If the game is fixed do you keep playing? Knowing it's not fair, feeling invisible, losing hope, and going to lose, but you keep the game going. Trying your hardest and putting everything in the game you are defeated.
“It is all too exhausting and Serena’s exhaustion shows in her playing; she is losing, a set and a game down… Again Serena’s frustrations, her disappointments, exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip” (31,32).
Claudia Rankine poetically uses Serena William's fixed tennis game as a metaphor for the "game" black people have to face in America regarding discrimination and racism. Rankine expresses how exhausting the "game" is for black people, how frustrating, disappointing, and unjust it is but the "game" is still being played. There's no giving up.
Serena loses the game and gets fined, facing repercussions farther than losing the game. But whoever fixed the game isn't facing any punishments. Seems blatantly unfair, an issue that should be immediately regarded and fixed but it seems most of America are blinded and the fixed game continues.
I completely agree with everything that you said. I think it is utterly unfair that the person who fixed the game is not facing any punishments. However, I never really thought about how the fixed tennis game as a metaphor for the "game" that African Americans have to face in America. I think that that metaphor is really poetic and powerful.
ReplyDeleteInteresting comparison of tennis and the "game" black Americans must play. This makes me think of the "game" Meursault refuses to play in "The Stranger": the game society forces on people to act, look, feel, and think a certain way. Somewhat juxtaposed to how Meursault was expected to cry at his mother's funeral and to grieve afterwards, black people are expected to roll over and accept being stepped on my racial roles. Both Meursault and Serena refused to play the game, thus gaining some freedom in their independence from the rules.
ReplyDeleteObviously I am not blind to the racial injustices that African Americans face every day. However, I had never thought about their lives as this "game"- but I think you're right. From the minute you're born with any skin color but white, you are at a disadvantage. I'm stating the obvious by saying that the world should not work this way, but it does. If there is a silver lining to be found, I think it could be that African Americans have not given up. In order to persevere, they have to have some sort of hope. They've been walking through a dark tunnel for hundreds of years, but the fact that they're still walking shows just how strong, brave, powerful, and hopeful they really are.
ReplyDeleteI really like your comparison between what Serena went through in one instance and what Black people go through everyday. It is all the same. Serena's frustration showed how tiring it is to be Black in America and it is very easy to understand where Serena is coming if system is always against her. Well, it is easy for us to understand it. For others it is not and that is why the game is still rigged.
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