In Praise of Pettiness

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

Image: instagram.com/serenawilliams

 
 

I’ve had an ongoing list of potential newsletter ideas in my Notes app since I started Friday Things in 2020. Sometimes they’re newsletters I want to write but there’s something timelier to tackle that week (I’m still mad I didn’t write about Michael B. Jordan’s appropriation rum in 2021, but don’t worry—one day you are getting an absolute opus about the celebrity liquor industrial complex), other times they’re topics I just want to think about more before I delve into them. And in a couple of instances, they’re things I’ve noticed, but have no firm opinion on… yet. Case in point, an entry halfway down the list consisting of just two words: “Petty kings?” I don’t know exactly when I added this to the note, but I’ve definitely been interested in the way pettiness has become a sort of social currency over the past decade or so—and I finally have a reason to write about it. Thank you, Serena Williams.

I say that because last week, the Toronto Tempo, the city’s new WNBA team, announced Williams was joining its ownership group, and while the most important part of that news is definitely why it matters for the team, the city and women’s sports in general, it was also the second time in as many months that her behaviour was both celebrated and criticized for her perceived pettiness by the internet at large, and obviously that’s the part I’ve been thinking about the most.

If Serena Williams is being petty, that would be very justified

The first time this conversation came up was about halfway through Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, when Williams made a surprise cameo to “gleefully danc[e] on a grave for four vivid seconds on the screen,” as sports journalist Ben Rothenberg described it in a post-game edition of his tennis-focused newsletter, which was later republished on Slate. While this performance was also a reference to the time she crip walked after beating Maria Sharapova to take home gold at the 2012 Olympics, the grave in question that night was Drake’s, and William’s appearance was very clearly a Lamar co-sign. So no wonder that, when the Tempo announced that she was a part-owner of the team with a chic IG collab post, the internet was both excited about her investment in women’s basketball and entertained by the message this was seemingly sending to Drake, a Raptors fan and Global Ambassador who has partnered with the team on basketball-related charity work and even bought the naming rights for the team’s practice facility through his record label/lifestyle brand OVO. And what was the message Williams was (again, seemingly) sending? “I’m in your city, taking your things,” basically.

Okay, it’s possible I’m projecting. But that is definitely the vibe my corner of the internet got. Some quick background, in case you’ve forgotten your early 2010s celebrity gossip: These two sparked dating rumours as far back as 2011, but reconnected much more publicly in 2015. Or rather, he was publicly, clearly smitten, following Williams from tournament to tournament and event to event to cheer her on. There was just one problem; that was also the year that Williams met her future husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. By the end of 2015, Ohanian was attending events as her plus-one. Drake had referenced Williams in at least one song prior to this (2013’s “Worst Behaviour,” where he raps, “I'm with my whole set, tennis matches at the crib. I swear I could beat Serena when she playin' with her left” which… probably not, Aubrey), but after that, the tone changed. 2016’s “Too Good” included a line about Williams (“You got somebody other than me... don't play the victim when you're with me, free time is costing me more than it seems”), as did “Middle Of The Ocean,” off 2022’s Her Loss (“Sidebar, Serena, your husband a groupie. He claim we don't got a problem but, no boo, it is like you coming for sushi,” a lyric Ohanian… um, did not like).

Rapping about past romantic entanglements years later is a very classic Drake move, and people are obviously allowed to process their feelings however they like, including in public, but there’s something gross about reacting to rejection like… this. Especially since, as a tiny sidenote, “Too Good” was a collab with Rihanna, who he very publicly obsessed over for like, a decade. So it’s not like he was loyally pining after Williams!

All of which is to say, even though she says there was nothing petty about her halftime show appearance, it feels like there was—and what’s more, the people are into it.

The differing opinions around Serena’s ‘pettiness’ are kind of fascinating

Or at least, some people are.

Some people… are not. Not people I’d generally recommend listening to, but people nonetheless. Charlemagne Tha God and Andrew Schulz thought Williams’ crip walk didn’t “look good” and was “weird,” with the implication that Ohanian should feel threatened by Williams still caring about Drake. ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith made a similar point, saying, “If I’m your husband, I’m thinking, ‘Why are you up there trolling him—trolling your ex?’ If I’m married, and my wife is going to troll her ex—go back to his ass. Because clearly you don’t belong with me. What you worried about him for—and you with me?” I think this is hilarious because a) the male fragility kills me, b) if I were married, I would definitely want my husband to adopt my enemies as his enemies, because that’s just teamwork and c) Alexis Ohanian is Williams’ biggest fan and extremely petty himself, so I feel confident in my belief that he loved that performance.

But here’s where we pause and think about who perceives pettiness as good, who perceives it as bad—and how race, power and especially gender might come into play in those equations. Race and power because the entire reason pettiness became a virtue in mainstream internet culture is Black Twitter. New York Times culture journalist Amanda Hess broke it down in 2017, writing, “On black [sic] Twitter, a certain brand of pettiness — the kind that involves gleefully asserting yourself over the smallest points and meticulously cataloging and avenging the tiniest of slights — is celebrated as a virtue and a skill, the comedic equivalent of possessing strong attention to detail… Here, the truly petty person becomes a kind of superhero: She’s focused, exacting, unwilling to suffer fools (or literally anything else) gladly. She is an everyday person who treats everything that relates to her as incredibly consequential.” But, she goes on to argue, mainstream (read: white) culture very quickly co-opted the idea, and it was soon applied to everyone from Taylor Swift to Donald Trump. Suddenly, the same concept was being applied to wildly different power dynamics, and what was satisfying to observe when celebrities or regular people on the internet did it became disturbing when the petty person also happened to be the leader of the free world.

That same year, Vice interviewed Anne H. Charity Hudley, associate professor of linguistics and Africana studies at the College of William and Mary, about the topic of pettiness, and she characterized pettiness as a form of Black resistance, in a similar vein to singing the blues. “[Petty comes] from a long history of Black verbal arts and culture in which things have a double meaning. It’s a way of doing or saying something that, because it isn’t an outward response, is less likely to [elicit a reaction that is] dangerous or deadly,” she said at the time.

I don’t think pettiness is actually a gendered trait (see: one Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, the internet’s favourite petty king), but in the context of Charity Hudley’s point about safety, it’s perhaps not a coincidence that the most overt response Williams has ever given to Drake’s jabs is one where she also has plausible deniability. And gender comes up in other ways, too, because it feels clear to me that Charlamagne, Schulz and Stephens are concerned with Williams’ pettiness for reasons that don’t apply to Lamar, because as far as I can tell, they’ve never criticized him for pettiness. (Though Schulz has definitely made other offensive comments.) In Williams, it’s a problem, a reflection of her relationship with her husband and maybe this is a stretch but, also… unfeminine somehow? I got the distinct vibe that all three of those men think a ‘good’ woman wouldn’t behave this way.

There’s a racial and gendered expectation at play here

I know this isn’t totally clear-cut, because while reactions to Williams’ perceived pettiness have been a little mixed and the internet (Drake fans aside) has been much more united in its enjoyment of Lamar’s pettiness, they’ve both received backlash and had their behaviour policed or otherwise judged as inappropriate because of racism, sexism and/or respectability politics, depending on who’s doing the judging. But I’m particularly interested in the gender aspect because recently, I’ve been thinking about what counts as an appropriate reaction to harm, and perhaps more importantly, why I’m at all concerned about reacting ‘appropriately.’

Okay, we know the answer to that. I, like many racialized women, have been socialized to minimize conflict by being the bigger person in the face of harm, large or small. Some of that is probably my personality, but I’ve also been trained to smooth things over, downplay my reaction and minimize my hurt. That’s the most mature, professional thing to do—and if it protects the comfort, reputation and peace of the people causing harm, well, that’s just how it should be. But recently, I’ve been finding that approach… difficult. This has almost felt like a failing on my part, as if I was giving my feelings too much prominence in spaces where they don’t really belong. But then I chatted with a friend about something that had been upsetting me. During that conversation, I told her that I wanted to be my highest self—calm, peaceful, unbothered—but in this situation, I was finding it impossible to be gracious, and that was only making me feel worse. Her response was a little paradigm-shifting for me. She said sometimes we are in situations where we can’t access our ‘highest’ selves because the circumstances just won’t allow it. So, not being able to be the version of myself who lets things go and rises above and makes everyone else comfortable isn’t necessarily a failing, it’s a fair and appropriate reaction to what I’m experiencing. I obviously found this personally reassuring, but thinking about it now, I’m also seeing a larger point about who benefits from the social stigma against pettiness. If, as Hess says, the truly petty person is someone who treats her life as incredibly consequential, it makes sense that those who benefit from the social messaging that some people’s lives are actually inconsequential would find that behaviour difficult or offensive.

In turn, this makes me think of a 2018 op-ed by Jemele Hill, who was gently criticizing Michelle Obama’s rise-above motto, “when they go low, we go high.”

“Most black [sic] people have been told practically since the womb that they must be twice as good to get half as much as anybody white. They have also been conditioned to believe that maintaining the moral high ground and being a bigger person is the only way to defeat racism. That often means suppressing natural human emotions that could communicate racism’s devastating impact,” she wrote at the time. “That’s one of the many burdens of racism for people of color: It is ridiculously one-sided. Only one side is expected to show compassion. Only one side must practice restraint. Only one side is pressured into forgiveness. It’s bad enough having to stomach being wronged. It’s downright shameful being stuck with the responsibility of also making it right.”

And at its heart, isn’t that what pettiness is—refusing the responsibility to make it right, refusing to pretend we weren’t hurt, and refusing to make ourselves small to keep the peace?

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Culture, CelebrityStacy Lee KongSerena Williams, Drake, Alexis Ohanian, Stephen A. Smith, Charlamagne Tha God, Andrew Schulz, Maria Sharapova, Michael B. Jordan, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump