Serena Williams’ husband Alexis Ohanian defends her Super Bowl halftime show performance

Alexis Ohanian defended his wife, Serena Williams, following her surprise cameo in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show.

The Reddit co-founder first reacted to Williams’ performance the night of the show. “Pretty fantastic halftime show,” Ohanian wrote on X.

The day after the Super Bowl, Ohanian took to X again to defend Williams for crip-walking during Lamar’s song “Not Like Us.”

According to the encyclopedia “Hip Hop Around the World,” crip-walking was first created in California in the early 1970s. The move got its names from a Los Angeles street gang called the Crips. Due to its association with gang life, the move is often surrounded by controversy.

The night of the Super Bowl, Williams’ performance elicited mixed reactions from viewers, with some applauding her for her dance moves, and others questioning why she performed the controversial dance. Her half-sister, Yetunde Price, was the victim of a gang shooting in 2003. 

Williams, who is from Compton, California, has a history of performing the dance move. In 2012, she was criticized for crip-walking after besting Maria Sharapova at Wimbledon.

Ohanian referenced this time of his wife’s life in a tweet posted the day after the Super Bowl. He wrote, “Some of y’all have no idea how criticized Serena was for this same dance at Wimbledon 13 years ago and it shows…. This is bigger than the music.”

Alongside the tweet, Ohanian posted a video of Williams at the Super Bowl halftime show and a screenshot of an article from The Week featuring criticism her for doing the same moves in 2012.

The excerpt of The Week article read, “Yes. Her dance was the height of disrespect: Williams ‘deserved to be criticized and she should’ve immediately apologized,’ says Jason Whitlock at Fox Sports. What she did ‘was akin to cracking a tasteless, X-rated joke inside a church.’”

The Week article featured multiple sides of the Wimbledon debate, including a Deadspin post that said crip-walking has “normalized and mainstreamed,” and that “Williams’ critics are really calling her out for doing ‘a Black Thing in a White Space.’” 

Williams also brought up Wimbledon in her own posts the night of the Super Bowl.

“Man, I did not crip-walk like that at Wimbledon. Oh, I would’ve been fined. It was all love,” she said in a video on X after her performance.