Taylor Townsend addresses essay about experiences as a Black woman in America: ‘America hating fat Black women — it’s just part of life’

 The tennis pro making waves at the US Open opens up about body image, self-worth, and breaking generational curses. 

When Taylor Townsend sat down to pen an essay in 2021 for The Players’ Tribune entitled “You Ain’t Never Been No Little Girl, Taylor Townsend,” in which she describes, in intimate detail, how body shaming, coupled with misogynoir, has impacted her throughout her career, she was attempting to address something “much deeper than tennis.”

During a recent episode of “The Pivot” podcast, the 29-year-old tennis pro shared what inspired the essay, what she was grappling with as a new mom when she wrote it, and how tennis was the perfect platform for her to launch her story.

At around the 13-minute mark of the episode, co-host Ryan Clark asks Townsend to explain how she felt when she wrote her essay four years ago.  

“It’s a loaded question because it goes much, much deeper than tennis,” she explained. “Tennis was just the avenue and the stage in which it exposed what was really inside.”

Townsend added how, up until that point, she always felt like she had something to prove, even beyond tennis.  

“I always had this chip on my shoulder where, until someone or something — whether it was a result, an outcome, validation from someone else — until that happened, I didn’t believe or didn’t see,” she continued. “So when I have people who are telling me that my funding and my career and the progression of my pro career is incumbent upon losing weight or fitting into a stigma, having to deal with that on a worldwide stage was very hard.”

Townsend, currently making waves at the US Open while standing as the world’s No. 1 doubles player, has carved out one of the most compelling rises in American tennis. In her essay for The Players’ Tribune, she described the toll the rise has taken, from receiving disparaging comments to the time she was sidelined by the USTA over her body and forced into fitness blocks — despite being the No. 1 junior player at the time. 

She famously wrote that after 20-some years, she had concluded that: “America hating fat Black women — it’s just part of life.” 

Her essay struck a nerve across the sports world, sparking conversations about body image, race, and gatekeeping in tennis.

While discussing the essay on “The Pivot,” Townsend said that at the time she wrote it, she had just given birth to her son and was living alone in Florida during the shutdowns, unpacking her life.

“When I found out that I was pregnant with my son, one of the things I realized was how much generational trauma existed within me,” she noted. “So I was like, it’s COVID. F— it. I’m unpacking, because I don’t want to pour anything else on this young Black boy, this new soul. He’s already gonna have to deal with so much. I don’t want to add to it with my sh— that I’m not dealing with unconsciously.”

In doing so, she realized that many of the voices she had been listening to about her body and her worth weren’t actually hers but had been inherited from others. 

“What I would see when I would look in the mirror wasn’t my voice, it was my mom’s voice. It was my grandma’s voice,” she added. 

Part of healing around body image has involved reclaiming her sense of personal style. Before, she used fashion “to hide.”

“But that’s what my mom did,” she noted. “I’m carrying this baggage that’s already there, and now I have these people telling me I’m fat and I don’t fit the stigma, and I can’t do this and I won’t get this and opportunities taken away from me. It just locked it in. It solidified it. So I really had to go deep to unpack those things and find my own voice; I didn’t even know what I sounded like.”