But there’s something
Hmm. Sometimes sniffing out concealed hatred or “bigotry” can accidentally reveal one’s own.
“We do not condone violence.” “Assault is never the answer.” These words have echoed through all of my social media accounts since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for making a poor-taste joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Most people agree the slap shouldn’t have happened. But there’s something that feels precious at best, and downright racist at worst, about white people’s reaction to the now-infamous smack.
I don’t think I understand the continuum here – from precious to racist? Maybe “petty” was the idea? At any rate, “something that feels” itself “feels” like a reach. That whole sentence “feels” like someone struggling to beef up a flimsy case.
The Hollywood director Judd Apatow declared in a deleted tweet that Smith “could have killed” Rock (seriously?), calling it “pure out of control rage and violence”. Apatow later confirmed he wasn’t even watching the show when he made the remarks. The radio host Howard Stern compared Smith to Donald Trump, while white women on Twitter somehow decided that Smith’s actions meant he must be beating his wife.
And this is where the flimsiness becomes downright embarrassing. A named famous man, a named famous man, and then – “white women.” White women wrote a tweet? How would they even coordinate that? And the linked tweet is by a white man, who went to all the trouble of finding four tweets by the dreaded Karens white women. Four random women, not famous like Judd Apatow and Howard Stern. You gotcher racist white famous dudes and then you got your white bitches.
While it’s justifiable – important, even – to interrogate his motives for delivering the slap (was this really all about defending his wife or more about his own ego?), it’s clear that the backlash against Smith is rooted in not just anti-Blackness, but respectability politics as well.
No it isn’t. It isn’t clear at all. It could be true, but it isn’t clear from 2 celebrity dudes and 4 uncelebrity women.
Then the subject suddenly changes and becomes about Black men punching down on Black women.
Still, this kind of punching down on Black women remains typical of many Black male comedians who, like the rest of the world, don’t see Black women’s struggles and experiences as real or legitimate. And this lack of care for Black women also partly explains why people were so taken aback by the image of Smith standing up for his wife in that way. The world is so used to seeing Black women as unworthy of being protected and fought for that it can’t see any merit to Smith’s actions or the emotions that spurred them.
Not the most tightly argued think-piece I’ve ever read.
Punching down?
Will Smith is 6’2″, 200 pounds, and a fitness fanatic.
Chris Rock is 5’10” and 168 pounds soaking wet.
Who was punching down, again?
This essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is much, much better and even makes a point!
https://kareem.substack.com/p/will-smith-did-a-bad-bad-thing
My opinion on the whole affair is this:
It’s an incredibly wealthy and famous man slapping another wealthy and famous man, can’t we just sit down and enjoy it?
(I am lying, by the way: I have many more opinions about it. I’d better keep them to myself, I think.)
I think “precious” was employed to evoke an image of fragile, naive, upper-class (implicitly white) people who fall to cases of the vapours whenever a bit of the raucous violence and urgency of the real world is exposed to their delicate senses. Picture a Southern Belle who lived in a mansion whose very existence was predicated upon extracting mechanical labour from African slaves, but who would tear up when her daddy was mean to her dog.
In the current supposedly-anti-racist moment, the world view (or Weltanschauung, to call back to a previous thread) being promulgated by “anti”-racist activists is one in which all white people are as “precious” as that hypothetical Southern Belle, and all “BIPOC” people are as put-upon and subject to the vicissitudes of a cruel and extractive white supremacy as those African slaves under the lash. “Precious” was chosen to this end. It is not surprising that an “anti”-racist activist sees no worse an enemy than a white woman, because in the “anti”-racist mind, white women have benefited from the blood and tears of black men and women for generations and continue to do so unabated.
That this world view is deluded, narcissistic, short-sighted, and ultimately counterproductive to women black and white is obvious enough to not need further elaboration around these parts, I hope. The futility of stuffing this lens over the mind’s eye at every occasion becomes a hindrance to understanding, at least if you cannot take the lens off.
And Apatow’s point, whether he intended it or not, is that direct physical violence between men can become deadly very quickly. While it was unlikely that a single slap could have spelt the end of Chris Rock, it might’ve, if he’d fallen and struck his head upon the floor or something with a sharp edge. Indeed, many men have gone to prison for years because a single unlucky punch caused another man to fall awkwardly and die, often over a dispute no more morally urgent than Will Smith’s attempt to defend his wife’s honour.
And even though the single strike that did occur was nowhere near fatal, if Rock had reacted with less grace and humility, the altercation might well have continued. In my experience, “standing up” to a bully willing to employ physical violence first only works when you can overcome the bully; if you invite further violence from them, you will probably receive it, and each second of such an altercation can mean the end of your life — either directly, or once you become the perpetrator of a homicide. Yes, that was (perhaps exceedingly) unlikely in this case, but there is another world where this altercation had a very different outcome.
Violence is a language that most men and a decent number of women understand instinctively, though few become masters of it. We have taken great pains to punish people for speaking this language inarticulately, which is likely a very good development, on balance. But that means that when someone speaks this language in public, we often lack the ability to parse it correctly, leading to the divergent reactions noted here.
DD’s elegant analysis of “precious” reminds me that the fictional midwife Lucile on Call the Midwife addresses all her patients as “Precious,” with a Jamaican accent. She does so especially when they’re worried or anxious or otherwise in trouble.
I don’t watch the awards, they are boring as all hell. I did see this story on the news outlets the next day and found some clips of the incident. I was honestly embarrassed for Will, he really made a fool of himself and I think he must be suffering from some troubles or stress that isn’t obvious. I thought Chris took this in stride as well as any man could without retaliating. I don’t think Chris was in the wrong, because as far as Chris Rock comedy goes, it was pretty mild and not funny at all. A really unfortunate overreaction by Will. I felt bad for both of them.
^ Especially funny since Smith’s action was to physically strike, where Rock only made a joke. But sure, Rock is the one doing the downward punching.
Maybe Will was reacting to the idea of Jada having the lead role in what would be a real stinker of a sequel, given how shitty and sexist GI Jane was in the first place. :P
As far as Hollywood is concerned, violence often is the answer. Of the top ten movies right now, at least nine involve violence. Hollywood has long sold the myth of righteous violence–violence isn’t just ok, it’s a moral imperative, as long as it’s the good guy doing it. Real men protect their own.
The irony is that in “King Richard”, after Will Smith’s character suffers a horrific violent attack, he has a chance to take revenge, but ultimately passes it up. Smith could’ve learned something from Richard Williams.
Yeah, Will Smith was wrong to react like that, and Chris rock’s joke was just not that funny and a bit tasteless, but then that describes 80% of modern comedy (with another 15% being appallingly tasteless whether funny or not).
As for the pearl clutching about this being the worst thing ever to happen to the academy, what about:
1. Polanski being given an award he couldn’t accept in person because he would have been arrested for raping a child?
2. Harvey Weinstein still having 81 (?) academy awards, despite having been expelled and having received many of those when it was an open secret how he was behaving?
3. The much lauded John Wayne, utter racist, having to be restrained from assaulting Sacheen Littlefeather?
But yeah, two rich guys playing out a long running niggle with each other in public is the worst thing ever.
That someone would defend actual assault over indirect offense by means of racial framing is completely unsurprising. The whole “anti-racist” paradigm is bound up in a sort of transitivity. Any critique of a member of a marginalized race applies to the race as a whole, and anything said about the race applies to each member in full. (This reasoning also holds for other marginalized groups, which is why it’s only permissible to speak positive things about “the trans community”. To point out one who represents a danger to women is transphobic, even when specifically asked to provide such an example. The “correct” response is to acknowledge that no such person exists.) So if you express disgust at Will Smith’s behavior, then you’re expressing disgust at all black men. The racism is a given, just as we learn from Robin Di’Angelo. The task is to identify precisely how the racism works.
A halfway decent Guardian hot take on the hot takes:
Will Smith’s Oscars slap created a storm of increasingly irrelevant internet hot takes
I essentially agree that people are making too much of this incident.
I’ve heard that people on Facebook are unfriending each other over there opinions on this incident. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration; perhaps the incident provides an opportunity for people to proclaim strong views about the limits of comedy or the appropriateness of violence, and it is those opinions that are causing the friendship rifts, not so much the views about this particular incident.
I tend to think Smith was in the wrong, and that the joke was mild. I tend to think violence is usually not justified. But this was only a slap, not hitting someone with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. So I care less than I might otherwise.
I did see a viewpoint that bothered me: words can hurt, and can move people to commit suicide, so there’s no difference between words and violence. What an absolute crock of shit. That’s akin to claiming we can’t say anything that bothers anyone, even if it’s the truth, even if it’s helpful, even if it’s necessary, because we have no way of helping people avoid committing suicide other than silence. That’s condoning people with the aforementioned “Lucille” baseball bat going after feminists who’ve done nothing worse than disagreeing with their claims. Sorry, no, there is a huge difference between words and violence.
Nullius, I’ve experienced that. My ex left me because he was gay. He treated me badly, and never had told me he was gay or that I was a trophy wife. Any comment about difficulties I had and still have because of this are greeted with (1) weren’t you lucky! Gay men make the best husbands! (Really? My current husband must be gay…) (2) Accusation against all gay men. (3) An assumption that I am saying my ex’s entire personality is bound up in this one event and there was nothing good about him or about our relationship (I would never say that, because it wouldn’t be true). Oh, and of course the old favorite: It takes two to get a divorce! Which of course isn’t true, because one can choose to get divorce and in the era of no fault divorce, it’s done. I would say it takes two to make a marriage, and if he wasn’t working at it, of course it ended. Plus, I was becoming less useful as a trophy wife because my anorexia made me scary thin.
It’s also the process we see in adding “western” to everything. “Western” in this case translates into “white”, and means “bad to the core”. Eastern, of course, means the opposite. It means non-white, good in every particular, and of course, more accurate than anything “White Western Colonialist Imperialist Materialist Male Science” could ever come up with. Genital mutilation? Hey, it’s their culture! (Of course, it’s now becoming our culture through trans activism). Acid in women’s faces? Hey, it’s their culture! Binding feet? Hey, it’s their culture! Who are we to say they’re wrong? Of course, for all the people who say we shouldn’t judge other cultures, I never see anyone stating that slavery was the culture of the antebellum south. Why? Because it is bad. It is easily seen as bad.
Of course, the other things I listed only happen to women….
I see the same thing in the trans debate: disagreement can cause distress, and distress is a form of harm, thus disagreement is identical to violence, or at least is a form of violence, depending on who you ask. But this logic dispenses with perhaps the most basic concept in communication: words differentiate between different things, even when those things have overlap. It offends my communication sensibilities.
I wanted to add a clip of John Wayne trying to lunge at Sacheen Littlefeather but it happened backstage and there’s apparently no video or photography of it.
iknklast: A) Ugh, that sounds quite shitty. My sympathy.
B) Yep, the two processes are intertwined. It’s almost a toy example, but you can really see the logical process in the realm of visual media; i.e., film, TV, comics, games, and the like. Only positive “representation” is permissible, because anything else would reflect negatively on the “community”, which means that the pool of villains (and less-than-perfect characters in general) is restricted to certain groups. This, of course, means that those groups become the de facto symbol of all that is bad. It also means that the protagonist who acts as demographic avatar cannot have meaningful flaws, and a flawless character is inhuman, unrelatable, uninspiring, and uninteresting. When audiences are understandably bored, it’s taken as proof of their prejudice against the portrayed group.
It’s like something out of a wry, British dystopia.
Papito:
As I understand it Rock made a jest at the expense of Smith’s wife.
In a competitive environment, as I imagine Hollywood is to blazes, digs politie or otherwise at another over their unalterable physical characteristcs, build, sexuality or whatever come with the rest of the package. Racism is also based on that.
Such digs are assertions of superiority, and it should come as no surprise when they are received as such and treated accordingly.
Rock’s joke was in bad taste. But I imagine that now said taste is somewhat improved.
https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2022/03/28/sports-world-reacts-will-smith-chris-rock-oscars-altercation
iknklast, #13
Oh yes, the ‘part of our ancient culture’ line was used by secessionists and slavery-apologists all the time. The Peculiar Institution and all that.
JtD, yes, I do know that. I should have been more clear. I was referring to now, in the post-modern ultra relativist mode where “culture” can be used to excuse anything people do unless they are white westerners. (Not that I think it should be used for white westerners, nor that I think it should never be used for anyone; it’s just applied so selectively that it makes me cringe.)
Omar @17
Except it wasn’t a “dig.” The character G.I. Jane was a beautiful woman with a shaved head. Jada Pinkett-Smith is a beautiful woman with a shaved head. Hey, she can play G.I. Jane! That’s it. That’s the joke. Not especially funny, but hardly mean spirited, even if Rock had known about Pinkett-Smith’s alopecia–which apparently he didn’t.
And I disagree with twiliter–G.I. Jane isn’t among Ridley Scott’s best films, but I didn’t think find it sexist at all–rather the opposite. I loved watching that tough-as-nails character holding her own with the men to complete the SEALS training. (Sheer wish-fulfillment fantasy for me; I doubt I could’ve even got through basic training!)