The Oscars: What Smith’s smack revealed
It was the slap heard round the world, said Eric Deggans in NPR .org. In a disturbing act of “public violence” this week, actor Will Smith invaded the stage and smacked comedian Chris Rock in the face during the Oscars ceremony after Rock cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Rock’s joke about Pinkett Smith’s short hair was mean and tasteless, since she suffers from alopecia, an autoimmune disorder that often causes hair loss. But hitting people in the face because you’re offended is criminal assault, and it was “bewildering” that just minutes after the slap, the Academy allowed a tearful, self-justifying Smith to go up and accept a Best Actor statue for playing Venus and Serena Williams’ father. Smith then received a standing ovation—a tacit endorsement of his “outburst of machismo.” The award should have been a celebration of “Black excellence,” but Smith ruined it by “acting in a way that reinforces old stereotypes” about Black men. For many of us, it felt “like a betrayal.”
Smith’s smack “was not right,” said LZ Granderson in the Los Angeles Times, “but I understand” why he lost his temper. Pinkett Smith deserves our admiration for walking the red carpet “without hiding her condition.” Yet Rock chose to “mock a Black woman’s hair on the world stage.” Given a long and ugly history of racialized misogyny against Black women and their hair, Rock’s heartless crack was its own “form of violence.” And “where I’m from, if you crack jokes about the medical condition of a man’s wife in front of him, you’re inviting trouble.”
Maybe so, said Holly Thomas in CNN.com, but Smith could have used his public platform to explain why Rock’s mockery was hurtful and wrong. Instead, he lashed out physically, and his acceptance speech was a “rationalization” of his toxic masculinity. “Love will make you do crazy things,” he said, portraying himself as “a defender of his family.” In addition to being “appallingly paternalistic,” Smith’s behavior “stunk of privilege,” said Charles Taylor in Esquire. If anyone other than a rich, powerful movie star “had assaulted Chris Rock, he’d have been led away in cuffs.” Smith’s box office “appeal has always been his regular-guy decency,” but the public won’t soon forget the “bullying” and “depths of narcissism” we witnessed.