Hey team,
By now, you are likely familiar with the incident involving Chris Rock, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith at the Academy Awards last night.
After witnessing such an emotional moment, either contemporaneously or after the fact, you almost certainly have had a visceral reaction, and you may have a resultant opinion you want to express. God knows everybody else seems to.
If you are a white person and especially if you consider yourself a white ally, this is an excellent opportunity to thoughtfully consider what your role is in this moment of heated public discourse.
If you're open to my opinion, I suggest taking the following steps:
1) Watch this video.
2) Check in with yourself and the motivations that inform your opinion.
If the strength of your urge to police a Black man's behavior is greater than the urge you feel to dismantle the systemic violence that oppresses and murders Black people EVERY DAY, then you are doing racism. That is an example of what racism looks like. It looks like being preoccupied with exercising your sense of power and ownership over a Black man's behavior. It looks like being more uncomfortable with a Black man making his own decisions, which you may or may not understand or agree with, than the harm done by systems that empower and privilege you while harming all Black people. It looks like minding Black people's business before you mind our own immense amount of business.
Please focus more on your internalized racism than whatever the hell Will Smith did yesterday.
3) Educate yourself.
Many people are asserting that Chris Rock didn't know about Jada Pinkett Smith's health history, which is the cause of the aspect of her appearance he felt free to ridicule yesterday.
Whether you actually believe that or not is pretty irrelevant, given that the joke is blatantly problematic in several ways (beyond being bizarrely untimely given its reference to a movie from 1997). His joke was a great (and by that I mean awful) example of punching down, which is a deeply problematic way to use humor.
Let's take stock of the specific ways in which Rock's joke punched down, shall we? A possibly inexhaustive list:
- It expresses misogynoir: It mocks and objectifies a Black woman.
- It expresses misogynoir specifically about a Black woman's hair: This, in an era in which no one can claim ignorance about the discrimination Black people experience because of their hair.
- It is ableist: It mocks a person for experiencing a chronic medical condition.
Take this opportunity to find at least three people who are directly impacted by misogynoir and/or ableism and have commented on yesterday's events and listen to their opinions with an open and curious heart.
NOTE: I am NOT suggesting that you track down a Black person or a person with a chronic medical condition to ask them to educate you about their lived experience. In fact, I am stridently discouraging you from doing that. DO NOT DO THAT.
Instead, there are many people who have already shared their opinions on this subject on various forms of social media and news outlets. Look there. And don't only look for opinions that confirm your own.
Consider starting with @ladyspeechsankofa's multiple videos on this subject, as they are excellent.
4) Keep your opinion to yourself.
Our sense of entitlement to share our opinions, even on issues that we can't possibly fully understand and that don't directly impact us and even when those opinions can be deeply harmful, is a glaring example of white privilege. To choose not to exercise that privilege is a practice that we all need more reps in. Your work is to educate yourself through listening to others. And also, finally, to:
5) Encourage other white people to follow steps 1 - 5.
{Heart}
