Lindsey Gray

Writing Sample
Intersectionality and the Media

Tennis player Serena Williams was given three code violations at the 2018 US Open: the
first for an illegal hand signal given by her coach, the second for smashing her racket in
frustration, and the third for verbal abuse towards umpire Carlos Ramos which resulted in a
game penalty that contributed to her defeat by rookie Naomi Osaka. Mark Knight, a political
cartoonist, published his own interpretation of the incident depicting a racially caricatured Serena
Williams stomping on her racquet with a pacifier lying beneath her while a white-washed Ramos
and Osaka occupy the background. Knight drew upon implicit and explicit stereotypes of
Williams’ race and gender to dramatize, exaggerate, and manipulate perceptions of her behavior
in the 2018 US Open. Taking an intersectional approach to this cartoon explains why societal
forces of racism and sexism produced Knight’s interpretation of Williams “meltdown”; Knight’s
inability to notice these cultural insensitivities, and the consequential cartoon he created, is a
result of systematic racial hierarchies that materialize in his life as the shield of white privilege.
The cartoon was posted in the Australian Herald the morning after the incident. In it,
Williams is drawn in the foreground, jumping midair with a broken racquet and a pacifier
beneath her. Her lips, tongue, nose, and curly hair are all exaggerated and enlarged in a style that
mimics distorted caricatures of African Americans from the Jim Crow Era. Her figure is
presented in the same manner. Williams is drawn with a magnified frame, oversized breasts,
wide shoulders and prominent biceps despite being about 5’7” and roughly 155 pounds. In the
background, Naomi Osaka is portrayed as a thin white woman with blond hair despite being half-
Haitian and half-Japanese and taller than Williams in real life. Carlos Ramos, a Portuguese
umpire, is also drawn with lighter skin. In a speech bubble next to his head, Ramos pleads to
Osaka, “Can you just let her win?”
It is important to recognize the factors that led to the creation of a cartoon of this nature.
In his depiction, Knight uses prejudiced notions of femininity and Blackness to degrade and
demean Williams. This illustration is an example of Crenshaw’s “representational
intersectionality,” which describes the ways in which images are produced through a confluence
of prevalent narratives of race and gender. Crenshaw introduces this phenomenon to call upon
feminists and anti-racists to consider intersectionality in their struggles towards social justice and
equality (Crenshaw 1242). In this case, the concept of intersectionality is used to explain how
both racism and sexism have been invoked to ridicule Williams for her behavior.
In the cartoon, Williams’ was portrayed as physically masculine, in contrast with Osaka’s
thin blonde more “traditionally feminine” frame; this dichotomy of stereotypically acceptable
and unacceptable feminine attributes represents Knights beliefs about women’s gender
presentation and serves to further the notion that Williams’ behavior at the US Open was
somehow anti-feminine. Similarly, the pronounced whitewashing of Naomi Osaka and Carlos
Marcos in the cartoon highlights the stereotypically African American features with which
Knight portrayed Serena Williams. A critic noted how one of the greatest modern athletes was
belittled to a “fat, angry mammy character” (Devic). This directly opposes the characterizations
of Osaka and Marcos who were drawn thinner and whiter in the background. In a similar vein,
Marcos’ plead to “just let [Williams] win” conjures the image of the angry black women
archetype; the question ascribes fear to Osaka and Marcos because of Williams’ exhibition of
what Knight’s supporters have deemed “poor behavior.” The contrast of the characters centers

1
on gendered and racial stereotypes insinuating that Williams’ characterization, and actual
personhood, is less desirable than that of Osaka and Marcos.
As Crenshaw has discussed, racist humor is often cast aside as “just joking,” yet this
implies that racist jokes are only harmful if they are intended to injure, be taken literally, or
contain no non-racist objective (Crenshaw 1293). In response to criticisms, Knight repeatedly
defends his cartoon as neither racist nor sexist. He states: “I drew her as she is, an African
American woman… the cartoon was about her behavior on the day and just having this massive
tantrum, and that’s really all it was” (Devic). Without acknowledging the larger social contexts
in which it exists, Knight sees the cartoon as merely a ridicule of specific behavior. McIntosh
notes how white people are taught to recognize racism only through explicit acts of hostility,
rather than “in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on [white people]”
(McIntosh 4). Knight fails to consider how the history behind racist caricatures that demeaned
and humiliated African Americans affects his work because he does not place it within the larger
social fabric through which his cartoon was disseminated. Knight’s inability to recognize his
own prejudiced fault is a product of what McIntosh calls white privilege (McIntosh 1). She
describes this privilege as an “invisible knapsack” of unearned assets and special provisions
which white men and women are socialized to ignore or misinterpret as a product of their own
hard work. Knight understood his cartoon only through his intention, i.e. to portray Williams’
meltdown. He could and did ignore race as a factor because his white privilege permitted a life in
which race is not an enduring or significant issue worthy of recognition.
As an individual incident, it is easy to dismiss criticisms of Knight’s cartoon as
overdramatized and misdirected. However, the negation of criticisms in this case is instead a
product of certain privileges that socialize white men to ignore present-day injustices. Serena
Williams’ position as a Black Woman makes her particularly vulnerable to sexism and racism
because she must constantly endure both. Mark Knight will be unable see the cartoon as racist
without considering depictions of African Americans and women in popular media throughout
history, and how that has affected and continues to affect Black Women today.

2
 Bibliography:
Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence
against women of color." Stanford law review (1991): 1241-1299.
Devic, Aleks. Herald Sun, Herald Sun, 11 Sept. 2018, 6:45pm,
www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/herald-sun-backs-mark-knights-cartoon-on-serena
williams/news-
story/30c877e3937a510d64609d89ac521d9f?utm_campaign=EditorialSF&utm_content
SocialFlow&utm_source=HeraldSun&utm_medium=Twitter.
McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." pp. 12-18.

Cartoon:

Knight, Mark. “Serena Williams.” Herald Sun, Herald Sun, 2018, pp. 1–1.