Serena Williams and me: the real story

On the face of it, this is unremarkable.

Williams is supremely talented, wealthy and sexy. Such women tend to marry men who are also wealthy and, if not famous in the same way, at least highly successful and admired by their peers.

So Ohanian is the kind of man you’d expect her to go for. He’s also about the same age as she is and not a bad looking guy. Therefore he ticks some more boxes. It’s not like Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch, for instance.

We men can understand what Murdoch sees in her, but not necessarily what she sees in him.

When Hall’s track record includes a pop icon, Mick Jagger, what can she possibly find seductive about a controversial newspaper publisher? There’s money and power, of course, the twin magnets that have been getting non-studly men laid since the dawn of time, but surely Hall has enough of those things herself.

The case of Serena and Alexis is different, though. The objections to this proposed union come from one particular sector: black men.

Black men who don’t want “their” women being tampered with by non-black men.

This is profoundly hypocritical.

If the boot was on the other foot the world would be outraged, because there’s a six-letter word that sums it up, gentlemen. It starts with r and ends with m, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

To make an obvious comparison with the Williams/Ohanian issue, how about Kanye West and Kim Kardashian? Her gene pool may be a bewildering cocktail of nationalities from Dutch and English to Armenian, but black she ain’t.

West, on the other hand, is a typical 21st century African American success story. He is unmistakably, dark-skinnedly African and operating in a musical genre that owes little to non-whites. If the black world has to insist on seeing itself as “the black world”, West symbolizes the rise from the downtrodden days and the development of a worldwide culture that is largely defined by the colour of someone’s skin. But don’t objections to discrimination argue against that very thing? And now you’re offended by the fact that one of your most prominent women, a world leader in her field, is marrying a white man? How can that relationship be negative? Of course there has been - and still is in some places – racism directed against black people, but, as this column has pointed out before, that sort of thing is not solved by tit-for-tat. While resentment is hardly in the same category as violence and murder – and may indeed be fuelled by such things – it lays a sinister foundation on which extremists can build.

The way the world is going these days, with lessons of previous horrors of ethnic cleansing from Nazi Germany to Bosnia and Rwanda to Iraq being forgotten as every group stands up for itself, we’re in danger of finding ourselves with a global conflict that is not country against country or religion against religion, but colour against colour.

Racial integration has been progressing slowly but surely in many countries. Look at all the black players in world football.

Those emerging from Africa may be “pure” black, but in the English Premier League, for instance, many of the home-grown players are now mixed-race. This is progress. It is not just desirable but essential.

But they’re not usually referred to as mixed-race: they’re called black players because some of their genes are black. It’s the same with Barack Obama. We are coming to the end of the first black presidency of the USA. But have you ever seen a picture of his mother? Look up Ann Dunham and you’ll see someone who looks like a librarian in a quiet English village, whose nextdoor neighbour is Miss Marple.

She was as white as a movie star’s teeth. Her husband, Barack Obama senior, was from Kenya, and from their marriage, their border-crossing love, came a president who ran the country with perceptiveness and compassion.

We might not agree with everything he did, but to dismiss him as not black enough – as some have - is as bad as the whites who dismiss on racial grounds his wife, a woman as beautiful, intelligent and charismatic as ever graced the world stage.

The Obamas are proof that integration can work.

Serena Williams? She’s coming towards retirement after a glorious era as the world’s best female tennis player. And just like any other woman, she has the right to marry whoever makes her happy.

And yes, I’m a little peeved that she didn’t choose me, but then we’ve never met, so she doesn’t know what she’s missing, does she?