Serena Williams is more than a tennis great: she showed black women we could be ourselves

“If you can see it, you can be it.”

It’s a phrase regularly preached by sporting governing bodies, educators and those in the media who champion diversity, like myself. Although it’s a cheesy phrase, it is 100% true.

When you are the first of your race, nationality, gender, sexuality or culture to achieve something, not only do you become the face of the country or team that you were representing at the time, but for many, you become the physical representation of everyone “who looks like you”.

So when I think about Serena Williams retiring from the sport she committed her life to – writing for Vogue that she would be “evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me” – I’m tempted to think that her greatest legacy will be the one she continues to build off the court.

There’s no way we can ignore her record: 23 grand slam titles (so far), 14 grand slam doubles titles and four Olympic gold medals to name just a few.

But her greatest achievement has nothing to do with Wimbledon, any grand slam or any tennis racket. Rather it is the way she continues trying to create a world where little girls who look like her and me don’t need to suffer the things she did or feel excluded from the worlds that we often were. As a sports journalist, I understand the journey of starting out in a world where people don’t expect to see you, or don’t always welcome you with open arms.

So the way that Serena and Venus strutted into a world where no one sounded like them and no one looked like them, and consistently proved they had a right to be there, was not only a win for them, but a win for every one of us little black girls who never thought those kinds of dreams were ones we could achieve.

When they told Serena her