The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 20

Of all the sentences I could possibly begin a newsletter with, I don’t think I’d ever imagined that I’d begin a newsletter with something like this one: Earlier this week, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars.

And if somehow my imagination was capacious enough to imagine writing that sentence, I’m not sure I’d ever have imagined the followup: Smith then received the best actor award, and received a standing ovation for his acceptance speech, in which he apologized to the academy for his actions (he’d post an apology to Rock the next day).

I understand what Will Smith did as a hair-trigger response, not so much to a perceived slight against him directly but against Rock’s joke at his wife Jada Smith’s expense. This is the second time in a few months that something like this has happened—University of Michigan men’s basketball coach Juwan Howard smacked a Wisconsin assistant coach as part of a broader incident that occurred after Wisconsin defeated Michigan. The one similarity that stands out between the two events is that in both the individuals involved (Howard and Will Smith) turned to repertoires of action they’d learned decades ago in very different contexts (Howard in Chicago, Will in Philadelphia). There are things that happen to all of us that immediately take us to some other place and time with our actions/inactions shaped by that other place and time.

Will went back to West Philadelphia. Probably for reasons unrelated to Rock, the joke, or Jada.

As this is still a story in process, I may get some aspects of the story wrong. But what I will do is briefly examine the incident itself—the thing most people are talking about—and then get to the most important aspect—the response.

One of the consequences of living the life that Will and Jada Smith have chosen to live over the past few decades is that their private decisions become the stuff of public comment and critique. Will’s recent autobiography, Jada’s Red Table Talk series on Facebook, both represent attempts to wrestle in public with many of the issues that most of us wrestle with in private. And although there is a monetizing element to it—I don’t read them as making their private life public solely for the purpose of making money. They’ve got enough of that. I read them as making their private life public for the purpose of trying to create space for people (black people specifically) to live different types of lives. But as powerful as both of them are (if there’s a more powerful acting couple in Hollywood I’d like to know who they are), this power does not translate into psychological expertise.

If it did, odds are that what happened Sunday night wouldn’t happen. Either because neither Will nor Jada would’ve taken offense, even given Jada’s disability (alopecia is a disability—I didn’t realize that until this event), or because if one of them had they would’ve been able to figure out a better response. Will slaps Chris Rock because he is triggered. The trigger, not Will himself, works to determine the response. The response was not commensurate to Chris Rock’s joke. If it was, I argue Will wouldn’t have apologized to Chris at all.

A lot of my friends and some of my colleagues are doing what Will himself did, turning to repertoires of action they either learned growing up or perhaps saw others learn. But in doing so, they’re falling victim to the same trigger dynamic Will did. And in their case, the trigger causes them to move beyond simply understanding why Will did what he did to suggesting that what Will did was right.

Here’s the thing that scares me.

After the slap, he stayed in the ceremony. And then, not only was he given the award for best actor—with Sam L. Jackson warmly congratulating him—he was given a standing ovation after.

There were basically three points where Will could’ve been sanctioned for his actions (directly after, when someone could’ve asked him to leave….at the moment he was told he won the award, when the presentees could have shunned him….and after his speech, when the crowd could’ve shunned him) and he wasn’t.

I’ve seen a number of people basically conduct thought experiments after this event—would Will have slapped a white comedian? Would Chris Rock have made a joke about a white woman with a disability?

Here’s the thought experiment we should run.

What would’ve happened had Chris Rock made a joke of Con O’Neil’s wife and Con O’Neil was so upset he did the same thing? What would’ve happened to O’Neil?

Now the experiment doesn’t really hold because Rock probably doesn’t know Con—hell I don’t know Con, I just used IMDB to randomly choose an actor from the last movie I saw. And because we don’t know Con, it’s highly unlikely he’s in one of the first few rows of the venue.

But let’s say for some reason Rock DOES know Con, and for some reason Con IS in the first few rows.

We all know what would happen to Con.

That nothing like that happened to WIll speaks volumes about how power functions to shape priorities, to preclude institutional action, to gloss over certain types of behavior. To be clear I don’t think Will Smith should’ve been arrested, even though what he did constitutes assault. But I do think that he should’ve been sanctioned somehow both for Rock’s sake and for Smith’s OWN sake, if not for the legitimacy of the Academy itself. I am far more understanding of Howard’s actions—the Wisconsin coach put his hands on Howard when Howard stated explicitly that he didn’t want to be touched—but I thought the sanction Howard received was appropriate given his (far more understandable) behavior, a five game suspension in which I’m pretty sure he received therapy.

It’s this power dynamic I think we should really be concerned with. WIth the action itself we can connect a whole set of questions about gender, disability, class and race. What about the response? When I heard about what happened (as a weird aside I was reading a story about the Colorado Avalanche-Detroit Red Wings brawl of 1997 when it happened) I thought about Dave Chappelle’s concert The Closer. As some of you might recall, Chappelle used that concert to argue about the dangers of cancel culture. I disagreed with 90-95% of what he said, largely because I felt it was an excuse to in effect “punch down.”

Will Smith used force to sanction Rock’s speech, he quite literally slapped down….and then used charisma (soft power) to bind himself to the crowd. The crowd’s applause for him is heartfelt…because Will Smith is probably one of the 20 most charismatic people on the face of the planet. There’s actually a word for that type of response he received when we place the event squarely within the realm of the political. That word is fascism. The response of the academy and everyone in it, was the response that we’d expect if we lived in a fascist regime.

We routinely talk about the Trump tendency as if it that tendency is peculiarly corrupt, peculiarly susceptible to strongmen, peculiarly susceptible to the claim that might should make right.

It’s us.

In the eighties and nineties, jazz critic Stanley Crouch was notorious for slapping people around at award ceremonies. During the same period I remember KRS-One going to a PM Dawn concert, getting on stage, slapping one of the group members, then taking the mic and performing. And it isn’t like there haven’t been faculty meetings where faculty members weren’t literally at each other’s throats.

Why the hell would anyone, no matter where and how they grew up, want to return to that?

Please correct me if I’m wrong. I hope there’s something I’m not seeing.

(As an aside I skipped issue numbers a couple of weeks ago because I'm sitting on a draft of an issue devoted to Adolph Reed's new "not a memoir" and I'm trying to figure out what to do with it.)