‘Well, what was the message you got?’: the discursive power of Naomi Osaka and her peaceful protest at the 2020 U.S. Open

Abstract

In September 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, professional tennis player Naomi Osaka wore a black face mask for each of her seven matches towards her U.S. Open victory in protest against systemic racism. While Osaka has lived much of her life in America, she does not compete as American; her father is Haitian and her mother is Japanese. Informed by Black feminist thought and intersectionality, this conceptual paper will reflect upon the importance of Osaka’s protest as a Black female athlete in the larger context of the reenergization of the Black Lives Matter movement. Given that tennis is a sport that historically and culturally values and represents whiteness, Osaka’s protest is emblematic of a new wave of Black athlete activism against systemic racism in the twenty-first century. This is especially critical in our colourblind society wherein Black women’s experiences and voices are often ignored and/or dismissed. Framing Osaka’s overt form of protest in the larger context of the (re)awakened anti-racist efforts, I conclude that in these unprecedented moments in an unprecedented time Osaka self-amplifies her voice through her peaceful protest emphasising the names of those who have been murdered at the hands of American law enforcement. In other words, in this particular social context this is how Osaka demonstrates resistance against discriminatory practices based on race. This, at the end of the day, matters. As a young professional Black tennis player with significant social capital and cultural influence, Osaka’s mask-wearing demonstrates her discursive power as a globally recognised athlete and as a woman of colour. Importantly, it also explicitly disrupts the notion that athletes should merely ‘shut up and play’ and take an apolitical stance in matters outside of sport.