White People Shouldn’t Talk About The Slap

The meme heard ‘round the world

For more than four days now, white people have been making fools of themselves over their criticism of Will Smith for publicly smacking the shit out of Chris Rock on the Oscars stage for a joke that targeted his wife’s physical appearance due to an auto-immune disease. They’ve been outraged and upset, demoralized and traumatized, and — as ever — ready to call the police. And when the “violence” Smith did was not enough to get vapors over, white people theorized pure hypothetical damage from what could have happened if he had murdered (?!) Chris Rock with a single open-handed slap or if a beloved (and already-deceased) white person had been there instead.

So I am here, after a seemingly infinite amount of discourse, to ask white people (and the BIPOC who cater to them) to stop embarrassing themselves.

Even aside from the fact that we should have been done with this beyond memes and Twitter discourse after Monday evening, it is frankly disturbing the degree to which people who have neither the range nor the depth are wading into matters way above their heads. This entire week, I have been less alarmed by Will Smith’s behavior than the reaction to it, where people have seemingly lost their damn minds that a grown man hit another grown man with a slap so mild that the audience in attendance initially thought it was a comedy bit.

Instead, Chris Rock either transformed into the embodiment of comedy itself (for the sake of a tired-ass joke from the mid-90’s) or became the avatar of each white person’s personal trauma, ready to reflect whatever these yogurt yetis hadn’t yet worked out in therapy. Meanwhile, Will Smith’s entire 30 year career of entertaining white audiences was obliterated in favor of making him into the incarnation of white fear of Black masculinity, a brutal, unyielding hulk, an out of control Negro who needed to be put down rather than helped up for tipping over the edge of his sanity.

All because white people couldn’t give humanity to a single person involved: not Chris Rock, not Will Smith, and not Jada Pinkett-Smith, who is the only true victim in this entire circumstance.

For all the gnashing and wailing about violence, it is white people who have done the worst of it by erasing the damage of a career built atop the humiliation and subjugation of Black women, by ignoring the power dynamics between two Black entertainment legends to force themselves into the conversation, by pretending that their white institution has any dignity left to be besmirched.

These are people demanding a pound of flesh for the infraction of hurting their feelings, who rushed to call the cops on an unarmed Black man (though I hear those Oscars statuettes are pretty heavy) because their comfort had been disrupted at an awards ceremony that has celebrated rapists and abusers with applause from racists, sexists and antisemites. For all the damage that the Academy has ignored and condoned, the wreckage of lives and joys and art and beauty that it has left in its wake, the systemic neglect and abandonment of artists of color it has perpetrated (as Smith became only the 5th Black man to win a Best Actor Oscar amidst a 94-year-old ceremony), the only harm they will recognize is a smack delivered by a Black hand.

Gonna be candid: It’s weird to hear the phrase “violence will not be tolerated” from people sitting atop a mountain of skulls.

This hypocrisy would be enough on its own, but white people can’t do anything halfway. There are seemingly infinite examples of supposedly liberal white women putting themselves in the place of a Black man who made sexual assault jokes to defend Louis CK, launched anti-Asian jokes from that stage in the same year Donald Trump came to power, and did an entire documentary on the sensitive subject of Black women’s hair only to come to the conclusion that we needed to be made fun of for trying to fit inside white beauty standards in order to have anything resembling a life. Not even for a moment did the fact that they were agreeing with vehement MAGA racists make them take a look at what they were saying.

And so here we are, with white people united in white supremacy and the respectability politics hall monitors running up behind them. In a country where white people are still committing a genocide, have actively undermined pandemic response because of who is most likely to die, and are busy making a tremendous number of excuses for why we’re not holding anyone accountable for A LITERAL ONGOING COUP, we’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy litigating why it’s important for Black men to be punished more for losing their tempers than for repeatedly, disgustingly disrespecting Black, disabled women.

But we don’t condone violence here.