Current Events

Survival Apparatus

We Wear the Mask: Why Will Smith laughed before he slapped Chris Rock

If you don’t know by now that Will Smith slapped the shit out of Chris Rock at the Oscars for making a joke of Jada Pinkket-Smith’s hair, live, in front of the world, then you’re likely a bookish soul who doesn’t own a TV and is vaguely aware of IG, TikTok etc. We’d likely be good friends. Here’s why you and everyone else, especially Black folks, should pay attention to what’s happened at the Oscars. Specifically, Will’s laughter before he confronted Chris. I understand what that laughter is/was, and so do many other Black people on this planet. That laughter is called a Survival Apparatus. It’s not new, we as marginalized folks, have been honing this skill generationally, one we should never have to master.

Maya Angelou spoke of this phenomenon, the Survival Apparatus, in a poem she adapted from Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask.” Please read and listen to it in its entirety, more than once preferably. It’s good for you.

She explained it completely, beautifully, the painful humiliation behind the ability for Black people to laugh at inappropriate times.

Hoteps immediately took to the internet criticizing Will with — hateful terms used to define another Black man as weak and easily manipulated by their women. I won’t repeat them here. The claim is that Will laughed at the “joke” and acted only after noticing Jada’s anger.

Will’s laughter was this survival apparatus at work, in that situation, while coping with everything else, known and unknown to us, that he and his family are currently living through right now, Jada’s hair loss being one.

She’s been transparent about when she began to lose her hair due to an auto-immune condition, Alopecia. It can be triggered by things like certain medications and stress and can range in severity from thinning hair to complete hair loss over the entire body. I don’t know the trigger for her condition or extent to which it affects her. What I do know is that it’s a soul crushing and humiliating thing that leaves the sufferer feeling powerless and afraid.

Due to trauma and abuse wrought on my physical and emotional being, I began to lose my hair, years ago. It was/is a devastating and humiliating experience. I know what it is to be the constant butt of jokes, to have my needs and pain dismissed, to have my intelligence and abilities devalued, and to pretend that I was ok just to survive the experiences. My hair is only now beginning to grow back. So, to hear Jada be made fun of, in front of the whole world for that, was too much for me, and surely too much for Will.

The plain unadulterated truth is that I was glad when Will slapped Chris. His “joke” was not funny. I felt an anger that I initially wrote off as irrational but giving myself time to reflect, I realized a few things.

First, that I needed to remind myself that I’m human first, a writer second as I admonished myself for not being more objective. Second, that his joke triggered me as a woman who has also suffered hair loss having been humiliated for it.

The coping mechanism, of laughter is not a new one, we, Black people have always had to pretend that we were ok under reprehensible conditions, being pitted against each other in systems coded for us to fail. As far back as chattel slavery, our ancestors had to pretend they were happy slaves so “ole massa” wouldn’t suspect a desire to escape enslavement which led to even more abject treatment as a result. That system of horror is not gone, neither are the coping mechanisms that were used to endure it — they’ve taken on new forms, and now present themselves in different ways.

In the modern workplace, Black people are subjected to lower wages, poor treatment, and little if no recourse at all for complaining about working conditions or low pay. In fact, the complaints can lead to worse treatment or a job loss.

Within the medical industrial complex, if we advocate for ourselves too vigorously, especially being Black women, we become “difficult patients” on paper and are treated as such by every other medical professional that has access to our records later.

Black people’s mistreatment by law enforcement has been front and center on every news outlet in the world for the last couple years, so I don’t need to go into that here.

The Entertainment industry, being centered in whiteness and white supremacy, like every other industry mentioned, pits Black artists against one another where more often than not, Black artists at the top like Will Smith and Chris Rock are few in number if not the only Black person in major productions. It’s worse for Black women.

As Black people, we are expected to, and have grown accustomed to the “laugh to keep from crying”, “fake it till you make it” default survival apparatus because the alternative has been further punishment, denial of critical services or like in the entertainment industry “blacklisting.” Think Mo’Nique, after she insisted on being paid for her appearances in public to promote the film Precious, for which she won an Oscar, BAFTA, BET and several other awards.

So yeah, Will laughed. But understand that that was not a funny ha-ha laughter, it was a “dangerously close the edge” kind of laugh that’s deeply rooted in a place of survival. One that we’ve been pigeonholed into by a white supremacist, patriarchal society. To add insult to injury, this was on full display at the whitest event on the planet, in front of the descendants of white slavers, who were ready to yell, “violence is not the answer.”

If you’re not Black and hear or see this kind of laughter, you should probably pray you’re not on the receiving end. Read “fuck around and find out.” I’ll leave you with the words of Sonya Renee Taylor:

“I would offer, I would implore white people to hold their tongues, sit this one out… nothing happens in isolation, nothing happens without a history behind it… as a critical thinking exercise: in what role does white supremacist delusion play in the ongoing trauma and pain that gets played out in public in Black people’s lives, I invite you to think about that…”-Sonya Renee Taylor

Devon J Hall Kern Carter Dr. Mary Marshall

A selection of healing for Black folks:

Black Love Lullaby

A poem: part 1

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