Serena Williams wants establishments to be more conscious of what they choose to adorn their interiors with.
On Thursday (Sept. 25), the tennis star took to her Instagram stories to criticize a New York City hotel’s choice of decor: a cotton plant.
“How do we feel about cotton as decoration?” Williams asks, panning the camera to a vase on a table in the hotel hallway. “Personally for me, it doesn’t feel great.”
She follows it up with a video of her plucking off some of the cotton and rubbing it on her fingernails, noting it feels like “nail polish remover cotton” and making an exaggerated disgusted shiver.
Williams never names the hotel in question, but her disgust comes from the history of slavery in the United States, where enslaved African-Americans were forced to harvest crops for landowners, oftentimes cotton.