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… - Anne Helen Petersen

When you conceptualize diversity as something you add onto an existing monoculture, chances are high those employees will always feel as if they were somehow on the outside of it. And when you treat DEI as a module to complete, you can blind yourself to the way your company fails to integrate its ethos into basic, day-to-day operations.

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.

Scandal is amplified when a star’s actions violate not only the status quo but the underlying understanding of that star’s image as well: when