Alexis Ohanian is exhibiting elite wife-guy behavior again. Ever since Serena Williams crip-walked during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, the tennis star has been catching heat from an easily offended few. ESPN host Stephen A. Smith, for one, said he would’ve divorced Williams for “trolling her ex” Drake, suggesting she “go back to his ass.” Jason Whitlock, a commentator at the conservative outlet Blaze Media, called Williams a “controlled clown.” And while Williams is surely used to all the noise, Ohanian still hopped on X to defend her honor.
“Some of y’all have no idea how criticized Serena was for this same dance at Wimbledon 13 years ago and it shows,” the Reddit co-founder wrote. “This is bigger than the music,” he added, referencing a line from Lamar’s halftime performance. Ohanian also included a clip from the halftime show in which Samuel L. Jackson’s Uncle Sam character accuses the rapper of being “too ghetto,” nodding at the racist overtones of the criticism leveled against Williams.
As for Wimbledon, Ohanian is referring to the 2012 Summer Olympics, when Williams appeared to briefly crip-walk after defeating Maria Sharapova. At the time, skeptics and uptight tennis fans took offense to the dance’s origins — it was created in the early 1970s by a California gang, the Los Angeles Crips. (Williams grew up in Compton, California.) The blowback was swift and racist: In a 2012 The Week article, Whitlock — yes, the same one — argued that Williams’ dance was akin to “cracking a tasteless, X-rated joke inside a church” and demanded she apologize. In the wake of the controversy, Williams called the celebration “just a dance.”
Thirteen years later, the same loud minority seems to be pounding its fists at Williams’s dance. This time, of course, she has Ohanian in her corner. “Also just wait until some of these folks learn about the illicit/criminal origins of Irish step-dancing or Northern English clog dancing!” her husband added in a follow-up tweet. “They’ll be APPALLED I tell you. OUTRAGED, even.”