Will Smith is only the fifth Black man in history to win an Oscar for Best Actor. But on the night of his historic win, the biggest story has become his reaction to Chris Rock’s joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. At first glance it was a throwaway line in the patter, suggesting Pinkett Smith would appear in G.I. Jane 2, a reference to Demi Moore’s 1997 movie in which her head was shaved for most of the movie as her character attempts to finish a military training program. It’s not a particularly clever or interesting joke, but it seemed like any other barb tossed off from the stage (in fact, a source later told Variety it wasn’t in the script). It was, however, a cruel thing to say about someone who has publicly been struggling with alopecia for several years. Does that mean that Smith was right to hit Rock? Absolutely not. But some of the hyperbolic reaction to what transpired say less about Smith’s actions and more about people’s inability to consider the situation with any nuance.
Rock has targeted some of his most biting jokes at the Smiths in the past, the most notable being the 2016 Oscars when he mocked Pinkett Smith’s decision to boycott the Oscars, suggesting that she wouldn’t have been invited anyway. At the time the couple appeared to brush it off. “Hey, look it comes with the territory, we gotta keep it moving,” Pinkett Smith said. So what changed? Was it the unseen impact of her illness? Was it the stress of the last few years? We may never know exactly what led to this time erupting into a physical conflict instead of a few lines in an interview. This doesn’t mean Smith was right. It means he is human. And humans mess up.
As a society we often pick and choose which violence is acceptable and forget that what we might do is not necessarily what someone who doesn’t share our…
Source : time
