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She is a beautiful, graceful, tennis champion, a world class athlete, and role model for millions of women around the world. And yesterday in America, tennis ace, Serena Williams, was pronounced Sportsperson of the year by the Sports magazine, Sports Illustrated. It is the first time an African American woman has been awarded this honour and only the third time that it has gone to a woman in the magazine’s history. But, being a powerful, black sportswoman in tennis, a sport often viewed as a bastion of white advantage, comes with constant challenges to her gender and ethnicity.
Not long after the announcement of the award was made, social media was abuzz with a number of complaints from a section of the magazines readers. These disgruntled sports fans pointed to an online poll, by Sports Illustrated fans, which gave a landslide victory, not to Serena Williams, but to the racehorse, ‘American Pharaoh’.
I think that the Sports Illustrated fans who voted for American Pharaoh missed an important point. The purpose of the award is to acknowledge the accomplishments of a human being; the award has never gone to an animal. But I have to wonder, why is it that an animal, however graceful and powerful, gets recognized above the humanity of an accomplished black woman?
It is a truism to say that some bodies count more than other bodies, but I'd like to flesh out this statement, pun intended.
The message of the advent, the coming of Christ into the world, is that we can identify God precisely by coming into contact with a human body. The church, for centuries, particularly the Gnostics, who denied God could be so closely aligned with physicality -- that if Jesus were God he couldn't be born as a baby, has struggled with this core element of the gospel.
Ranking American Pharaoh above Serena Williams suggests that we in the Western world, even here in Britain, still struggle with bodies--especially the bodies of women, and particularly the bodies of black women.
Throughout her career, the very body of Serena Williams, rather than her sportsmanship, has been attacked: too muscular, too physical, too aggressive--too unlike other bodies traditionally associated with greatness in tennis. Have our own commentators given her the credit she deserves?
I believe the discussion of Serena’s body is an illustration of a larger question. A question about personhood; recognizing and respecting people for who they are, and what they have done. And how we should live out the meaning of Advent, the idea that God lives in all flesh, and that all flesh is good.
