The simple fact overlooked in Serena Williams fallout

It’s a tricky move to attach gender or race motives to an umpire officiating a tennis match between two women: one Afro-American, the other half-Japanese, half-Haitian but one by one, too many members of the commentariat to count worked overtime to pull it off.

In the morass of Op-Eds scrawled in the wake of the US women’s Open final, focus quickly became lost and one rather simple fact was ignored:

Take this tweet from ABC presenter, Virginia Trioli. She claimed to have read almost all there was to read about what had happened and only then had been moved to judgment by way of retweet with comment. The retweet was of a judgy columnist, Margaret Sullivan, who splatters words around for the Washington Post and the New York Times, sometimes in some recognisable order. She, in turn, was tweeting up a rapidly cobbled together think piece from Sally Jenkins at WaPo. Jenkins, Sullivan enthused, got it “exactly right.”

Full column here.