Love should have kept him off that stage: A deep dive on the Will/Rock Affair #slapgate

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Will Smith smacked Chris Rock…in the face…at the Oscars…because Chris Rock told a (probably) bad joke about his wife and the fact she has a bald head. The situation peels back and touches many levels of intersectionality. I think I could literally write a book on my thoughts about this situation. I’ll clarify my thoughts in sections.

Disinformation

The situation was crazy, but the aftermath produced some of the most brazen disinformation this era can provide. Some people believe that the whole situation was fake. It just speaks to our current social environment that even though we’ve seen something with our own eyes, we can’t accept it. We saw Chris Rock get hit in the face and many of us are so cynical we believe it was a staged event.

Even more egregious is that Will Smith was allowed to get on stage, accept his award, announce that it was a “beautiful moment” and proceed to talk about how he is being called (by God?) to be a protector and defender of his family. And he received a standing ovation from a crowd that just watched him behave exactly opposite to what he was saying about forty minutes earlier! It was surreal and bizarre, and I don’t know how the Academy allowed it. It also reflects the cognitive dissonance that seems to permeate our culture these days. What Will Smith did was not to protect his wife and it was not to defend his family. It was to protect his apparently fragile ego and defend his perception of himself as a “man.”

Toxic Masculinity

Most men have been there, and those of us that have been there should admit it and acknowledge that we are trying to grow and mature from it. The truth is that many of us haven’t matured and many of us don’t understand what toxic masculinity is. Upon closer investigation we can see that Will Smith could not have been defending his wife because she wasn’t in physical danger. This is an important point. A man is bound to protect and defend women when they are in physical danger particularly from other men. But a man is not entitled to physically attack another man, because of some words that were said. In that case his wife can speak for herself. If she was annoyed, she could have picked a time and place of her choosing to address it. She has several platforms and options available to her to do that. What Will did actually took take away his wife’s agency and ability to speak for herself. His proper role was to find out how she wanted to be supported and then support her in whatever she wanted short of violence. Violence in these situations protects no one. In fact, what Will did put his wife and his family in more danger by making them targets for derision, punitive actions, and potential retaliation. In general, that is what happens when a man escalates a situation to violence. In the name of protecting his loved ones, he generally marginalizes their agency and decreases their security.

How a man should protect a woman

Running the risk of mansplaining, let me reiterate that what Will Smith did is not what women want. This type of “protection” suggests that a woman is not a human being with her own agency, but a pawn or piece of property that has no agency and needs to be protected. More ominously, it also suggests that a man is bound to act violently based on what he perceives a woman’s needs to be without any input from the woman herself. It further robs a man of any accountability for his own actions. The rationale being “well my woman was (I think) hurt, therefore I must act violently.” This is the same logic abusive men use to rationalize the abuse they heap upon their women, which is why it is so disturbing. Abusive men say things like “well if you hadn’t said or done x or y, then I would not have had to hit you.” Similarly, Will Smith was arguing that if Chris Rock hadn’t said what he said he never would have gotten and stage and hit him. The most disturbing part of this is that logic can at any moment be turned upon the people he purports to want to protect. Most women I know are wary of a man who acts violently without thinking or in response to even the slightest provocation because on some level they know that violence could be turned upon her for the slightest reason. Abused women often buy into this logic themselves and begin to blame themselves for the abuse they receive. Likewise, women conditioned to accept toxic masculinity as a norm will support the idea of a man acting violently to protect her “honor” as “chivalry.” It is not chivalry; it is abuse and the small faction of women who support this are dealing with traumatic stress from patriarchy and toxic masculinity. To be 100% transparent I did not come by this knowledge on my own. It was taught to me when I stopped to actually listen to the intelligent women in my life. Women can articulate this point more powerfully than I ever could. What I know is that a man purporting to fight over a woman’s honor is misguided. He is really fighting to assert control either over the situation or over other people. 

A man does not protect a woman by acting violently. He protects a woman by shielding her from all violent situations even at the cost of his own ego. If Will Smith’s ego was hurt and his gut response in that moment was to respond with violence to the source of the hurt, his love for his wife and his concern for her safety should have been what restrained him. Love should have kept him off that stage. Contrary to his remarks at the Oscar’s he did not act out of love or as a bridge between people. He acted to protect his hurt ego and burn the bridges that have allowed him to provide such a great life for his family to this point. And it is a shame.

Will Smith brought this situation on himself

Although the propriety of Chris Rock’s joke can be debated, it cannot be debated that Will Smith was completely out of line. I’ve heard many people say that Will Smith was under a lot of stress because he has been the butt of many mean and nasty jokes over the past two years. But let’s not forget, Will Smith cheated on his wife for years outside the context of their marital arrangement. Will Smith has admitted publicly that he was not the best husband. He was also dealing with additional scrutiny because he and his wife had decided to live in an unconventional marital arrangement and were public about it. Finally, his wife publicly admitted she had a relationship with another man while she and Will were separated. All this has led to the false assertion that Jada somehow “emasculated” Will Smith which led to his incident with Chris Rock. But these are just trumped-up excuses for inexcusable behavior. Will Smith chose to marry his wife, he chose to act contrary to the values of his marriage, he chose to participate in their marriage arrangement, and he chose to entertain his wife’s admission on a public stage. Again, all of this is public information and most of it was made public by Will Smith, his wife, or both of them jointly. There are costs to making such information public and part of that is you can’t predict what the public will do with that information. If there was a transgression against, Will it wasn’t done by Chris Rock it was done by a social system which puts celebrities on pedestals and tears them down. But instead of attempting to reform the system with the tools at his disposal, he attacked Chris Rock.

Racial Implications

The social implications of Will Smith smacking Chris Rock at the Oscar’s is profound to say the least. The optic of two wildly successful and rich Black men getting into any kind of physical altercation on live TV at a widely viewed event has intersectional gender, race, and class implications that I can only scratch the surface of. Here’s a “brief” analysis. Will Smith is likely under heavy personal and emotional stress, that has a lot to do with him being a very successful, very visible Black man, who is living his life in public; and bearing all of his vulnerabilities to the public. The public is trivializing his pain for comedic, economic, and cultural profit. I suspect if we could give Will Smith a truth serum these are the forces he would really like to strike at. It is not a situation that is too unlike that of many Black people who feel deprived of freedom, opportunity, and agency, by a system that dehumanizes them and trivializes their experiences. The feeling of hopelessness that often permeates from the environments which house those of us with the least opportunities provides an apt approximation of the type of pressure I suspect Will Smith feels. Additionally, there are few avenues by which Black men can properly vent their situation and be taken seriously. This is also why there is so much violence within and between oppressed groups. They don’t feel they have the power to attack the class, race, or gender discrimination that depresses them, and this results in violence. But it doesn’t usually result in violent or preferably nonviolent action against oppressive structures, rather it results in violence against those who are simultaneously most accessible and most vulnerable…each other or themselves. And that’s partially what I believe we saw at the Oscar’s. Will Smith was tired of having his pain (self-inflicted as it has been) commodified by a system that is unrelenting to men and women who share the same skin tone as him. But unable or unwilling to strike at that system, he struck at someone who is simultaneously most accessible to him and probably most able to understand his predicament. It is ironic to say the least.

I didn’t like Chris Rock’s joke

I didn’t like Chris Rock’s joke. I thought it was a bit much and I cringed in the moment, and this was before I knew anything about Jada having alopecia. But I am probably oversensitive to those kinds of jokes. Here’s the thing, comedians always talk about continually pushing the envelope to find out where the line is in terms of what you can and can’t say. And they’ve been stepping across that line for quite some time. Personal jokes about a person’s appearance are over the line. We have no idea why a person might look the way they look. Why is that a joke? Maybe it’s time we examined what it means to be a celebrity in 2022. Apparently, it means any joke is within bounds. In his “apology” Will Smith stated, “that jokes made at his expense are part of the job.” And maybe that’s true, but what is the limit? Should we be allowed to lampoon and roast public figures without their consent about personal tragedies which they have no control over? Do we want to continue to live in a society that continues to encourage the commodification of people and their suffering for profit and public amusement? The “GI Jane” joke was cheap, it was a personal attack, it may not have been hateful, but it certainly was ignorant. Furthermore, it had nothing to do with Jada’s work or even the myriad public statements she has made on different topics. Any of those things would have been perfectly within bounds, and many of those types of jokes were made throughout the night. But the personal nature of the “GI Jane” joke might have been a step too far. At minimum, it the joke was beneath the stature of a comedian like Chris Rock. For some time now, comedians have been asking the public to keep an open mind about the jokes they tell. They maintain “they are just jokes.” But we all know a lot of truth is said in jest. Essentially the job of the comedian is to make hard truths palatable. To potentially soften what is hard to accept with humor, or maybe to even illuminate some profound truths with satire. The comedian is at their worst when dropping to the level of personal attacks for cheap laughs. Maybe people should have more open minds, maybe people should be more flexible in their thinking, but maybe the public should expect comedians to be better at their craft. 

In conclusion, Will Smith did a bad thing and what he did was not about protecting women, it was about protecting his own ego and his actions are a basic reflection of toxic masculinity.