Leave Naomi Osaka Alone

There is a line in the activist Tarana Burke’s new book Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement where she elucidates on the health issues she’s faced since coining the phrase “me too” as a form of empathy for sexual assault survivors in 2006. “Black excellence, strong Black woman, thank a Black woman, Black girl magic. They are all about our labor, not our liberation,” she writes. “We will die on the vine for them if we don’t stop and realize that we are sick.” In a recent interview, she expanded on this idea, saying, “I think people are genuinely uplifting Black women, but it is empty. They thank us, talk about our magic and all of us these other little things, but every one of those are connected to our labor. There’s no massive movement to just let us be.”

This insight is crucial to understanding the invisible pain suffered by the Black people we revere as our stars and our dynamos. Even as they fly, they face the demands of a world that often does not cherish them. That it is core to understanding why Naomi Osaka stopped playing tennis recently.

Before the French Open Osaka, who is the best thing to happen to women’s tennis since Serena Williams, released a statement saying that she wouldn’t be doing press conferences during the tournament, because she has “often felt that people have no regard for athletes’ mental health… We are often sat there and asked questions that we’ve been asked multiple times before or asked questions that bring doubt into our minds.” She hoped the expected fines would be donated to a mental health charity.

The Roland Garros tournament in Paris did fine her $15,000 and threatened her with expulsion if she didn’t fulfill her press obligations, as did the heads of the three other Grand Slam events. So she vacated the premises and quit the tournament, apologizing if she had become a distraction for the other athletes. Osaka also explained that she’s been suffering from depression since the controversial 2018 U.S. Open final against Serena Williams, and that her social anxiety has reached a crippling point. It’s the first time a star like Osaka has walked away from a major competition without an injury, and uproar ensued.

Osaka should’ve been heralded for her bravery in speaking out. Instead, Piers Morgan wrote a column calling her an “arrogant spoiled brat” while sports journalists defended the importance of press conferences and complained that they’re being “demonized,” while her male counterparts argued for the importance of the press instead of defending one of their own. Osaka is not above her contractual obligations to the press, nor does she deserve a permanent exemption. But her request was clearly not made hastily or without thought—not only did she bring it up before the tournament, she is now saying that she will need to “take some time away from tennis” before playing again. Would it have been so hard for Roland Garros to hear her pleas and grant a special break for one tournament?

Tennis is the rare sport played solo, and it comes with a level of elevated exposure most athletes will never face, particularly for the Black women who have challenged its antiquated ideals. It was at Roland Garros where Bernard Giudicielli, then head of the French Tennis Association, scoffed at Serena Williams’ all-black cat suit—which, it emerged, was designed to stop blood clots after giving birth to her daughter Olympia—and told reporters that she didn’t “respect the game and the place.”

The scholar Cynthia Frisby found that more sports stories are written about white athletes than Black athletes, that 66 percent of stories involving crime in athletics were about Black athletes, and 53 percent of stories involving Black athletes carried a negative tone. “Not only does negative media coverage serve to legitimize social power inequalities, but also it is likely to undermine black athletes’ achievements and contribute to stereotype threat,” Frisby concluded. This is why, before the press became integrated, Black athletes often went to Black writers to tell their stories.

It is as Toni Morrison once said: The function of racism is to provide a distraction that “keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” The current power structure of the athletic enterprise is built to erase what doesn’t conform to the status quo. It makes differences unrecognizable and becomes a salve for normalcy instead of a bridge toward the equality sports are supposed to provide. Why should the next Serena or Naomi want to participate in such a sport if it is too rigid and unwilling to bend to the needs of its labor force?

The issue is not Osaka, or her statements, or her refusal to speak with the same boring, majority white press she’s interacted with since her emergence in the sport. The issue lies with who has the power to continue to shape the game and punish those who do not fit their idea of what it means to be a superstar. The central contradiction in sports is the idea of it as some mighty force for unity, when it has always been a false idol to the players who want their game to change. It’s easy to wax lyrical about the triumph of the unyielding human spirit until athletes begin acting like more than lifeless apparitions.

It was not long ago that Osaka’s demure demeanor—her playfulness, her young and sunny disposition—was used as a cudgel against Serena’s perceived “aggression.” Now that same disposition is being used to bash her name. One Canadian tennis commentator called her “weak,” “privileged” and “tone deaf,” adding that her stance “downplays” other people’s mental health challenges. Another writer said that really, Osaka “feared humiliation” because clay isn’t her strong surface.

It is depressing to witness Osaka being forced away from the game in this manner. How is it that these people chose to view this woman’s transparency with such disgust and callous indifference? When has Osaka been anything but pleasant on the tour? What reason would there ever be to not take her message as seriously as she intended? It feels targeted, as if the goal of her opposers was to stamp out her light. The scholar Moya Bailey described this as misogynoir, where Black women are specifically the aim of racist discrimination. The many ways in which it shows it’s stunning flexibility should be terrifying.

All of this because she wanted to be left alone? Is it so hard to believe that the most dominant and dynamic tennis athlete of the next generation, who has already soared past expectations and is blazing her own, unique path, just wants a bit of peace and quiet? For the past year, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Osaka consistently decried the horrors of police brutality and systemic racism more than any other tennis player, while often fielding ludicrous questions from the press about it. Was that not enough?

There is no binding law that guides how athletes should interact with the rest of the world. Sports are a fanciful world of someone else’s making, a sick and deluded society that will remain forever imperfect.The strain and depression people feel, whether in sport or just from being alive, can be immense. Naomi Osaka deserves her basic protections. And if we cannot afford her that, she deserves to be left alone.