Will Smith, Chris Rock, and the Power of Blinding Privilege

The privilege of freaking out over an impromptu public slap

It’s the most infamous slap in human history.

The world is still reeling in from the slap heard ’round the world, as the moment has become fodder for internet personalities and media outlets to push their agendas.

In a pick-your-poison moment, you can now turn to a near infinity of gurus and celebrity hopefuls on social media to tell you how you should interpret the slap. Countless attention-seekers are spewing various flavors of crazy, vying for their few minutes in the spotlight.

And, of course, a lot of privileged people are complaining.

I hereby declare Duncan’s first law of the internet: no matter what happens in the world, there will be a swath of people in some internet subculture who will complain about it like it’s the end of the world.

And the dust-up between Chris Rock and Will Smith is just the latest example of this law holding up.

My favorite flavor of the moment? The people who’ve plopped themselves atop the comfortably unaware high horse of violence phobia that reeks of the zero-tolerance policies and the staunchest of social authoritarianism.

It goes hand-in-hand that the type of people who complain about everything usually do so because they want to control everything.

When I was young, the Evangelical movement was on its upswing, and preachers and pastors used to make a name for themselves by taking on free speech. These crusaders would rush to silence talk radio voices who dared drop a profane word while they quietly loved the overt racism of Rush Limbaugh.

This same impulse — this same instinct — is an indefatigable feature of at least some small subset of the population, as it’s outstripped the religious movements that were its hallmark when I was a kid and has now overtaken secular and non-religious movements just the same.

It’s’ the new Puritanism, where everyone pretends to be holier than thou always to one-up their pals and show how saintly they are. It’s a pissing contest between complainers to see who can generate the biggest puddle of nonsense.

In response to the Smith-Rock incident, the indisputable worst privileged people are the people who are calling a slap between two stars “traumatizing” and acting like the two famed actors engaged in mortal combat — to the death in front of a live audience. These people act like they just watched a murder-suicide snuff film and will need years of serious therapy to live a normal life again.

The thing is, humans are incredibly flexible. Ancient Romans watched while laughing and cheering, toasting their brass wine glasses and scarfing their faces with grapes and olives, as warriors tore each other limb from limb.

Gladiator games weren’t “traumatizing” because it was an everyday part of Roman culture.

And while I’m not suggesting we return to the old gladiator days and embrace socially accepted violence, what rubs me wrong is how some people have the privilege to pretend there aren’t significantly more brutal forms of violence taking place here in America today.

Don’t even get me started on third-world violence.

We don’t have to get into a time machine and travel back to Ancient Rome to find that kind of brutality. We just need to visit America’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where I’ve spent most of my younger years living.

There’s an unflattering arrogance in the privilege of suburbanites complaining about the horrors of violence from their large homes in gated suburbs where they’re so far removed from it that minor scuffles, a hand slap, are akin to the worst kinds of brutality humans can dish out.

What should embarrass these people more than anything is that the very wealth and privilege that’s allowed them to be insulated from such violence is built on centuries of continuous institutional violence that’s afforded them the luxury of not encountering violence in everyday life.

It’s as if they climbed atop a pile of freshly-killed bodies to hoist up a sign: give peace a chance!

“Violence is never the answer,” they say — until it comes time for softer sentences on people convicted of non-violent crimes or time to abolish the death penalty or any number of times they support violence when it benefits their social prestige and economic privilege.

I’m not trying to beat a dead horse (certainly, my use of this phrase is bound to “traumatize” someone), but there’s a literal war with bombs and rockets and bullets flying on the other side of the world. It’s a horrific crisis, but people are coming together with resilience and fighting for their lives and country.

Forgive me if I scoff at your complaints about an impromptu slap raised from the comfort of your air-conditioned homes. That’s precisely what I’m going to do. You’ve never seen two men engage in violence before? Oh, my, you have no idea how fortunate you indeed are…and yet…here you are…complaining about it.

It’s catastrophizing.

These people fear that the world is beyond their control, and they have a built-in compulsion to try to smite out every instance of anything that makes them remotely uncomfortable. This wouldn’t be a problem if this same impulse didn’t cause collateral damage along the way.

People like this wreck things. They destroy people’s lives. They’re the modern-day digital mobs whose first impulse is to destroy anything and everything that makes them uncomfortable.

We’ve now awoken to a world where like the music at a music festival seamlessly flows throughout the night, the self-righteous crowd ceaselessly hops from fake catastrophe to manufactured crisis to alleviate boredom, fear, or both, breaking whatever they feel is necessary without ever stopping to fix what they’ve just broken when the dust inevitably settles, and they move on to the next thing.

One thing I guarantee you is this: there is not a single person in the entire world who didn’t already have a mental health problem who will need years of therapy over the Rock-Smith incident, yet, to some people, the world might as well be ending.

New rule: if you’re so privileged that you can’t even encounter mild violence without claiming to be traumatized, you must, at the very least, own up to the fact that you came upon that privilege through a constant churn of unending violence that came before you and is still going on today.

Those expensive homes in gated communities and fancy lattes don’t pay for themselves.

A whole lot of violence went into maintaining your lifestyle, and the very least you can do is acknowledge it. Acknowledge it, and please stop talking whenever violence comes to the forefront of the public’s attention. You’re clearly not an expert in this field.

It’s okay that it’s not your wheelhouse. Stick to Pilates and your favorite yoga influencers on Instagram, and let people who are the real victims of violence have this conversation space, a space they’ve earned in bruises.

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