Mostly I’m watching black people I know express distaste with non-black people ignoring the context of what happened, thankfully no one I follow is clowning where I can see it.
But I’m watching arguments about ‘toxic masculinity’ (can you call defending your wife from someone being a dick to her 'toxic masculinity’???) and 'male violence’ (I know PLENTY of black women who would backhand someone talking about them like that) and 'abusive’ (fellas is it abuse to defend your wife’s honor in a way you likely were taught yourself?) etc etc and they’re all ignoring the actual context of what happened.
A black man who knew better made an offensive and ableist joke about a black woman’s medical condition that drastically changed her appearance and caused her to sacrifice something culturally important to her, on live TV in front of an audience, and her black husband got on stage and confronted the problem the same way it would have played out if this was not a televised event.
It’s wild to me that people aren’t connecting the dots. “He shouldn’t have used violence” sure and Chris Rock shouldn’t have made the joke but he did and he got what he knew he would have gotten if he’d said it anywhere else. He was part of that hair documentary. He KNOWS BETTER. I got popped just like that for a comment about a black woman’s hair when I was 8. There are lines and he crossed them. And unlike my 8yo self, he knew where those lines were when he chose to open his mouth.
She was in the audience. She was sitting by Will. Chris looked directly at her and pointed at her before making the joke. He knew what he was doing. He watched Will come up to him agitated. And he didn’t press charges even though police encouraged him to do so. He knew exactly what he would have gotten for that in any other place.
I mean, he also knows how much he’d come off as a whiny crybaby who dished out but couldn’t take it if he didpress charges. At the level of scrutiny both of these guys are at, everything about how they’re handling this conflict has to be calculated in terms of public reaction, which has layers and layers of observation and scrutiny from both people with and without context.
as you absolutely already know, obv. but like. yes. Rock’s douchery had layersand he knew exactlywhat kind of nastiness he was pulling, and he was executing that nastiness in a venue where he must have thought he could force Smith to observe without being able to do anything about it: Smith was up for an Oscar himself, he had to attend, Jaida essentially had to attend, Rock is on stage–what the hell is Will Smith going to do to him if he makes that joke? The more humiliating he can make it, the more powerful he feels, and yeah, you are correct and he knew precisely what kind of target he was aiming at, because the more humiliating and painful the joke he can make without retaliation from Will Smith the more he can get off on how much power and control he can exert. Which, you know, totally consistent with Chris Rock’s everything.
It’s an interesting incident in terms of just how much social context layers onto it to underscore exactly how much of an offensive, nasty, asshole Chris Rock was being there–again–and also in terms of how much weight and context hangs on everything Will Smith chose to do and why. As You Know Jaz the standards that even wealthy and famous and powerful black men are held to are so different from what wealthy and famous and powerful white men are, and especially given the weird dynamics of being minority people in a majoritarian institution–there’s so much pressure there to navigate, the stakes are so high!
like, I guarantee to you that the choice to slapChris Rock rather than punchinghim was a thing Will Smith made an active decision about based on calculations about the signal thatsent: how much aggression vs control does he calculate that both Rock, a generalized black audience, and a generalized white audience will see? how much context does he need to underscore? you can see Chris Rock trying to weasel out and make Will Smith look unreasonable (“I said G. I. Jane!”) and Will Smith is just totally unyielding. He’s got to make sure he comes off as both angry and principled and also completelycontrolled and it’s just, it’s such a great example of a thwarted power play on this enormous stage.
pretty sure I’m lecturing the prof, here, obviously, but just–aaaaugh the whole interaction sincerely feels like something that should be preserved in a museum display so that the layers of context can be unwrapped and understood to appreciate all the pieces, and white people making stupid fucking takes that ignore all of the very specific African-American experience pieces of it (not the least that hair documentary that Chris fucking Rock produced if I recall right) are. vexing.
Good god allllllll of this plus some. Again because like, Chris Rock is known for toeing the line of what he can get away with and so, knowing no one defends disabled people and no one defends black women and certainly no one defends any woman made out to be ugly- because there is an implied message of ugliness there.
The Smiths have had a very public eye on the situation with the cheating and so for Rock to stand on stage and point to her and call her “GI Jane” aka an ugly, mannish, brutish, bald woman knowing that Will is still smarting after the hordes of cuckhold jokes he’s been subject to… there’s this feeling of 'haha your wife’s ugly now, you couldn’t keep her when she was pretty do you think she’ll stay now that she’s ugly, maybe you’ll cheat now that she’s hideous, lol isn’t that so funny’ to it knowing their marriage problems are very, very much exposed to the public.
There’s also the racial aspect of black women especially with shorter hair being called exactly that: ugly, brutish, mannish for not fitting white femininity. And Rock knows, he fucking KNOWS that, that’s a racially charged statement to make and he did it anyway and this is why I’m constantly harping on how black people absolutely can further antiblackness despite being black themselves. Rock was raised by a black woman and he has black women in his life and he KNOWS and he chose to do it anyway because he thought it’d be funny and he’d get away with it because who confronts a comedian on live TV and especially at an awards show?
“he just said GI Jane” “it was just a joke” until you can fully understand the full context of that “joke” you will never understand why a lot of black people who saw that had the reaction of “Smith shouldn’t have hit him but Rock was wrong for that one” or “if someone talked about my wife like that they’d get more than a slap”.
yeah, I just wandered over to another community of mine and the goddamn pearlclutchingover “violence is never the answer” there. (I waded in, because what the fuck, you’re the same fucking community that went “YEAH GO THAT DUDE WHO PUNCHED RICHARD SPENCER.”) At some point we do have to ask ourselves: what speech can we tolerate without directly responding, and what do you do when the person you are trying to deal with is not operating in good faith.
I am just! How the fuck! people.
there’s also the layer in which by pulling that, Smith draws somuch more attention to how unacceptable the joke is than he would by simply speaking about it. he is somuch more emphatic by saying “not here, not now, not where I see.” He gets so many more people talking about what an assholeChris Rock is being, again, and he can hope that enough people explain the layers to really underscore how much Chris Rock knew what the fuck he was doing to people who aren’t members of the African-American community that he and Chris Rock share. Like, how do you respond when someone is deliberately being as vicious as they can to you on a shared wavelength that a bunch of observing people don’t have access to?
Will Smithand wife Jada Pinkett Smith are taking the steps to expand their entertainment empire.
The power couple just announced that they will launch a brand new entertainment company calledWestbrook inc.The new company will back new and existing projects from the Smith family, including short and mid-form digital content, as well as traditional TV shows and movies, in an effort to execute…
