Value in the dialogue

He had the most famous hook shot in the history of basketball and now he has the best blog post on the online writers’ subscription service called Substack.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has always been a meditative, thoughtful, progressive person. He applied all that to his sterling essay Monday.

He delved into the matter in which—square-dab in the middle of the Oscars on live television Sunday evening—actor-comedian Chris Rock made a joke about the shaved head of actor Will Smith’s wife, Jada, and Smith walked to the stage and slapped Rock right in the kisser.

Jada shaves her head because she has a medical condition that causes her to lose clumps of hair.

I am sorry for that. I am sorry for emotional pain caused by the condition.

But humor, lame and otherwise, and mean often, goes on.

The Oscars spectacle intrigued me on many levels, including the day-after popularity of the idea that no one should ever joke about another’s physical appearance. That’s bullying, we were told this week, supposedly justifying at least to some extent battery.

Comedic putdown as “bullying” came as news to me.

It’s not the same thing, I know—my fatness versus Mrs. Smith’s medical condition. Still, on the issue of whether it’s all right to assault the jokester for an appearance-based quip, consider: Long ago, when he was governor of the state, Bill Clinton declared at a roast-and-toast that my wife Shalah and I, newlyweds at the time, already were expecting (which we weren’t) and that I was such a liberal that, obviously, I had offered to carry the child.

I laughed with everyone else. I was paying a fair-enough price for beer and cookies. Maybe I was paying as well for a metabolism not my fault, which did not make the line any less funny.

But now I’m beginning to wonder why Shalah didn’t walk to the dais and slap the future president square in the face.

Meantime, my social-media comments on the Smith-Rock spectacle have led to disapproving replies to the effect that, with Ukraine happening and Donald Trump’s presidential lawlessness becoming more apparent daily, it was shameful to focus on silly Hollywood trivia.

That confuses me as well. I’ve always allowed myself more than one thought at a time and more than one conversation per season.

I can’t fix Ukraine by talking only about it and I may as well give up if I haven’t made the case in this space already that Trump is a disgrace. I saw important social and cultural context to what happened Sunday night in Hollywood. And I was gratified Tuesday to read my thoughts expressed more credibly by Abdul-Jabbar—a Black man in the public eye, like Smith and Rock, and an old friend and house guest of Smith.

You could read his full essay at

For now, I’ll devote the rest of the space to a synopsis.

Abdul-Jabbar said he found Smith’s behavior wholly wrong on four points, writing that:

■ “Smith’s slap was a slap to women” in that it indicated his wife couldn’t defend herself “against words,” with “words” in italics for a kind of de-emphasis. He said the incident reduced women to a dated stereotype as damsels needing big strong men to defend their honor.

■ “Worse than the slap was Smith’s tearful, self-serving acceptance speech” in which he asserted that protecting women in the film “King Richard,” which won him his leading-actor Oscar, was his God-assigned responsibility of love.

■ “The Black community also takes a direct hit from Smith” because his behavior fed systemic racism’s characterization of Blacks as prone to violence and unable to control their emotions. Noting that Trumpian blowhard Jeanine Pirro rushed on Fox to say the Oscars are “not the hood,” Abdul-Jabbar wondered whether, if Brad Pitt had slapped Ricky Gervais, she’d have said the Oscars are not Rodeo Drive.

■ “Smith’s violence is an implied threat to all comedians, who now have to worry that an edgy or insulting joke might be met” by a Will Smith copycat.

Abdul-Jabbar concluded by saying he didn’t want him ostracized. He wrote that, instead, he wanted Smith to learn from the damage he’d done how to be a man who truly protects others.

Since first reading and embracing Abdul-Jabbar’s four points, I have been educated by other responses to reconsider one of them. It is the point that the Black community took a hit because of the race of the assailant. Some have said—and I’m thinking they may be right—that no one should care if a Black person’s action gave someone like Jeanine Pirro an opening to spout her racism.

Would we think less of white people if Clint Eastwood slugged Larry the Cable Guy?

So, can you begin to see some value in the dialogue? I can, even though, yes, there assuredly are bigger world events.