Aside from Angel Reese, Here Are More Examples Of Black Women Athletes Who've Gotten Racist Backlash

In 2018, Serena Williams challenged chair umpire Carlos Ramos during a match against Naomi Osaka in the women’s final of the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. Blown calls, controversial calls and non-calls are nothing new to sports. However, the way the public responded to Williams standing up for herself—including an infamously racist cartoon—demonstrated the powerful intersection of sexism and racism.

Sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was barred from competing in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics for smoking weed. She served a one-month ban on testing positive at the trials meet where she won the 100 meters. However, a year later Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and was still allowed to compete. Richardson—and the world—called out this racist hypocrisy.

In 2016, NBC’s gymnastics announcer at the Rio Games Al Trautwig adoption-shamed Simone Biles for reasons no one will ever understand. Trautwig suggested Biles’ parents through adoption are not really her parents. Biles, who was competing, was just 19-years-old at the time. When a woman tweeted Trautwig to say that he should call them her parents, he tweeted: “They may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents.” He later apologized for his words.

In 2021, tennis star Naomi Osaka represented Japan instead of the United States at the Olympics. In her self-titled docuseries on Netflix, she revealed the backlash she faced when this was announced. “So I don’t choose America and suddenly people are like, ‘Your Black card is revoked.’ And it’s like, African American isn’t the only Black, you know?” Osaka’s mother in Japanese and her father is Haitian.

Back in 2019, hammer thrower Gwen Berry won gold at the Pan American Games and shockingly raised her fist on the podium toward the end of the national anthem. She did it to speak up for racial injustice. However, Berry found herself in swarm of controversy since she violated the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) prohibition on athletes’ demonstrations. She was put on probation for a year and lost corporate sponsors.

South African runner and double Olympic champion Caster Semenya had her natural body penalized in 2018 when ​World Athletics announced new rules forcing her to reduce her natural levels of testosterone. Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated that “women from the Global South have been disproportionately affected” by these rules. Semenya is able to still compete in certain races but these stipulations have also affected other Black women athletes.

Sports commentators have described Black women athletes in racist terms since the 1930s, with phrases like “dancing monkey” being one of them. In the 1950s and 1960s, esteemed sprinter Wilma Rudolph was labeled the “Black Gazelle,” which intentionally separated her femininity from her Blackness.

Back in 2012, NBC sports anchor Bob Costas praised gymnast Gabby Douglas’ for becoming the first Black athlete to win Olympic gold. However, right after his commentary an ad featuring a monkey performing gymnastics aired causing justifiable outrage. The network apologized but insisted it was an accident, but it felt far more sinister than that.

In 2021, Raven Saunders of the United States won the silver medal in the shot-put. That night, Saunders delivered the first political demonstration on the podium at the Tokyo Olympics when she raised her arms and crossed them in an X after receiving her medal. The International Olympic Committee launched a probe to find if the gesture violated the rules of prohibiting any kind of demonstration or political, religious and racial propaganda. Later that year, the IOC suspended its investigation on Saunders’ gesture, though that didn’t stop the backlash that occurred.

In 2021, United States Olympic gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from competing in that year’s Olympic Games to focus her mental health. Despite all that she endured—including claims of sexual abuse at the hands of Team USA doctor Larry Nassar—right-wing personalities like Clay Travis and Piers Morgan couldn’t wait to make jokes about her “poor” performance and selfishness.

The late U.S. Olympic runner Florence Griffith Joyner was regularly the subject of racist rumors in the 1980s of allegedly using steroids. This was a tactic to discredit her title as the fastest woman of all time. Joyner has never used performance-enhancing drugs but was punished for her greatness.

Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix has long accused Nike of not supporting pregnant women and new mothers. She even wrote about her experience as a Black woman athlete with the company in a 2019 New York Times op-ed. After her contract with Nike expired in December 2017, Felix negotiated a new deal pregnant. She claimed that Nike offered her a 70% pay cut in the new contract and failed to support maternity protections she asked for.