“It’s 2024 and you can’t tell Black people apart”: Variety Makes Embarrassing Mistake In Story About Serena Williams

Serena Williams has quite the month ahead. On Thursday, July 11, she’ll be hosting the ESPYs, and her ESPN/Religion of Sports series In The Arena: Serena Williams debuts on ESPN+ the day before. But a Variety article by Brian Steinberg spotlighting that series and Morgan Stanley’s sponsorship of elements within it as part of a larger trend of advertisers sponsoring women’s sports content initially ran with a picture of Williams’ sister Venus instead (as seen at left above).

The photo with the story on Variety‘s website was corrected to one of Serena within half an hour. But the Venus image ran with the story on X/Twitter as well. And Variety kept that tweet up for more than three hours despite many people noting the error:

Variety tweeted this out at 10:15am ET.
As of 11:34am nobody there seems to know that the tweet about Serena has a photo of Venus — who’s never mentioned in the story (as of 11:34am)
They also apparently don’t know the photo was in an actual 2022 Variety story about Venus. https://t.co/9Y81PKR5TC pic.twitter.com/cgHyyI8JFq

— Charles T (@ChuckyT3) June 27, 2024

So @Variety its been 2hrs. How long does it take to correct your error and actually put up.a picture of SERENA not her sister Venus? Y’all need help, chile! https://t.co/6XYWTXl0B8 pic.twitter.com/Wp13zKmryO

— Good2Great12 (@Good2Great12) June 27, 2024

While this is only one of many photo misidentifications over the years, this feels like a bad one on a few fronts. For one, the Williams sisters do look quite different. Beyond that, this was an internal Variety photo, so it’s definitely on them rather than on a mislabeling by wire service (something we often see). And it’s more unfortunate still to see this on an (otherwise good!) article specifically spotlighting a series on the sister who doesn’t appear in the photo.

And it’s unfortunate to see this not yet addressed by Variety on X/Twitter, either with a deletion of the initial tweet and a new tweet with an apology and the proper photo or with a reply to the initial story including an apology. Photo mistakes happen at many outlets, including this one, but how you deal with them is important. And while Variety did fix their web photo relatively quickly, it’s remarkable that they’ve left the error up on their social media feed.