Venus Williams Quotes

“My first job is big sister and I take that very seriously.”
― Venus Williams

“To turn black women into objectified others was to underline their difference; they may be beautiful, but they are of another kind, separate from the dominant understanding of attractiveness.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“The Williams sisters had something else: each other, and their absolute dominance.”
― Anne Helen Petersen

“But every step of Williams’s career has been shadowed with the sort of resentment that emerges whenever someone unsettles the status quo in an effective and unapologetic way. Put differently, when she stirred the pot, a whole lot of bullshit rose to the surface – and her refusal to try to perfume its smell has made her unruliness all the more potent.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“But that lie – whose purpose was to allow white people to continue to think they weren’t racist, even when their actions and words indicated otherwise – was one in which the Williams sisters, like their father, refused to participate. They rejected the idea that they would assimilate to the white codes of the tennis world. Instead, they posed the question of their difference over and over again – in every clack of their densely beaded hair, in every powerful serve.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“Williams’s trashiness is the opposite of the tennis image: to be sexy, to admit you have a body, to wear things that are flashy or sparkly, all of it flies in the face of the traditional tennis idea, which corresponds with that of upper-class America.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman