It’s not enough for young black women to admire Serena. They need to emulate her will to win. [View all]

I like both the message and tone of this essay by Julianne Malveaux, economist, author and president emerita of Bennett College for Women.

Hard work, of course, is a necessary condition of that success. There’s no way Serena would dominate tennis as she has without a life spent on the practice court. But it frequently takes more than that. It takes an embrace of Maya Angelou’s lyrical, but deadly serious mantra: “You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies“ but “Still I’ll rise.”

snip

In a white man, that same confidence is expected; and in a white woman, trailblazing, perhaps. But in an African American woman, confidence is just as likely to be taken as uppity, if not bellicose. Black women with confidence often implicitly challenge the insecure among us, who then want to put black women in what they perceive as our proper place. Think Michelle Obama. Think — if we’re going to be real about it — Sandra Bland.

And that’s the rub. In a society that values winning above almost all else, young black women consistently receive the message that they should try to be less Serena-like when, in order to compete, that’s exactly who they should emulate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/04/its-not-enough-for-young-black-women-to-admire-serena-they-need-to-emulate-her-will-to-win/

As the grandmother of two young (white) women age 14 and 15, I am reminded of how hard confidence is to achieve during those teen years, and how terribly easy it is to shatter. I watch their Black girl friends, who appear very self assured to me, and wonder what it says to them when, as Malveaux writes, they hear the routine and barely-veiled “racism that underlies the characterizations of her as hypersexual, aggressive, and animalistic.” I shudder.