Yellow, Green and Black:

The Treatment of Venus and Serena Williams in Professional Tennis

This paper will attempt to explore the question of whether American Tennis fans favor white European players over minority American players. Specifically, the paper will examine the treatment of Venus and Serena Williams from the moment that they exploded onto the international tennis scene as “phenoms” to their current treatment as they reach the end of their exemplary careers. The discussions will center on their treatment by the media and tennis fans in an attempt to tease out whether ascriptive characteristics of them are tinged by racial and/or class perceptions. Part of the conversation will focus on the tennis establishment and the persona of exclusivity that surrounds the sport. The paper will ask the questions: where the sisters welcomed into the tennis academy? If there was resistance was it a product of class, race, or both? How did this resistance manifest itself? These questions will be answered by comparing media and fan commentaries of Venus and Serena Williams against those made about winners of Grand Slam tournaments who are not American. This study will expand upon the findings of Thierry Devos and Marzarin Banjo contained in their article, American=white?, Vol. 88, No. 3 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44-446 (2005) where the authors tested the implicit and explicit responses of a control group that tended to show that even in the arena of sports to be American is synonymous with being white. This paper adds to the larger discussion of the historical perceptions and treatment of black women in America.