Ben Shelton. Photo:
The recent U.S. Open has been called historic. Not since Arthur Ashe won the U.S. Open in 1968 and reached the final again in 1972 had a Black American man reached the final. This year, two Black Americans reached the semifinals and one reached the final. The achievement has been celebrated as evidence of how far American tennis—and American society—have come. It seems almost to confirm Barack Obama’s famous formulation that the arc of history bends toward justice.
But does it? If two Black American men reaching a U.S. Open semifinal is evidence of racial progress, what exactly does it prove? A rereading of John McPhee’s account of Ashe’s victory, combined with a few contemporary statistics, suggests a less comforting conclusion. Whatever the arc of history may be, it is moving very slowly toward justice.
Ben Shelton’s arrival in the final has been heralded as proof that tennis, like American society, has radically changed. As Martin Blackman, then General Manager of USTA Player Development, put it: “One of the USTA’s priorities over the years is to make tennis look like America.” And there are tennis indicators of progress. Where once the U.S. Open was played at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, where a 1959 controversy erupted after Ralph Bunche, a high U.N. official, said he and his son had been told they could not become members because they were Black, the tournament now is played at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, with its major stadium named after Arthur Ashe.
The USTA has learned the vocabulary of inclusion. King defeated Bobby Riggs in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” and, after being publicly outed as a lesbian in 1981, she became one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ figures in American sports. And race has its own monument in Arthur Ashe Stadium. The symbolism is unmistakable. By its own stated objective, the USTA can point to the summit of the sport and say that tennis now looks more like America.
People are treating representation at the top of American tennis (or other sports) as evidence that the racial arc of history bends toward justice. But does the evidence actually support that conclusion? Have the underlying social relations changed at the same speed? America has become extraordinarily good at making its institutions look integrated without necessarily making the underlying structures integrated.
The definitive history of Ashe’s path to victory is John McPhee’s two 1969 New Yorker articles, later collected in Levels of the Game. What makes a rereading of the articles so relevant is the stark dichotomy presented by McPhee of Ashe and his opponent, Clark Graebner. McPhee presents Graebner as the typical conservative, religious Midwesterner with a personally signed photo of Richard Nixon in his home. Crew cut, disciplined, described as Germanic, he represents a middle America. Ashe, on the other hand, is presented by McPhee as dreamlike, flexible, and more liberal. Although he was raised by a very strict father and early coach and served at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) during the Vietnam War, Ashe is portrayed as the opposite of Graebner, including a long passage tracing Ashe’s genealogy back to slavery.
This is how sports journalist Louisa Thomas presents The New Yorker’s recent republication of McPhee’s articles:
“Ashe grew up as a Black man in segregated Richmond, Virginia. When his coach, Walter Johnson, first met him, Ashe was so frail that Johnson wondered if he’d suffered from rickets. Graebner was a country-club kid from suburban Milwaukee. His All-American good looks reminded people of another Clark, Clark Kent, and his nickname in tennis was Superboy—except among those who referred to him as Herr Graebner, on account of his straight-backed posture and Teutonic bearing.”
McPhee was writing about two men, but he turned a tennis match into a portrait of two Americas. It was, in McPhee’s telling, a very simple black-and-white America.
But what happens when we move forward more than half a century? If McPhee’s Ashe and Graebner embodied two Americas staring at each other across the net in 1968, what do Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe staring at each other across the net in 2026 tell us about America today?
At the U.S. Open, two Black Americans reaching the semifinals can look like the culmination of successful American integration. The economic statistics tell a different story. The latest Census data show that in 2024 median household income for non-Hispanic White households was $92,530, compared with $56,000 for Black households—meaning the median Black household earned only about 60 percent as much as the median White household. The wealth gap is even more striking. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances, from 2022, found median wealth of $285,000 for White families and $44,900 for Black families. The typical White family therefore possessed about 6.3 times the wealth of the typical Black family. The absolute levels of wealth have risen over time, but the relative gap remains enormous.
The American Dream story of Tiafoe sleeping in a spare office at the tennis center where his father worked maintenance can obscure a much larger racial wealth and income gap.
Another dramatic statistic—one that by itself does not fully establish racial discrimination—is incarceration. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports that the U.S. had approximately 1.254 million people in state and federal prisons at the end of 2023. Its data show a prison incarceration rate of approximately 1,218 Black adults per 100,000, compared with 231 per 100,000 for White adults—more than five times higher.
Two Black Americans reaching the semifinals of the U.S. Open shows how far integration has come. But we have become very good at seeing integration at the summit and assuming it exists throughout the pyramid. Shelton and Tiafoe’s successes may demonstrate something more complicated: how easily a society can confuse representation at the summit with integration throughout the pyramid.
Another example of representation without power in a major American sport: It took years for the National Football League to have Black quarterbacks. That has improved. But when the Black quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to make a political statement by kneeling during the national anthem, that was a step too far. Although talented and proven, he has been unable to find a team willing to sign him.
Kaepernick’s case exposed the limits of representation. A Black quarterback could become an emblem of Black achievement in the NFL; a Black quarterback who used that visibility to protest racial injustice became something else entirely. After the 2016 season, despite his record, no NFL team signed him again. Whether one calls that blackballing or something else, the episode exposed a boundary that statistics about the number of Black quarterbacks do not capture.
And what about Black head coaches? The National Football League has spent more than two decades trying to address the problem. Its Rooney Rule requires teams to interview minority candidates for senior positions. Yet at the start of the 2026 season, only three of the NFL’s 32 head coaches—just 9.4 percent—are Black. That is particularly striking in a league in which Black athletes constitute a large percentage of the players on the field. Indeed, during the 2026 hiring cycle, 10 head-coaching jobs became available. Not one was filled by a Black coach. There has never been a Black principal owner of an NFL team.
Arthur Ashe was a breakthrough. Billie Jean King was a breakthrough. Tiafoe and Shelton are breakthroughs. Black quarterbacks are no longer unusual. But Black head coaches in the NFL remain unusual. And there has never been a Black principal owner of an NFL team.
Breakthroughs at the top don’t necessarily tell us what’s happening throughout the system. A society can achieve representation without achieving proportional power. Progress has been real. But Americans repeatedly mistake the most visible manifestations of progress for evidence that the underlying problem has been solved.
