Perspective on alopecia

This letter is in response to “Diversity & inclusion the real highlights of Oscar night” by Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, March 30.

Normally, I don’t see any value in playing an identity victim card, it’s rarely productive to any conversation. However, Joyce Bolling’s opinion piece urges me to play that card. Because her piece on the joke told by Chris Rock that led to the “Slap Heard ‘Round The World” makes a striking comment about how horrible it was to target Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia.

As someone who has suffered alopecia (universalis and areata) since I was a toddler, I sympathize with Jada for being bullied for her hair loss. I sympathize with the amount of extra skin care and harassment one undergoes. So, speaking as someone who couldn’t take showers with my eyes open because I lacked eyelashes, I would like to say this: Calm down, grow up, and stop patronizing people like me.

Jada is not some defenseless child who gets pointed at by her peers and teased for having cancer. Jada is presumably not so fragile that it takes violent action from her husband in order to make her feel better. Jada is an adult in an industry where people are expected … nay, encouraged to change their appearance with makeup, cosmetic surgery and most applicably: headwear.

Alopecia is not some debilitating disease that requires people to be pitied wherever they go. We learn to live with it, many of us with more severe iterations than her alopecia areata. But Bolling instead decides to aim her piece at how horrible things are for an identity victim group, and on top of that, couches her point in more identity victim groups to further drive the emotional point. Which, on top of being a misleading statement, is downright insulting and makes it look like those with alopecia only matter as much as she chooses to make them matter.

Should Rock have made the joke? No. Should Will Smith have smacked him? No. On this we can agree. But the reason neither should have done what they did isn’t because they were based on horrible bigotry and ignorance. They were instead based on the TRUE disease afflicting many in Hollywood and from coast to coast: having an impossibly thin skin.

— Tuvya Maeir, Sharon