I may as well, since it seems to be the ONLY thing that people can talk about right now. I tried doing it on Facebook, but defending myself against a random knucklehead landed me in Facebook Jail for “bullying” the guy that harassed me, and I’m not going back there.
The Oscars. Great and mighty things happened that night that people are trying to hang on to in the face of the one thing that should NEVER have happened.
“The Slap”. Until last Sunday, that phrase applied to a satin hair covering for Naturalistas. Now, it pertains to Will Smith behaving badly towards Chris Rock.
Chris told an inappropriate joke, whether he wrote it himself or not. He was doing his job as a comedian and presenter. Whether or not he knew about Jada’s alopecia is irrelevant. It was a dumb joke about a Black woman’s hair.
Will was WRONG. Point blank. Period. Full stop. Yes, I said it, and I don’t care how anyone feels about it. Don’t give me that BS about protecting his woman, because Jada has been able to handle herself before she ever met Will.
Protecting your woman by swinging your fists is a throwback to the caveman mentality. Everyone who defends Will Smith for acting like an animal *cough*Tiffany Haddish*cough* subscribes to that base, brutish behavior. We are not animals, or savages, or barbarians. We are intelligent human beings, and Will Smith forgot that. He could have had a private confab with Chris backstage or at the after-party, instead of shaking his dusty behind to his own music. He could have handled it any other way but how he chose to do it. That’s what brainless thugs do, not Oscar-nominated actors.
Sidney Poitier would not have done that. Barack Obama would not have done that A lot of classy, intelligent, evolved Black men would not have done that.
Shame on all the people who swooped over to comfort Will, the guy who committed assault, while Chris, the guy who was assaulted and cursed at in front of an audience of millions, was left to walk off the stage by himself and lick his wounds.
Shame on the Academy for doing the CYA thing with lies about asking Will to leave while doing nothing to protect Chris Rock from an assault. If they wanted him gone, he’d have been escorted out of the building in handcuffs, whether Chris wanted to press charges or not. Will should have been arrested for assault. If he had struck anybody else, he would have been.
Will’s apology was too little, too late. He was not sorry when he did it, and neither was his wife and son. The apology came after a couple of days’ worth of blowback, bad press, and the threat of his Oscar being taken away. That makes it a spin, not an apology.
Please don’t come at me with how much Will has been through, and he “just snapped”. To paraphrase Shannon Sharpe, he should have “snapped” on the guy his wife had an “entanglement” with. But that guy would have hit him back.
I hope that by this time next week, we all will have moved past this incident. I hope that Chris continues to rise above and show himself to be the better man. I hope that Will faces some form of consequence for his actions. And I hope that we can all go back to being human to each other again.
