HISTORY MADE AGAIN….DESPITE DECADES OF CRITICS, RACIST AND SEXIST ATTACKS, SERENA WILLIAMS KEEPS WINNING

Serena Williams, who’s widely considered the greatest woman tennis player ever, has made history again.

When she beat her sister Venus to win Saturday’s Australian Open final, she won her seventh Australian title and her 23rd Grand Slam singles title, moving ahead of Steffi Graf for the most major titles in the Open era, the Associated Press reported.

Breaking records is nothing new for Williams. As recently as September of last year, she defeated Kazakhstan’s Yaroslava Shvedova in the fourth round of the US Open, giving her more Grand Slam victories (308) than any other tennis player.

But longtime fans know that along with celebrating, they should brace for more of the expressions of bigotry that have threatened to tarnish nearly every victory, magazine cover, and interview of Williams’s entire incredible career. All too often, at the same time she’s being celebrated, she’s targeted with outrageous racist and sexist comments.

For example, in the moments surrounding her win at the French Open in June 2015, Williams was compared to an animal, likened to a man, and deemed frightening and horrifyingly unattractive. One Twitter user wrote that Williams “looks like a gorilla, and sounds like a gorilla when she grunts while hitting the ball. In conclusion, she is a gorilla.” And another described her as “so unbelievably dominant … and manly.” ESPN sports commentator Bomani Jones responded to those reactions — as well as to the ones that dismissed them as subjective commentary — with a series of