The Empress's New Clothes

It is both monumentally frustrating and oddly comforting to be reminded that, a year after the terrorist attacks, Americans haven't lost any of the cluelessness or cultural myopia that shape our national character and make us grate -- on nerves -- the globe over. In bad times people understandably cling to the familiar, but it's almost as if we believe that an obsession with the outcome of "American Idol," coupled with a determined ignorance about our unraveling environmental policies, is not a problem, but just what we need to improve things, to bring down the price of gas, bring up the price of stock and, in general, clear the close air. Race has always provided much of this strange comfort; through peacetime and war, Jim Crow or no, it has never failed to reassure people of their respective places in a shaken society. Nor, of course, does it ever fail to reaffirm just how fucked up we still are.

The recent flap over Serena Williams' new tennis duds at the U.S. Open picks up that double-edged sword where we last left it (let's see: reparations, Donovan Jackson, Allen Iverson . . . well, maybe "left" isn't the right word). When Serena stepped out onto the court last month to play a round in a short, poured-on black cat suit courtesy of Puma, all hell broke loose. Pundits carped that this was wrong for the sport, wrong for feminism, wrong for youth role modeling. Far richer was all that wasn't said, though it was communicated clearly enough in photos that put Serena's mahogany skin, considerable sinew, blond braids and sculpted butt in everybody's face, right where our deepest fetishisms of race and sex are never supposed to be. The whole package was like a bomb threat that forced everybody to leave the building, though people stood outside at a distance and theorized plenty about what happened -- Serena didn't show good sense, she was acting out, she might suffer from low self-esteem (Dr. Joyce Brothers' birdbrained offering). No one spoke even in passing to the possibility of some time-honored ethnic notions being responsible for much of the buzz, except Serena Williams herself, indirectly; when questioned about the outfit, she said with trademark candor: "It really sticks to what type of shape you have. If you don't have a decent shape, this isn't the best outfit to have." Translation: If you can't deal with a typically robust black woman's figure in full relief, you'd better learn how.

Certainly there have been body-baring tennis outfits before, from Suzanne Lenglen's right on up to Anna Kournikova's, but we've had a template (Marilyn Monroe, Playboy) for talking about those. We've never had Serena.

So what in the world are we to do with a girl who gets out in front of our fears so often, and who actually has the right to do so because she's number one? Serena, as the top female tennis player in the world, changes everything. Both she and her sister Venus belong to an unquestionably new breed. Neither woman is the symbol of black resistance that their predecessor Arthur Ashe automatically was; as champions in the Tiger Woods era, they do not protest so much as prescribe. They expect -- perhaps naively, though rightfully -- to be taken merely as themselves, and to set the trend rather than counter it simply by occupying positions never before occupied by blacks. But they know full well that black girls from Compton don't exactly conjure up images of success in the pro-tennis monde, which is still a bastion of the American elite; they know that beads and blond braids and frank self-approval only increase the paradox -- this might be Li'l Kim or Foxy Brown, but not the reigning tennis queens whom we imagine, at the very least, as having sprung from college tours and suburban sensibilities. In the last generation we have all firmly separated good blacks from bad with a sort of hip-hop color line, and Serena and Venus routinely defy it: They're hood rats who speak like Valley girls, haute couture enthusiasts who refuse to straighten their hair, but see nothing overtly political about it. They have plenty of attitude on the court, but none of the sullenness or dreaded chips on the shoulder we associate with black Americans in general and with black athletes in particular; to the contrary, Serena and Venus are among the most emotionally open players on the circuit -- giggly when they win, gloomy when they lose, entirely willing to answer questions from the press, even those with clear racial overtones that have me wishing they'd scare up some of that Compton trash talk, if only for a minute. But no; when a reporter asked Serena earlier this year if she felt she was worth all the "bank" she was making, Serena said yes, of course I do, and moved on.