Super athlete Serena Williams covers the February 2019 issue of Allure Magazine, styled by Zhenya Posternak in images by Tanya Posternak./ Hair by Vernon François

Ashley C Ford conducts the interview Serena Williams: The Power of Unapologetic Greatness. This story has been told a few too many times right about now.

Serena Williams is a powerhouse woman with a lot to say on an infinite number of subjects. Journalists need to live a bit dangerously with her, not trot out the tried and true paragraphs we’ve read 100x by now. Serena doesn’t mess around. Ask her about Colin Kaepernick. Asl her about the NFL . For example, Serena recently sat down with her friend Oscar-winning, hip-hop Renaissance man Common to talk about being black on The Undefeated. Given the title of the Allure article, I would expect something like this to be revealed, as Serena talks about watching ‘Roots’ as a child:

Yeah, we watched all that stuff just to learn about our history. You become proud, you see all the stuff your people went through so you have an opportunity. Like that poem that Maya Angelou said, that we are the hope and the dream of a slave. If you think about what the slave had to go through, and then the life that we are privileged to live — I wouldn’t want to be any other color. There’s no other race, to me, that has such a tough history for hundreds and hundreds of years, and only the strong survive, so we were the strongest and the most mentally tough, and I’m really proud to wear this color every single day of my life.

Dear Journalists. If you want to interview the great Serena Williams, up your own game. ~ Anne