Whether we call it irony or hypocrisy, it’s who “we” are today.
More than half of those surveyed in a new poll said the comedian was in the wrong when he joked about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head at the Oscars — and do not fault actor Will Smith for smacking him on camera.
The Blue Rose Research poll found that 52.3% of people blamed Rock for the incident, compared to 47.7% who said Smith was out of line, according to a report published by Mediaite.com on Tuesday.
Forget about Will Smith and Chris Rock for a moment. Consider instead the issue of physical violence in response to speech. Remember when the guy getting sucker punched was named Richard Spencer, and suddenly punching someone because you generally hated his views became the subject of hot debate, and far hotter rationalizations?
After all, Spencer was a “Nazi,” it was argued, so how could it be wrong to punch him? And so it slid down the slippery slope to punching fascists, whether by those who thought wearing black masks exempted them from law and norms and blessed their hitting people with bike locks?
But this comes at the issue from the perspective of the tolerant and empathetic, who can express with the utmost sincerity why their violence, brimming with the best of intentions and directed at the worst people ever, is good violence, as opposed to the bad violence of the other side. They internalized the nonsensical contortions necessary to explain why speech is violence because it hurts their feelings, it traumatizes them, and if you don’t agree, you deserve to get punched.
Yet, this isn’t necessarily the reason Will Smith gave in to his impulse. When he went from laughing at Rock’s joke to seeing his wife upset by it, he shifted modes into the defender of her honor. To some, this was a reflection of the honor code of “toxic masculinity,” defending one’s woman from insult. But that’s more an elite white folx way of explaining it. No less a heavyweight than Roxane Gay explained why, after repeating the requisite “violence is wrong” mantra, she loved it.
And what gets lost in the discourse is that, however disappointing the incident was, it was also a rare moment when a Black woman was publicly defended.
For many Black women, it was a painful spectacle because we know what it is like to experience that kind of scrutiny, interrogation and disrespect in personal and professional settings. We know what it’s like to withstand scrutiny without intervention.
For Gay, there are laws, rules and norms, and then there are black women’s feelings, which can’t be constrained by any of the foregoing. If you disagree, that’s just because you don’t get it, and you should shut up, sit down, listen and do as you’re told. And it’s not her job to educate you either. Educate yourself.
John McWhorter, however, is an educator by trade, and so provides some background to the perspective.
In the ’90s, the sociologist Elijah Anderson documented that “street culture has evolved what may be called a code of the streets, which amounts to a set of informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior, including violence,” such that “people become very sensitive to advances and slights, which could well serve as warnings of imminent physical confrontation.”
For criminal defense lawyers, street “justice” is nothing new. If you want to survive the “mean streets,” you can’t let people think they can push you around, which includes dissing your woman. A “real man” won’t take that sort of disrespect, so he has to do something about it. Too often, this involves a gun. This time it was a slap, which in the scheme of violent reactions, is a lot less permanent.
In this vein I suspect that Smith was, on a certain level, performing for Black America, supposing that many of his Black fans would see him as going to a perhaps unideal extreme, but one that might be warranted when a man decides to “stand up” for his woman. Smith seems to have been trying for something vernacular, as it were, not unlike Biden letting go with his unfiltered personal take on Putin. But the Oscars incident was a smack seen around the world, where so many saw not “how we do it,” but violence, period.
The problem here is that this concedes some things that few want to admit, as they fly in the face of the preferred narrative of equity. If there is such a thing as black culture where violence is normalized, where “might makes right,” does that mean those who embrace it, or as McWhorter says, perform it, are somehow less refined, less civilized, than those who respond to words with words rather than violence? This is an unacceptable question, and yet McWhorter asks it.
There are times when only the established norm will do the job, regardless of one’s feelings. It reminds me that a few years after Anita Hill’s mistreatment during Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, the scholar Karla F.C. Holloway, in her book “Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character,” asked whether Hill would have been better off “turning it out” in those hearings. If, in other words, she had directly excoriated the white male senators giving her grief by using a Black American cadence and phraseology. If she had “read them for filth,” in today’s parlance. For a Black woman, Holloway wrote, that meant “handing over to our adversary our version of the stereotype that motivates their disrespect to us — just to prove to them that they could no better handle the stereotype than they can determine and control our character.”
The nice phrase for it is “code switching,” where a black person goes from using the polite effete norms of ‘white” speech and behavior to the street version, with its cadence and phraseology and a slap, punch or bullet as the case may be.
On the one hand, the slap was acceptable because it’s acceptable to use violence in response to speech that’s unacceptable. On the other hand, the slap was acceptable because a black man finally defended a black woman’s feelings. And on the third hand (I know), the slap was acceptable because that’s how black people roll. We all agree that violence is not the answer, of course, except when it is.
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