Meredith Cash reports for Insider on the protest of police violence by Naomi Osaka, the U.S. tennis champion whose heritage is Haitian and Japanese.
- Naomi Osaka has dropped out of the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati in protest of police violence.
- The 22-year-old tennis superstar was scheduled to face Elise Mertens in the semifinals on Thursday morning but posted a note late Wednesday night announcing her decision to not play.
- “Watching the continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police is honestly making me sick to my stomach,” Osaka wrote in a statement published on Twitter.
- Her decision came with protests erupting around the US — including by other major athletes — in light of Sunday’s police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man in Wisconsin who a police officer shot seven times in front of his three children.
[Photo above by Al Bello/Getty Images.]
For more on this item, see https://www.insider.com/naomi-osaka-drops-out-of-tournament-protest-police-violence-2020-8?
