The Oscar Smackdown 2022
This essay is to employ the 1Cor13project framework: Rehearse, Remind and Re-member to examine the incident involving the belittling of actor Jada Pinkett Smith by comedian Chris Rock and the subsequent response of her husband, actor Will Smith, at the 2022 Oscar award show.
The Framework
Rehearse: To remember in a way that brings the past into the present and stares it down until it breaks our heart and leads to a change of mind, thoughts and actions. “And I will remember my covenant…” (Exodus 32:13)
Remind: To have a transformation of the mind to think new thoughts, have new instincts and have new attitudes about Black people. “...by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2)
Re-member: To act in ways that rectify the widespread “dismemberment” of Black people by centering their songs, expressions, God-talk, history, and breath as needful elements in the Christian church in America. No saying “I have no need of you.” (1 Corinthians 12:21)
Preface
1Cor13Project exists to Center the Health, Healing and Wholeness of Black People for the Flourishing of the Entire Community. As such, we applaud the action of Will Smith, neither celebrating battery as a response to verbal assault nor promoting violence between black people on the world stage or in private. However, we clap slowly and loudly for the first conceivable act in American history of a privileged black man responding to misogynoir with an unequivocal message of unacceptance and disdain in the face of public scrutiny and possible ridicule.
Introduction
Sunday, March 27, 2022, was a remarkable night for black people to show themselves on full display. The performances were spectacular, the preparation was meticulous, the awards were abundant and humor was ample. In addition to all of these things, the misogynoir that plagues the spaces between black women and black men was also center stage as it usually is in black comedy and often black spaces in general. Yes, misogynoir put on his tuxedo and paraded into the theater along with all other things black. But this time something else showed up, something that we’ve never seen but that had always been latent in the place where black excellence is celebrated: his name was Resistance. For one second on the stage at the Oscars, a black woman was centered, not for the purpose of entertaining or presenting, but as a symbol that our story, the story of black people and entertainment, can be rewritten. In this new version, violence against black women from black men in particular will not go unchecked on the world’s stage or in private spaces.
Rehearse
Since we arrived on the shores of the Americas, black women’s bodies have been a crime scene at the hands of white slave owners. She was pawed, molested and degraded in the presence of her male counterpart. Her beloved black man was unable to offer protest and was debilitated by the fear of being sold, castrated and/or having her raped before his eyes. White women meanwhile have been the subject of vulnerability and protection since those early days. White men have burned black bodies for the slightest hint that a white woman might have felt threatened by them. Emmett Till and others’ stories tell of a white woman’s received threat from a black man and an entire community of white men (and women) who rose up in the public square to ensure the message was clear: black men were to keep not just their hands but also their words, eyes and whistles away from white women or they would be beaten, hung, set on fire and thrown into rivers.
Sojourner Truth evoked the famous question of the century when she lived “Ain’t I woman?” by publicly baring her breast, signaling her experience of the double-standard treatment of white women vis-à-vis black women.
Fast forward to recent history, where the black male comedian has been competing with black male hip-hop artists to be the most degrading of black women’s bodies from head to toe on the world’s stage. She has had her hair weaved and natural, lips full and plump, breast ample and less so. She has had her butt, vagina, hips, legs and feet objectified and demonized on stages from LA to DC, Miami to Detroit. It is therefore significant that it would be two comedians on the world stage of the Oscars, squaring off—with Chris Rock in the corner of ages old misogynoir and with Will Smith wielding the flat hand of “not today” and “not my wife” to the patriarchy.
I’ve never seen anything like it before… a black man standing in the face of pure patriarchy, in its blackest and most human form, AND in the face of a black audience AND his black wife to symbolically—whether intentional or not—smack down misogynoir.
Never before have I seen such a thing… help me if you can.
So the calls for an alternative response from Will Smith seem to massage the shoulders of the patriarchy, which only wants to go unnamed, unchecked and invisible in the face of verbal and emotional battery of women, especially black women. It instead wants to center the global stage, which equates to what Toni Morrison calls the “white gaze.” We also want to center two black men who themselves have had thoughts, ideals and a reaction handed to them by the patriarchy that tries to shame them under the banner of “black-on-black” crime—when in fact this incident is a symptom of a much greater problem, one that begs for this action alongside many others. The patriarchy, misogynoir, white supremacy and their agents must be confronted and redirected to new practices and ideals. They must shed old ways of engaging black women’s bodies and gain a new understanding of the role of society, especially black men, in accepting no measure of dishonoring toward black women.
Remind
Black men in particular, and all people in general, must study the ways of comedians who manage to stop short at the degrading and animalistic references they often visit upon black women and girls. In this time when mental health issues, anxiety and suicide among black women are rising exponentially, we cannot afford to continue to let her bear the burden of being an object of our ridicule and entertainment. The assault on black women’s bodies in the comedic field has been not only tolerated but normalized and defended as “just comedy” at the expense of black women’s self esteem and feelings of beauty and worthiness in society. Black men have conspired with white slave holders of to mock and demean black women in some of the most vulnerable parts of their bodies.
The Bible warns, “Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).
Let us reject our diminishing of verbal and emotional violence as a lesser assault than the physical violence Smith displayed. Let’s gain a new mind about protecting the bodies and esteem of black women in the face of public ridicule and demeaning references to her person. Let’s learn from the way black men manage to protect each other in the industry such that if a male evokes laughter at the expense of another it often involves a strike at his external reality—cars, clothes, sexual exploits—and though potentially hurtful, does not threaten his core identity. A black woman is struck at the core of her person, in all of the places that have dismembered her from womanhood in the first place—her hair, her body and her compatibility to white womanhood.
Let’s sow into the soil of society and culture new things to joke about besides women’s bodies, male sexual exploits with women and the devaluation of the mother of all civilations. Let’s also refuse to laugh when the verbal assault is as violent as the slap Smith planted on Rock’s face that Sunday evening.
Re-member
Let us commit to bringing black women back from the plantation of dismemberment where they have been since arriving in the new world. To be clear, so many black women have come into their worthiness and are unwavering in their conviction that “I am enough.” Yet there are so many more who are heavily laden under the burden of the historical images of Mammy, the full-figured jovial one who cooks, cleans and care-gives in a body perceived as sexless and fit only to serve the patriarchy. Then there’s the angry Black woman whose pain level is expected to be greater than any human on earth: she is perceived and expected to be self-sufficient and never needful of anything or anyone, not even her black male counterparts. There’s also the Jezebel image: the exotic and sexual black woman who every man salivates over because she is stacked in all the right ways and places for their personal and perverted pleasures. She is perceived to be oversexualized and deserving of whatever sexual advances or assaults that visit her. She is often closer to white women in presentation, which makes her all the more alluring, sometimes with light eyes, long hair and just enough ethnic flair to make her the object of one’s sexual exploits—until her blackness peeks out in the lowering of her countenance as the words from the stage pierce her in the most tender place of her current experience. Then she gets to take her place among the angry black women as one who emasculates her male counterpart by daring to display the pain his verbal attack causes.
That Sunday night at Dolby Theater, Jada represented all of these characterizations of black women at once. Let’s re-member Jada Pinkett Smith as an actress and producer, as a musician, mother, wife and activist in her own right. Petite, attractive, light-skinned and eloquent, with one obvious point of vulnerability: her hair. Jada has been vocal about the pain of sudden hair loss associated with the autoimmune disease Alopecia. Her assailant, comedian Chris Rock, who wrote an entire documentary, “Good Hair,” on the complexity of black women and their hair, sharpened his arrow and directed it straight at her place of weakness. Indeed, we can’t know Rock’s intent at the time, but we could see the impact of his actions in her face that night. And while we laughed, the sting of his slap was as public as the one that would follow.
Black women need others to center their pain and experience as an act of re-membering their dismembered bodies, stories and experiences. This will require dogged protection not unlike Will Smith’s response to the assault on his wife. Let us be as passionate about calling out fatphobia, strong-black-woman tropes and the degradation of black women—indeed all women—as we are about the singular violent act demonstrated by the first man I can recall in the history of this country to use his privilege and risk his reputation to slap the literal hell out of misogynoir.
Conclusion
When Amnon raped his sister Tamar, she was relegated to the home of her other brother Absalom, to be heard or seen no more in the biblical text. King David sat in silence neither consoling his daughter nor punishing his son, so Absalom later set out to kill his father (2 Samuel13).
When Sojourner Truth heard it said that women were to be “helped into carriages and lifted over ditches and have the best places everywhere,” she lifted her voice, riddled with the anemia of a former slave whose first language was Dutch, trying to speak English: “Ain’t I a Woman.” Her question was met with this response from a white man: “I don't believe you are a woman.” So she lifted her blouse to reveal her breast as proof.
When Will Smith, a comedian and self-proclaimed coward, saw a fellow comedian gain his laugh from a backhand blow to his wife Jada’s vulnerability while the world around laughed, he rose up and returned the blow.
No one wants to condone the retaliation of Absalom, although we understand it, or the breast-bearing, although in some ways we might applaud it, or physical battery of one black man to another on one of the most celebratory nights of the year for entertainment and film. Yet these are the actions that have and do re-member the stories, bodies and voices of black women muted and demeaned by male dominance and misogynoir.