Will Smith’s slap has already launched a thousand takes. On Sunday evening at the Academy Awards, the actor struck Chris Rock after the comedian …
Will Smith’s slap has already launched a thousand takes. On Sunday evening at the Academy Awards, the actor struck Chris Rock after the comedian joked about his wife’s shaved head. (Jada Pinkett Smith has alopecia, a condition that leads to hair loss.) Later in the evening, when Smith won his first Oscar, he apologized onstage, saying, “Love will make you do crazy things.”
On Monday the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences condemned Smith for his actions and announced an official investigation into the incident.
Times Opinion columnist Charles Blow and Times Opinion contributing writers Roxane Gay and Esau McCaulley joined Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a Times Opinion podcast host, to analyze the moment and why it so quickly spurred a heated cultural debate.
Their conversation, recorded Monday, is available in the audio file and the transcript below.
Four Opinion Writers on Will Smith’s Slap: ‘There Are No Heroes in This Story’
The following conversation has been edited for clarity.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: There have been — to put it mildly — some hot takes on this event, but I actually want to dig into why this has resonated for so many people. I want to start with this quote by [the comedian and actress] Tiffany Haddish, who said — and I’m quoting her here — that “the slap was the most beautiful thing I have seen, because it made me believe that there are still men out there that love and care about their women, their wives,” and she saw — and again a quote — “a Black man stand up for his wife.” Roxane, I want to start with you and your thoughts.
Roxane Gay: The primary takeaway for me was, indeed, to see a Black woman being defended, especially after a week of trials with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and really nobody standing up for her.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: The Supreme Court nominee.
Roxane Gay: Yes. So was it violent, and is violence unacceptable? Absolutely. But Jada Pinkett Smith has alopecia. They were sitting right there in the front row. And comedians are free to talk about whatever they want, they’re free to say whatever they want, but as I have written before, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and they’re not free from people responding however they respond.
Now, we can’t have everyone respond to jokes with violence. But this idea that we’re all supposed to have the thickest skin in the world all the time so that comedians can do whatever they want — well, I reject that.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Charles?
Charles Blow: Well, I thought it was supremely sad. That was my initial response to seeing it.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: How so?
Charles Blow: It’s just sad to see that display have to happen on a night — we didn’t know that Will was going to win at the time, but he was in the running, we knew that. Chris Rock was presenting to another Black man who was going to win, who was Questlove. To have that take over the moment was sad, to me.
Roxane, I will say that I did see someone stand up for Black women for Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Roxane Gay: Yeah, Cory Booker.
Charles Blow: That was Cory Booker.
Roxane Gay: Yeah, the one person.
Charles Blow: One person, but I’m just saying, he did it in a way that he was applauded for, and I could respect that in a way that this was just not OK. And I understand the deep injury that is expressed and justified that there are not enough, nor have there ever been enough, people standing up for Black women. Completely understand that.
And Black women never really getting their due. The Black women who participated in the emancipation cause never got their full due. The women who participated in the civil rights movement never really got their full due. Black women started Black Lives Matter, and still we focus primarily on men.
So I get that, and then to see that in the context of watching what happened in the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing — well, there was only one Black man there, and that Black man did say something. But I think we cannot, even understanding that there is a void of action, to allow this particular action to fill that void. Because there is also, layered on top of the lack of defense of these women, another layer where men express or shield their aggression behind what they call love. That is not OK, either. That is also not the way love is expressed.
Esau McCaulley: I think there are a lot of hurting people, who feel like they’re ignored, who are triggered by this particular incident. I think there is a disabled community who often feel — actually, not feel, are — disrespected and mocked. I think there’s Black women and their general disrespect that they experience as a part of being a Black woman in America. I think there’s the particular issue of Black women and their hair.
Actually, it’s crazy — I have a kids’ book dealing with, like, positive perceptions of hair, and Chris Rock had a documentary dealing with positive perceptions of hair. So there’s that issue going on. Then there’s the issue related to kind of toxic manifestation of masculinity and the question of, what does healthy masculinity actually look like? And so often we don’t actually address these issues unless there’s a presenting cause. What I see happening is that so many people are taking this event as an opportunity to say, this is what I’m going through. This is what I’m feeling. Please listen to me.
One of the sad things about this is that we only listen to these kinds of things when there’s someone publicly being traumatized. But what I can’t get over is that those are actually people. When I’m talking about that, I mean Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith and Chris Rock are actually persons.
I struggle with how we as a culture — and I understand this is part of what you have to do — but how we use the lives and traumas of people as talking points. So when I saw that event, I didn’t have an immediate clear, coherent response. I guess I was closer to Charles. I was mostly sad, because I grew up watching Will Smith and Chris Rock and Denzel Washington and Jada Pinkett Smith. So I was just sad to see people who I had looked up to at different points in my life publicly going through something so traumatic.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Roxane, I do want you to respond to Charles’s comment about how this is not maybe the manner in which men should be defending women, and that there is, in his view, something troubling about the way that this manifested itself.
Roxane Gay: Yeah, I mean, of course not. Violence is never the answer, but I’m not mad at it. I’m just not. I was shocked when it happened. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, and I hope to never see anything like it again, but I understand it. I understand it all around.
I felt bad for Chris Rock, because that was such a shocking moment. I felt bad for Jada Pinkett Smith having to deal with the fallout of all of this. I felt bad for Will Smith, who sort of just — there will always be an asterisk now on his Oscar win. I just think there’s plenty of empathy to go around, and all things considered, I just — I can’t, given everything going on in the world, I just cannot bring myself to be outraged by this.
Esau McCaulley: I agree there. I think when Will said during his acceptance speech that you’re supposed to smile and take it, I don’t think he was just talking about that one line. I think he’s talking about what he’s been enduring for the last few years, and I think that what you had is a person who had a bad moment, and I think that the stress — I mean, just looking at it, from what he said, it seems like the stress of having to be Will Smith for a period of time just got the best of him. In that particular moment, he lost it.
I think that all of us will understand, without downplaying the violence and the fact that he shouldn’t have done it, all of us have had these moments in our lives where it wasn’t the thing — the thing that we responded to wasn’t the actual issue. It was all the stuff that led up to it.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I’m going to jump in here, though. The fact is, they are people, but of course, this is something that happened on the biggest stage, and they are celebrities. Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said on Twitter, “I know we’re still processing, but the way casual violence was normalized tonight by a collective national audience will have consequences that we can’t even fathom in the moment.” Was letting Will Smith stay at the Oscars — which he was — normalizing his behavior to you? What about the audience members who applauded him minutes after the slap?
Roxane Gay: Are we really going to suggest that this was the first time this culture has normalized violence? I mean, “punch a Nazi” was a whole thing. And I agree, go ahead, punch a Nazi. But we live in a culture that is steeped in normalized violence. That doesn’t make it OK. Multiple wrongs don’t make a right. But to suggest that this was the tipping point, I think, is inaccurate.
Charles Blow: I also want to go back to something Esau said about whether this is a culmination of a stress that’s happening over the last few years. I think you would probably make a bigger argument, which is that it’s, in Will’s life, something that’s happened literally his entire life. He just published his book, and the first chapter opens with him saying, basically — I’m paraphrasing here, but — I’ve always thought of myself as a coward. He first embodies this notion that he is a coward because he is unable to protect his mother, as a very young child, from the abuse of his father.
This idea of him feeling like a coward tracks through the entire book. So this is not psychoanalyzing him — this is just me revisiting what he wrote about himself. Toward the end of the book, he’s taking care of his father. He literally contemplates killing his father as vengeance for him abusing his mother by pushing him — you know, he’s in a wheelchair — he’s going to push him down the stairs. And I do believe we have to stay on this idea, separate from whether or not we have empathy for all the people involved, that the masculine response to conflict and trouble cannot be violent. It is really a problem.
It doesn’t mean that it starts with Will Smith. Yet men do this too often, which is to respond to conflict with violence, and that is not the way that it should be done. We can say both things simultaneously — that I feel bad, and I hate the joke, and also say, when men use valor and chivalry as a shield to mask aggression, that we have to call that out as well.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Esau, what I’m hearing Charles saying is that there is context that we can take into consideration here, which is Will Smith’s own personal life. But some people have seen this as a display of toxic masculinity, as Charles is saying — that need to defend your partner through violence.
Esau McCaulley: I think you might have rigorous agreement, because I think that Charles is basically correct. What I mean is that empathy and consequences aren’t necessarily separated. In other words, I’ve known people who’ve responded like Will did to that event. I grew up in a context where, if you say something about my mom or my sister, you reacted violently. As a matter of fact, I once got into a fight with someone because they called my sister the b-word, and I ran up to him and I fought him. I understand that entire context. And so it’s not that I don’t understand the world into which violence is the response to disrespect, especially to Black women. I understand that world.
But at bottom, I think that what Charles says is, violence isn’t the answer. See, this is the problem. This happened, and Will had, I don’t know, 20 minutes between when he hit the guy and when he gave his acceptance speech, so I don’t want to accept the acceptance speech like this is his considered remarks. But when you start to fall back on tropes like “love makes you do crazy things,” then I think that that’s a dangerous way of thinking about what does it mean to be a man who loves his wife well.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Roxane, we seem to be having a discussion about masculinity and the way that it gets displayed. I am also thinking about what Jada may or may not have been thinking and where the sort of female role in what happened lays, in your view.
Roxane Gay: Well, I mean, women are not a monolith, and I’ve already seen a range of responses from women. On the one hand, women can stand up for themselves. So when, during his acceptance speech, Will Smith was talking about, I protected Aunjanue Ellis, I protected the other actors, and so on, I appreciated the comment.
Looking at it in the most charitable way, I appreciated the comment. On the other hand, though, I thought, who asked for his protection? His comments — I think he was in the moment, and he knew that he had made a grave mistake, and he was deep in his feelings, so I take it in that context. But “love makes you do crazy things” is something men have always used to justify violence, particularly toward women.
So I think it was a lot of things, I really do, and I think that looking at it and expecting there to be a pat explanation for it — it’s simply not going to happen. There’s, like, what happened in the moment on a personal level, and then there are the repercussions, and then, of course, there are all of the things that may have influenced both what happened and the aftermath. I’m a Libra, and so I’m just holding space for all of it, but I think — ask three women, ask three feminists, and you’re going to get different responses.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Yeah. A lot of folks are clamoring for some kind of punishment. Chris Rock declined to press charges. But should there have been something that should have happened in the moment? Because some people say, he didn’t have any repercussions because he’s a rich celebrity, and others are saying, he’s a Black man, and why are people trying to criminalize his behavior? This is very much being seen through a variety of lenses, as you say, Roxane, race and class being the two main ones.
Roxane Gay: Certainly. I think we cannot overlook the fact that these are actually two very wealthy men — very powerful men, very visible men. And it’s because he was Will Smith that he was allowed to stay. I think there are problems with that, because it says that the Academy condones violence, but they’ve already said that, in terms of giving Oscars to Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, Sean Penn. So I don’t — again, make the stand, but let’s not pretend last night was the first time this happened.
I don’t know how you move forward. I believe in prison abolition, so you can’t say “defund the police” and “abolish prison,” and then say Will Smith should be arrested. So I hope that there is a space here for restorative justice, which I’m still learning about, and I still wonder, is it something that can work? But I would like to believe that men of their means can find a way to use restorative justice to address the violence, to address the harm and to create repair.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Charles and Esau, you both censured Will and said that his actions were difficult to watch and unacceptable, perhaps, in their execution. I’d like to know if you think there’s something that should be done about it.
Charles Blow: Well, I want to broaden the conversation just a little bit. You may even think that this is a stretch, but I do not, because this is the context in which I view this. The protection of white women by white men has been such a feature in American society, and Black women were largely left — well, not largely, completely left out of that equation. They could lynch because a white woman’s virtue or honor had been despoiled in some way. You could burn something down because it had happened, and that travels even until today. If a white girl or woman goes missing, we’ll turn the world upside down, and every newscast will have it on ad infinitum, and that does not happen for Black women.
Black women have been so left out of being honored in this society, because that was a primary position for white women. They were the ones who were honored. Even in films, white men would go to the ends of the earth to save the white women, and that was not something that was even allowed in Black film. Whatever you thought of “Django [Unchained]”, it was one of the first modern films where the Black man went to all ends to save the Black woman. That was transformative and revolutionary, because it’s not a thing that gets greenlit in film that we see.
But taking all of that into context, understanding that Black women have been left out of this idea that they are worthy of defense, I can understand how it can be fascinating and a relief to see — even if you don’t agree with the action — to see somebody do the same thing for a Black woman. But I look at that at the same time and say, tread very carefully not to absorb the lessons of this violent society — not to absorb the lessons that white supremacy taught, that you weren’t worth this, and that this becomes an example of you being worth it. Tread very carefully on that, because it is a dangerous place to be, and it is partly because of deprivation that I believe a lot of people see it as OK.
Esau McCaulley: It’s a totally different conversation if Will walks up and does the exact same thing, but instead of hits him, he takes the mic and says: “Don’t disrespect my wife. Don’t disrespect Black women.” I think that allows us to have this conversation in a much less complicated way.
But I’ll also say that, just to be honest, I can’t imagine a scenario in which my actual life is in danger — only in that context, I mean real danger — that I would ever call the police on another Black man. I just can’t imagine it. I mean I just don’t live in a context where I would be in the Oscars. But if someone — if a Black man hit me, I’m not calling the police on him, because I don’t know how that’s going to go.
Charles Blow: One of the biggest steps taken against toxic masculinity last night was Chris Rock, even though he is the one who had told the joke. The fact that he did not retaliate, which is a thing in the warfare of masculinity that we’re constantly involved in, and Chris chose not to do that. I think that is a big plus of the evening.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I just want to ask Roxane — the idea that Chris Rock somehow ends up as the hero in the story?
Roxane Gay: No, I don’t think he ends up as the hero, but I absolutely give credit to him for de-escalating the situation in the moment on the stage. There are no heroes in this story.
Esau McCaulley: This is the question that I’ve been pondering, and I don’t have an answer. There’s a statement that Will Smith is defending the honor of his wife, and that part becomes understandable. The thing that I’ve wrestled with is during his acceptance speech, he says, you can only put up with so much disrespect. And the question that I had — and maybe it doesn’t make a difference — was it his wife that was disrespected in that moment, or did he feel disrespected?
In other words, I wonder about who he was defending in that moment. I don’t know if there’s a clear answer to that question, if you can delineate between him and his spouse. But when he said, we have to smile and we have to take it, there’s only so much disrespect — it felt like he was talking about how he was perceiving that event. I don’t know if that changes the dynamics at all, but I know that’s a complicated mix of someone’s disrespecting my wife, but that transfers over to me. And is he defending his masculinity, or is he defending his wife’s honor, or are those two things so tied up that we can’t separate them?
Roxane Gay: I think that’s a good question. And I think it’s both. I think the toxic masculinity, in addition to the violence, was really in him feeling disrespected because of something said about his wife, which, that’s a lot, Will. I also think it’s really hard to separate the two. I think that this has origins that were well before last night, and I think that’s one of the things that people are going to be discussing over the next week or so.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I want to just flip the lens here for my last question, because what’s been fascinating to me is what all these reactions that I’ve been seeing online and in conversations that I’ve been having say about us as a society. Some folks tend to dismiss these discussions about something like this happening at the Oscars, saying, no one died. It’s not Ukraine. But these cultural touch points are a kind of Rorschach test, and I’m wondering, from all three of you, what are you seeing reflected back at us right now? Charles, I’m going to start with you.
Charles Blow: I’m always interested, and I will never know the answer to this, because it is a hypothetical, but I’ve seen people do this a lot. You grow up. You’re a guy. You see a lot of men act aggressively.
But I often see men act aggressively by picking and choosing their targets. I’ve been in a space with Will Smith before. He’s my size. He’s 6 foot 2. He’s a big guy. Chris Rock is 5ʹ 8ʺ, 10ʺ, maybe. He’s a smaller man. So it’s one thing to slap Chris Rock. It’s another thing to slap The Rock. So to me, I always think of like, what are you doing? You’ve decided that this is a person you can do this to. I’m, I guess, more impressed by valor when it is someone who you don’t feel like you have the size advantage over.
Just something about it just didn’t feel right. Something about it felt like there’s this smaller man who has said — not just that someone has said something. There’s a smaller man who has said something about me, and I now feel like I have the power and the advantage to do this. I can’t leave this podcast without saying that it is stuck in my head.
Roxane Gay: I have to say, Chris Rock spent last year showing off his abs and how muscled he is. He may be 5ʹ 8ʺ, but he is not a delicate flower. I think this was a moment between peers, in my opinion. I think that this is not a situation of David and Goliath, and I think it overlooks so much of what happened to suggest that it was — that Will Smith was, like, picking on a smaller guy, a small, innocent up-and-coming person when he wasn’t.
Charles Blow: I didn’t say up-and-coming. I didn’t say any of that.
Roxane Gay: Well, no, you didn’t say up-and-coming. I’m just saying, it’s not a David and Goliath situation, in my opinion. Everyone’s going to see different things in this, and I think it’s important not to make broad cultural generalizations based on this incident. I don’t think this says anything that hasn’t already been said about American culture, or global culture, for that matter. I don’t think this is indicative of some sort of new wave of violence in the world. I think it was a heated moment and the end of a wave of a pandemic, where people are frazzled. I think it’s just important to maybe not draw grand conclusions about what happened.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Esau, last word to you.
Esau McCaulley: I would say what shocked me was how ordinary it was. What I mean by that is that we have potentially a false perception of what money can do for people. You can have all of the money and all of the success in the world, but you can still have these insecurities, and that we can still be, in some sense, broken.
I think that we can think that the people who have money and resources are, in some ways, steeled or protected by those things from all of the vicissitudes of what it means to be human. What you saw at the end was a broken person trying to defend his wife with the only tools that he had to him. So if there is some kind of grand reflection — not from this particular incident, but what money and fame does and doesn’t do for people is something that I took from this particular incident.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a Times Opinion podcast host. Mr. Blow is a Times columnist. Ms. Gay and Mr. McCaulley are contributing writers.
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Times Opinion audio produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Alison Bruzek. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristina Samulewski. Original music and mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. With editorial support from Kristin Lin. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Lauren Kelley, Vanessa Mobley, Indrani Sen and Patrick Healy.