If there's one thing we can learn from the Serena Williams debacle it is this: never dismiss marginalised people when they insist your interpretation of their experience is wrong.
We can argue relentlessly about whether or not the tennis great had the right to smash her racquet, to dispute the umpire's decision, to rain on opponent Naomi Osaka's parade. (Williams might well have won that match, so it's a moot point as to whether or not she knew she was spoiling the up-and-comer's moment of glory.)
Many before her have unleashed tirades at umpires, and many more will do so in the years to come. No-one is arguing that such behaviour is acceptable; though it must be said that numberless players have hurled ghastlier slurs and have nonetheless been spared the intense, divisive, global examination of their actions for days afterwards. John McEnroe was expected to smash his racquets and verbally abuse everyone in his sphere when he walked onto the court.
So people are entitled to argue that Williams was out of line with her response to cautions and penalties during Saturday's women's finals match at Flushing Meadows — as another female tennis legend, Martina Navratilova, has done. But they have no right to racially slur Williams because of her actions — as News Limited's Herald Sun cartoonist Mark Knight has done.
We can argue about whether or not the caricature produced by Knight is racist and sexist. White people in their swarms have done so already, flooding social media with their opprobrium, casually dismissing the representation of Williams as nothing more than an interpretation of a dummy-spitting sports star. The cartoonist himself is devoid of contrition. The whites have spoken.
But African-Americans (and people of colour and marginalised groups in general) vehemently disagree with Knight and his supporters. And herein lies the lesson: if a marginalised group tells you unequivocally that what you have done is deeply insensitive — and provides reams of literature and historical context with which to support this assertion — it behoves us to listen to them; just as it behoves men to listen to women when they tell — and show — them that the world is a deeply sexist place.
As members of the dominant culture, we have a nasty habit of offending marginalised people then lecturing them on the virtue of not being offended. But there's no longer any excuse for superiority and ignorance, for the voices of reason are flooding the world and imploring us to listen.
"The image clearly packages Williams as an unidentifiable, unattractive black female troublemaker."
While Knight's cartoon might appear innocuous to those of us removed from America's shameful slaving and segregation history, it conveys a deeply racist message aimed at reducing Williams to a caricature of her race rather than a parody of her own person. The image clearly packages Williams as an unidentifiable, unattractive black female troublemaker.
If we could identify with her features, at least, we could tap into the person the cartoonist is imploring we see. Because she's represented as an everywoman, she becomes the stand-in for any black woman expressing her anger. The fact that the anger has been caused by a (perceived) injustice is not alluded to.
The juxtaposition of Williams' opponent, Osaka — a brown-skinned, Japanese-Haitian woman with fair hair — compounds the offence. Where Williams is depicted as ungainly and slack-jawed, Osaka (naturally slim by comparison) stands innocent-faced and inaccurately white-skinned on the sidelines, apparently considering the umpire's injunction that she 'just let [Williams] win'.
But more injuriously still — when one peels back the layers so dextrously arranged by Knight — the cartoon paints a picture not of Williams herself but of the deeply racist sentiment conjured around slaves and their descendants during the Jim Crow era; it exhumes a painful, not-yet-vanquished history in which being black put people at serious risk of violence and death.
While such a portrayal damages people at their core — and undermines the strides they have made in the lost war against racism — it has a more damaging consequence still: the emboldening of a hyper conservative society in which those with racist values are begging for permission to express them.
A cartoonist on a major daily newspaper would surely understand the judgement that cartoons cast, and the way in which they've been used to vilify and caricature people in centuries past. If he sincerely has no idea of the way images he himself has employed were used to demean African-Americans, then now is his chance: he is being advised ad infinitum by history professors and human rights activists and people with common sense.
His response to this re-education has been to double down by trying to prove that he offends all of his subjects (none of them, of course, could be distilled to a particular ethnic group or race). But the rest of us are welcome to remove the blinkers: educate ourselves about the complex origin of a black woman's anger; read between the lines of the cartoon's commentary; and acknowledge that we can never speak to the exact experience of anyone else — especially when that person has been victimised by entrenched racial bias. Let's silence our own defences for a change, and sit back and listen.
Cartoons contain deep commentary on their subjects, and those people who have viewed Knight's cartoon are more literate than he might have hoped; for his indictment of Williams is clear for them to see.
Catherine Marshall is a Sydney-based journalist and travel writer.
Main image: Serena Williams reacts to umpire Carlos Ramos after her defeat in the Women's Singles finals match to Naomi Osaka at the 2018 US Open. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)