Deborah Orr: Williams sister's death a racial wake-up call

COMMENT

LONDON - How very far Venus and Serena Williams appeared to have travelled from the home of their childhood. The sisters, famously brought up from birth to be the tennis champions they became, spent their early years in Compton, the poverty-stricken, gang-infested south central Los Angeles district where their eldest sister, Yetunde Price, was shot dead with an assault rifle on Sunday night.

The tennis stars issued a statement saying: "Our grief is overwhelming, and this is the saddest day of our lives."

Part of the Williams family's achievement - Yetunde was close to her half-sisters and had been working as their personal assistant - was that they had escaped this blighted neighbourhood.

Amid the tragedy of this young woman's murder, there now is the feeling that these dark places are entities in themselves, malign beings which do not like to be defied.

The family mythology, promoted by Richard Williams, the father and mentor of Venus and Serena, certainly invoked the tough beginnings of the sisters to the hilt.

The girls used to practise their tennis as children on the public courts in Compton, picking up broken glass and the detritus of drug-taking before they played. Their tremendous focus and concentration was honed by continuing to play even as gunshots could be heard around them.

Mr Williams has even suggested that he decided his family should live in Compton not out of necessity but because he believed it would be character forming. Perhaps it was, but if there is truth in the assertion, then it may have exacted an awful price.

Whether it was these old connections that led Yetunde to have been where she was when she was killed remains to be seen.

So far, no one has been able to say why Yetunde was in Compton, about 60km from where she lived, or how she became embroiled in the confrontation with local residents that cost her her life.

But she had a companion with her on her journey, Rolland Wormley, who will be a pivotal witness. The arrest of a man, Aaron Michael Hammer, on suspicion of murder, has already been made. There is a good chance that justice will be done.

But at the same time, there will be many unjust consequences, with much wider social implications than the personal ones involved in the loss of a much-loved sister, daughter and mother-of-three.

Mr Williams, who is very much the eminence grise behind the success of his daughters, has been justly proud, and expansively vocal, about the fact that his family has managed to break into a small elite community - the international tennis circuit - overwhelmingly dominated by whites.

This made the family into important positive role models, and has helped them to highlight many issues about the insular nature of the tennis world.

Now, though, the message is a little more complicated, because the family has become engulfed by a tragic circumstance that on both sides of the Atlantic is too often characterised as "a black problem", and widely ignored because of this.

The last major florescence in Britain of the phenomenon whereby a single crime unleashes a moral panic about an entire swathe of people was when two teenage girls were killed when caught in the crossfire between rival gangs in Birmingham in the new year.

A similar crime occurred in Britain on the same weekend that Yetunde lost her life.

A 7-year-old girl was gunned down alongside her father in London on Sunday night, and in a quite different way to the Williams sisters, this girl had travelled a long way too.

She had been sent over from Jamaica by her mother to get a British education, and had been due to start school this week.

The only connection between these violent crimes on both continents is that in both cases it appears that innocent people were shot down in cold blood.

Yet there is another more sinister message here, even though the case of the murder of Yetunde is clearly of tremendous interest because of her celebrated sisters.

The message is that young black men's lives are somehow of less worth than those of black women.

The deaths of young men in such situations go almost unreported.

But instead, if there is to be a message drawn from the death of Yetunde, it should be that there are many people who make their best endeavours to work hard, live decently but still find themselves caught up in gang-driven criminality.

This goes not only for victims but for perpetrators too.

Those awaiting the full story behind the death of Yetunde will expect to have their prejudices confirmed.

It has already been reported, for example, that Yetunde's companion is under arrest because he was on parole, his presence at a crime scene breaking that.

Yet if anything positive is to come from the sad event, it is that desperate lives have a huge influence over the whole of society, and cannot be tucked away in a box marked "trouble" and left to stew.

The double murder that took place in London over the weekend is being investigated by Operation Trident, the Scotland Yard squad that specialises in investigating gun crime in the black community.

But we urgently need to look much more widely at what sort of start in life people get.

Mythology is powerful, and the negative mythology that surrounds young black men is particularly powerful in the most soul-destroying and damaging of ways.

It would be good if the dreadful, high-profile murder of Yetunde could change lazy attitudes, instead of confirming them yet again.

- INDEPENDENT