The very facts of her life make her an almost too-perfect representative of the basic struggle against racism and prejudice that people of color in the country still face. She and Venus spent their early childhood in Compton, California, learning the game of tennis on public courts secured by gang members in jeans, and hydrating with water from a taco stand. Although the sisters later received the insulated homeschooling and private tennis lessons that define prodigies, the Williams sisters were often reminded of their race and the fact that it made them outsiders, no matter how much they dominated.

There was the Indian Wells incident, in which the sisters declined to participate in the tournament for 14 years after Venus withdrew from a match with Serena and the crowd subjected the family to boos and alleged verbal abuse. There are the banal attacks on Serena’s body image and femininity. There are the issues of her marketability in contrast to Maria Sharapova, a far inferior tennis player who, prior to being banned on doping charges, outpaced Serena in earnings everywhere but on the court. And then there are the daily racial slurs and innuendo that every black person of renown has to deal with. Her success is both an exemplar of the necessary and exhausting business of blackness—twice as good, twice as humble, twice as nice, twice as amazing—that black people have to deal in just in order to survive and a glimmer of hope that on their Sisyphean struggle they might finally see the top of the slope.

That Serena is a black woman is not tangential or merely related to her importance as a symbol of hope, but central to it. Black activism today has been a conscious redress of its most glaring weaknesses through most of history: the marginalization of women and queer people. Athletes have often served as symbols of hope for black activism, but rarely have women been accepted as those symbols. Serena is the perfect hero for today’s time and the simple fact is that no straight man could serve as an symbol that so perfectly encapsulates what Serena does. She is what we want our daughters to be. She is what I’d want my sons to be.

I wrote about Muhammad Ali after his death and how his skills in the ring and his message of blackness, boldness, and beauty became a voice for black America and a balm for its ills in the critical time of rage and sorrow after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. He was larger than life because he had to be—an incredibly unfair burden that he bore all the same. If the stakes today are less than then, the burden for Serena seems just as heavy. She has carried that burden with the same real, raw humanity and brashness of Ali—perfect in its imperfection—and has managed to cope with the twin perils of racism and misogyny while carrying it. While nobody asks for that burden, and carrying the weight of expectations of thousands (maybe millions) of people is entirely unfair, Serena has accepted it.