Jo-Wilfried Tsonga is currently ranked 49 in the world. (Source: Reuters)
As protests continue to rage on in various states of the United States after the murder of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, former world number five Jo-Wilfried Tsonga revealed on Tuesday that he had been facing racist remarks since he was a child.
On May 25, Floyd, an African-American man, was suffocated to death by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, as the latter kneeled on Floyd’s neck. Since the incident, sports fraternity around the world have acted in solidarity with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement with Liverpool players kneeling down in training and LeBron James taking to social media to mourn Floyd’s death.
Tsonga too opened up about the issue of racism in the wake of the incident in his interview with Franceinfo. The current world number 49 was born to a Congolese father, Didier Tsonga, and a French mother, Evelyne Tsonga.
“I have been regularly confronted with racism, very regularly, and since my earliest childhood. However, I have a black father, a white mom… I am black and white. I was one of the only children having an immigrant father in my elementary school. I let you imagine the rest,” said the 35-year-old.
“I was taught to never put this issue forward. Honestly, I never talk about it, but I am not naive about it. This tragedy is just one too many. Inevitably it makes you want to shout louder, to shout my pain.”
“At the beginning, it starts with little nicknames. Then there may be little insults, something quite latent. Afterward, I remember having been the victim of, let’s say, abusive checks, especially identity checks in the street when my friends were never checked. I was refused to get into premises, while sometimes I arrived with my friends,” said the Frenchman.
Earlier, other players from the tennis fraternity like Serena Williams, Coco Gauff, Frances Tiafoe, etc. voiced their opinion about the ongoing protests and called for unity in response to racial discrimination.
Since that incident, Chauvin has been arrested and charged with third-degree murder, and overnight curfews have been imposed in more than a dozen major cities in the US. Because of the escalation of the protests, US President Donald Trump has been forced to take shelter in a White House bunker.