In Praise of Serena Williams by Abdul Mahmud

By Abdul Mahmud

Serena Williams has never been silent. On the court, her racket thundered against centuries of exclusion. Off the court, her voice carries the weight of history. She is both an athlete and a witness. When she recently spoke of discomfort at the sight of a cotton plant placed as decoration in a New York hotel, she did more than remark on poor taste. She not only reminded America of its unresolved past, but also reminded all that cotton is never innocent. It is not a neutral flower. It is a crop soaked in blood. For centuries it stood as the currency of slavery. It clothed America and the world and chained the blacks. The fields of the American South stretched wide with it. Bent backs and broken hands plucked it under the sun. As the late Negritude poet, David Diop wrote of Africa, “those who patiently, stubbornly, carried the weight of humiliation, all the weight of slavery, whose backs are bent”. Cotton was profitable. Cotton was an empire. Cotton was a pain. To see it in a hotel hallway, arranged like a bouquet, is to see history stripped of its horror. It is to watch suffering repackaged as a contemporary style. Serena felt it in her bones. She asked, “How do we feel about cotton as decoration?” And she answered herself: it does not feel great. It cannot feel great.

The symbolism is heavy. The plantation economy of the South rose on cotton. The whip cracked to its rhythm. Children were born into bondage to feed its demands. The great wealth of New York banks, of English mills, of European ports, grew fat on bales shipped down the Mississippi. Cotton built nations. It also destroyed lives, so much so that great American writers bore witness. Frederick Douglass told of the fields where bodies bent in endless labour. Harriet Jacobs hid in an attic to escape the tyranny of the planter’s eye. Toni Morrison’s words return us to the choke of history, to scars that never fade. “The past is not past. It is still with us, shaping our present and our future”, she famously wrote. The cotton fields stand in their books not as scenery, but as symbols of cruelty and endurance. They are the graveyards of people’s freedom.

Unfortunately, long after slavery ended, cotton haunted the memories of African-Americans. Jim Crow spread its shadows across the South. Sharecropping replaced slavery with another trap. Black families worked the same fields, tied to the land by debt and deceit. Cotton kept them bound. The lynching tree stood not far from the rows of white bloom. The legacy was one of continuity: freedom promised, but freedom denied. In songs, too, cotton carries meaning. Blues singers mourned lives wasted under its weight. Gospel hymns dreamed of deliverance from its hold. “Pick a bale of cotton” was no innocent refrain. It was a memory in melody, pain set to rhythm. To decorate it now as an obsequious contemporary style is to pluck history from its roots and place it, unexamined, in a vase.

Serena Williams knows this. Her greatness has always been about more than tennis. She broke through a sport designed for privilege, for country clubs and white attire. She carried Compton to Wimbledon. She bore the scars of exclusion and turned them into triumph. When she speaks, she speaks as one who knows the cost of erasure. Her unease is not personal alone. It is collective. African-Americans carry, in memory or inheritance, the story of the cotton. It is the story of survival against an economy that thrived on the degradation of their race. It is the story of Jim Crow laws that followed them from the fields into the cities, into the voting booths, into the segregated schools. To dismiss her discomfort is to dismiss history. To say “it is just a decoration” is to say “it is just cotton”. But, cotton is never just cotton. It is the backdrop of American hypocrisy, the crop that proclaimed liberty while binding millions in chains. It is the silent witness to Jefferson’s pen and Washington’s sword, to a Constitution written above the groans of the enslaved.

Serena’s words matter because they pierce this silence. They remind us that symbols are not to be taken lightly. A flag, a statue, and a crop on a table all speak. They speak of who is remembered, who is honoured, and who is forgotten. They speak of wounds reopened in the name of aesthetics. But, it goes beyond the beauty of the hotel’s hallway, to the point of framing her question more acutely – at least, it is not a question of interior design. It is about memory. It is about respect. It is about the responsibility of a nation to confront its past with honesty. It is about whether America has learned to see its history not as an ornament, but as a warning. Whether it dares to admit that beauty, when torn from its context, can be cruel. Whether it understands that what is placed casually on a table may carry the weight of centuries.

We live in an age where symbols are contested. Statues fall. Names change. History long buried demands recognition. The cotton stalk in the hotel is part of this struggle. It is a reminder that America’s original sin still decorates its halls, unseen by many, unbearable to some. Serena Williams saw it. She said it aloud. And in doing so, she stands once more at the intersection of memory and society, where she has always stood. She refused the comfort of silence. She chose the truth. We must thank her for this. Because it is easy to forget. It is easy to walk past the cotton stalk and see only the design. It is easy to turn slavery into abstraction, to treat Jim Crow as distant history. But history is not distant. It is present in symbols, in memories, in wounds that never fully close.

Serena’s voice keeps it present. She makes us stop and look again. She asks us to feel what cotton meant in the past, and still means today. She demands we remember. In praise of Serena, we must say this: greatness is not only in victory, in trophies, in records. Greatness is also in memory. It is in the courage to speak against forgetting and to demand remembering. After all, as Milan Kundera reminds us, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. To remember is to resist. To remember is to keep alive what power would rather bury. Forgetting serves convenience; remembering serves truth. Memory is not decoration, not a keepsake to be placed on a shelf. It is a living demand, a reckoning, a refusal to allow the past to slip quietly into oblivion. It is in the refusal to let pain be polished into decoration. Serena embodies this refusal. She insists that the stalk of cotton is not just a plant, but a symbol, a ghost of history pressing itself into the present.

Cotton may bloom white in the hallway of a hotel, arranged to please the eye, yet its roots run red in the soil where it was once sown. What appears as beauty in one place was born of brutality in another. Its softness carries the hardness of chains. Its whiteness hides the darkness of blood. To display it as an ornament is to forget that behind its fragile bloom lies a history of bent backs, broken hands, sorrow, blood, tears and silent graves. To praise Serena is to honour the memory she defends. She reminds us that the past is not past. That America’s wealth carries the mark of the cotton fields. The legacy of Jim Crow still lingers in the structures of inequality. And that symbols matter, because they carry the stories we choose either to acknowledge or to erase. So when Serena Williams says cotton does not feel great, she speaks for the black race. She speaks for history. She speaks the truth. And this truth, like her game, is undeniable.

Serena Williams has never been silent. Her voice has carried across courts and beyond them. Taking a cue from her, African Americans and Black people everywhere must also refuse silence. For silence concedes too much. Silence allows history to be rewritten as an ornament. Silence turns pain into decoration. To speak, as Serena has spoken, is to keep memory alive. It is to guard against forgetting. It is to remind the world that greatness is not measured only in victories won, but in defending truths. In Serena, we see not just a champion of sport, but a custodian of memory, a witness against erasure, a voice for dignity. To follow her example is to refuse the comfort of silence and to choose, always, the courage of truth.