US tennis star feels some people don’t want Black players to succeed.
Juan Martin del Potro and Andy Roddick are among the few Black players to reach the top 200 in the world, while top players like James Blake, Maria Sharapova and Sam Querrey are all White with the exception of Blake’s father, who is Jewish.
The White American public is not used to seeing a Black or Latino playing their top-level sport but a story has been making the rounds the last week or so – of a Black tennis player, who is being told to not “go out there and play the game” – because he’s trying to make it to the top. I found some clips online that are getting a lot of play, but they’re just quotes from the White media, not the other way around.
In the clip, a White woman is telling a Black tennis player to leave his sport. She says she is tired of seeing Black athletes, especially Black women and girls, having their dreams of success upended by being told to drop their games.
She’s asking him: “Do your people want you to go out and play or are they telling you that you’re not wanted?”
What is said in the clip by the tennis athlete is as follows:
“What am I going to do? I have a family, I have a kid. They’re 6 and 7. How am I supposed to feed him? And the only thing I do is tennis.
“They won’t be proud of me because I haven’t won a Grand Slam. That’s the only thing that’s ever given me any sort of sense of credibility.”
When asked if he had ever heard a Black woman or a Black person say something like this, he said he had.
“But what is more upsetting is the way things are. When I first started out, I was always asked to stop playing when I played in tournaments because I was Black.
“And sometimes, I would ask my wife to go out