Truth sacrificed at altar of grievance

According to one feminist pundit, Serena Williams’s problem is that as a woman she is not allowed to get angry.

The job of a cartoonist is to use caricature, satire and humour to shine a light on harsh reality. A good cartoonist doesn’t employ the tropes of race and sex to ridicule a subject. Their vision goes stiletto-like to the banal reality of human foibles, no matter the race or sex. It is called the truth.

The reality, the truth, is that at the US Open final, the favourite, Serena Williams, who happens to be a black woman, behaved like a rude, petulant crybaby.

Oh, but we are living in a postmodern post-truth world and objective reality has gone out the window. The bizarre controversy over Mark Knight’s accurate ­cartoon depiction of Williams’s dummy spit raises the question: when is a controversy about something real and based on serious concerns and when is it a tir­ade perpetuated by a postmodern culture of grievance about the big three preoccupations of race, sex or identity, manufactured to intimidate and silence?

The Williams cartoon controversy started to grow to sinister proportions when the cartoonist reluctantly said on television that in the future he might have to “pull his punches” because of concern about his family, who were “worried and upset”.

Make no mistake, this controversy isn’t only about one cartoon or one cartoonist unwittingly and with no malice committing the sin of “disrespecting” a popular figure of black America and feminism. It is a sign of the times.

The fashionable tropes of race and sex have been used before to silence valid criticism. Remember The Australian’s Bill Leak with his serious cartoon about the situation of Aboriginal children? Accusations of racism were emp­loyed as a weapon to disguise and undercut the reality of the tragic issue of Aboriginal child neglect.

To have an author of the stature of JK Rowling accuse Knight of employing racist and sexist tropes is the worst and most dangerous comment in this saga.

Rowling accused Knight of “reducing one of the greatest sportswomen alive to racist and sexist tropes and turning a second great sportswoman into a faceless prop”, which is also proof of the magnitude of the intimidation against anyone whose clear-eyed view of reality ignores the postmodern prisms of race and sex.

Knight’s frank admission of his worries about his family has moved the focus of the cartoon wars from the mere fact of Wil­liams’s appalling behaviour and the depiction of her race and sex, to the blatant intimidation that exists in the online world and even the real media world against freedom of speech and thought.

The US media, including The New York Times, published articles about the racism of the cartoon, and the racism of Australia. The National Association of Black Journalists said the cartoon was “repugnant on many levels. The Sept 10 cartoon not only exudes racist, sexist caricatures of both women, but Williams’ depiction is unnecessarily sambo-like”.

After that the racism accusations started to fly. Civil rights activist and politician Jesse Jackson joined the Twitter avalanche: “This despicable cartoon tried and failed to diminish the greatness & grace of @serenawilliams. Racism in any form is unacceptable.”

Most Australians who saw the cartoon were baffled by these responses. It looked like a pretty accurate picture of Williams’s appalling behaviour to most of us.

We all know she does her block and often accuses umpires of being “bad”, of being “bad inside” and so on. She has a repertoire of these accusations. Yet she is a formidable and often gracious athlete who can accept defeat properly — even by her sister.

The frightening thing about the Williams cartoon, especially for young tennis players, is the way her behaviour was ignored and the whole thing turned around as an attack on the cartoonist, and by extension on the Australian media, and Australians in general. It is a “shoot the messenger” mentality that tries to expunge the unpalatable, petulant face of a commercially driven brand that is Serena Williams

The furore when the cartoon was reprinted on Wednesday was indicative of this. US media was at it again, intimating that Knight had “problems” of racist depictions before, bringing up his African gangs cartoon. Never mind the fact of African gangs. Apparently, the Australian media is expected to bow to the absurdly heightened racial sensitivities of a US media obsessed with domestic racial problems, which it forcibly projects on to the rest of the world.

Sections of our own media were not immune to this absurd deconstruction of the cartoon, with various feminist and racial experts weighing in. According to one feminist pundit, Williams’s problem is that as a woman she is not allowed to get angry.

Her yelling and screaming at the umpire, whom she accused of being a thief and a liar several times, and breaking her racquet were interpreted, according to the feminists, as “hysteria” because she is a woman. Williams said men had done the same; if she were a man she would be “outspoken”. So who is using the feminist trope now? Some might say her performance was kindly interpreted as hysteria. Others just might call it a tantrum of a bad loser.

Some of us can still remember the great female champions of the past; women such as the ever modest Evonne Goolagong who had to endure real racial slurs from stupid commentators, not to mention the champion of cham­pions Margaret Court whose grand slam record Williams still has not beaten.

Court was given a terrible time over her views on marriage, which did not accord with the zeitgeist on sexuality. Her crime was that she did not accept a definition of marriage that the identity merchants had manufactured.

Rowling’s comment shows us two things. First, it is Rowling who saw an accurate caricature of Wil­liams’s behaviour as only about the tropes of race and sex. Second, anyone who doesn’t employ these “tropes” or images in some universally acknowledged acceptable way is automatically branded as a racist and sexist. Consequently they and their families will be subject to social media threats.

That is frightening, it is sad and it is appalling that people whose job it is to provide satirical comment on public life and who do not allow fashionable modern preoccupations to interfere with a clear vision of reality find themselves in the position of the Herald Sun’s cartoonist.