I haven’t been updating my blog this past month for two reasons:
- There was some restructuring going on at my job and I had to work overtime to keep up with the workflow.
- I saw The Worst Person in the World and got an idea for a screenplay. So now I’m another New Yorker working on a screenplay.
This week, my schedule is finally back to normal and I can read the news early in the morning like I used to, so I told myself this weekend that I would start posting regularly again. And boy oh boy, everybody is talking about this:
UNCENSORED WILL SMITH FOOTAGE AS SHOWN ON AUSTRALIAN TV pic.twitter.com/NcRfdjWxqe
— David Mack (@davidmackau) March 28, 2022
The number of breathless tweets immediately calling for Will Smith’s arrest while simultaneously lecturing everyone that violence isn’t the answer is very curious indeed, considering what the police in this country do. I personally don’t believe you should slap people at work, but I also do not care that somebody hauled off and hit Christopher Julius Rock in the mouth.
Will Smith didn’t punch him.
It was a slap. Still physical assault! But there is physical assault where you are trying to injure someone and physical assault where someone is out of line and you want to knock some sense into them. Should you go around knocking sense into people? No. I’ve never hit anyone first in my entire life, but that’s mostly because I don’t want to go to jail. There are plenty of people on the subway I have wanted to smack because they were being disrespectful to me or someone else.
When people say “violence is never the answer, and no one deserves to get hit,” I cannot co-sign. Your view here probably depends on your personal experience with verbal assault, and that’s okay. Our lived experiences shape how we see the world and respond to various scenarios. My lived experience, as a person who has been called the n-word from a passing F-150 or called gay slurs walking to the bus stop is that some people are violent bullies who realize there are no consequences for making people feel uncomfortable and making people feel threatened. I believe if people got slapped for saying things they shouldn’t, they would stop saying things they shouldn’t.
Chris Rock is a little shit.
Chris Rock used Jada as a punchline 5 or 6 years ago and he’s still on it. To be fair, most of the world has used Jada as a punchline at some point, so Chris Rock was just following suit. And Will Smith snapped — it is what it is. For Chris Rock in particular though, I have no sympathy. The guy who made a documentary on Black women’s hair punching down at them so white people could gawk at the lengths they go through to fit into a mold of professionalism and acceptability built by white people does not then get to make jokes about any Black woman’s hair, let alone one suffering from alopecia.
And there is nothing you can say to me that will make me believe Chris Rock did not know Jada was suffering from alopecia. She has talked about it and been vulnerable about it, and if you yourself reading this were not aware, I totally understand. There are a lot of celebrities in the world and they (especially The Smiths) have a lot to say. Chris Rock, whose profession entails knowing things about celebrities so he can write jokes about it, absolutely did know. Chris Rock, an A-list Black celebrity, absolutely knows what the other A-list Black celebrities are talking about and going through.
Words are powerful.
If you search Twitter for “violence is never the answer” now, you mostly get tweets from Black people responding to the trend with observations about the LAPD, police in general, suburbia, and seasoning, but there was definitely a certain genre of person tweeting about it last night. Let’s unpack that!
There are two kinds of white people who couldn’t wait to shoot off a hot take. The first are the kind we ignore in every situation, the Conservatives and Undercover Conservatives who are always secretly or blatantly looking for a reason to pile on a Black person. If someone darker than instant oatmeal steps even slightly outside the completely malleable and situationally applicable rules of civil behavior, here comes a stampede of patriots calling for a police response.
The other kind are normal, basically good, everyday white people who are coming from a place of general humanity and non-violence. I don’t mind what they said and I don’t wholly disagree with the impulse — violence shouldn’t be the answer to a disagreement….but words are violent. I think people from marginalized communities are more likely to understand the violence of words and a lot of us would put violent words on par with a slap in the face. Does being insulted equate to being shot and killed? No, but that’s not what we’re talking about, and this idea of putting all physical violence in the same category wholly apart from verbal violence is a little precious. I’ve been in plenty of physical altercations, because I was an effeminate Black boy growing up in the rural South, and I gotta tell you, I rarely think about those fights. I can’t even remember the names of some of the people I got into fights with, but I think about the times I’ve been verbally assaulted, insulted, or made low more often than I realized before I sat down to write that paragraph.
Violent words, to a marginalized community, aren’t just about the words. It’s everything behind the word that reminds you where you are in the hierarchy of society. It’s reinforcing a powerlessness to do anything about your station. This is why calling a Black man a boy isn’t calling him a youth — it pulls from centuries of disrespect and knowing your place and the futility of pushing back against a system that will kill you before it hears you.
What does that have to do with Will Smith? Chris Rock isn’t white and there weren’t any slurs or violent intent behind the words. Maybe nothing, but for me, and a lot of Black people I know, disrespect toward you or your family is so serious because of the fact that simply living and existing is an exercise in fighting for respect in this country.
Because Black people across the diaspora from a wide variety of backgrounds can hop on social media and talk about how similar our upbringings were, I gotta assume a lot of us do carry “talk shit, get hit” somewhere deep in our psyche. The foundation of that is generations of Black people who had to (and have to!) swallow disrespect from White America for fear of torture and death, so you control the things you can control. You cannot stop white people from verbally assaulting you, but you can stop another Black person. If I have to take XYZ every day from Miss Millie, I’ll be damned if I’m going to take it in my own neighborhood from somebody else. I grew up watching my dad, as the only Black man in his workplace, coming home to complain and cuss about “those redneck white boys at the jobsite.” The idea that you have to grab or maintain respect where you can was instilled in me as a silent lesson from both of my parents who grew up during Jim Crow being insulted directly and environmentally by White America.
That, in particular, is why I don’t really care what white people have to say about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. I’m not saying you’re wrong, because your experience shapes your worldview, and like I said — you shouldn’t go around slapping people at work. I’m just saying from my experience, a Black man slapping another Black man for insulting his wife did not send me into a fit of frenzy over social decorum.
Besides, it’s the Oscars. They hand those things out all willy nilly to all manner of abusers, rapists, and pedophiles. Maybe focus on that instead and let Black people handle this in-house. Diddy has already stepped up to be the Iyanla of the situation, and if those words mean nothing to you, it’s all the more reason to keep your hot takes on the shelf.
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