Will Smith’s Slap Was Unsanctioned Behavior in a White Space

Culture is a performance that allows expression of human emotion. Smith unabashedly accessed it, which drives white people crazy.

Will Smith dashed all intentions of me starting my work week with eight hours of sleep.

Moments after the comedian made fun of Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair, his slap on Chris Rock injected physical violence into the Academy Awards. Minutes later, after huddling with Denzel Washington and Tyler Perry, Smith took the stage to accept the Best Actor award for his role in King Richard. Though the LAPD offered to intervene, Rock declined their assistance.

The language, the huddle, the refusal to get police involved. It all was very, very Black.

My Twitter timeline fell into shambles, with Two Americas quickly asserting themselves. I spend most of my time on Black Twitter. The responses ran the gamut of corner vengeance (play stupid games, win stupid prizes), toxic masculinity (Chris Rock really can’t be from Bed-Stuy if he just let that happen), chivalry (that’s how you stand up for your wife), and respectability politics (he can’t do that at the Academy Awards!).

Interpersonal violence is the focus of so much of human imaginary lives. We reminisce on schoolyard fights we either saw or were participants. We consume video games and books where protagonists violently clash with villains. Creators fill our literature and comic books with tragic stories of people inflicting violence upon each other for honor, vengeance, love, guilt, trauma responses, money, fame, and derangement. All of these responses are rooted in interpersonal violence. Interpersonal violence is a part of the human experience, and codes for when it is appropriate to engage are engrained in cultures worldwide.

Smith was doing culture. Culture is a performance. One of the oldest cultural mores of the West is defending your wife. He decided to use a slap to defend Jada’s honor. The responses I stayed up deep into the can’t-see last night were not about if Smith had the right to protect his wife’s honor. Rock set up a situation where Smith was expected to do culture. Black Twitter kept me up past bedtime as I read the debates on Smith’s method and place.

Smith did culture in a very Black way in front of white people, upon one of their public stages where they have celebrated their exclusive whiteness for generations. His actions breached all the protocols white folk have set up for Black actors like Smith to behave themselves. After working so hard to ingratiate himself into their power structures, Smith showed that he would not be anyone’s Negro. The racial responses toward his behavior show the Two America structure I mentioned earlier, where whiteness determines when and how Black people do culture.

Judd Apatow claimed that Smith could have murdered Rock in a deleted Tweet. Howard Stern compared Smith to Donald Trump while claiming that “this is a sign of great mental illness when you can’t control your impulse.” Various other white people inserted themselves into threads on Black Twitter and created increasingly hypothetical situations to convince us that what Smith did was wrong. What if he did it to a white man? A white woman? Betty White? Bob Sagat? Emily Porter, in a deleted Tweet, went down this bizarre rabbit hole in her attempt at moral suasion.

White people engage in interpersonal violence too, but do not consider any violence between Black people to be such. For white supremacy, any Black violence instantly becomes political. Smith’s slap was not part of some Oscar film montage. It was not a product of screenwriting, acting, or cinematography. Smith did culture in a white space, meaning whiteness expected to govern his behavior with rules, laws, norms, and expectations. Smith can only do culture with its permission. Being the fifth Black man to win Best Actor was approved culture. Everything Smith did surrounding that white-ordained victory was not; slapping Chris Rock, him screaming for Rock to keep his wife’s name out of his mouth, and Smith being comforted by two of the most influential Black men in the industry.

That is why no famous white person joined Washington’s and Perry’s huddle when they went to talk to Smith during the commercial break.

Smith did culture in a very Black way in front of white people, upon one of their public stages where they have celebrated their exclusive whiteness for generations. His actions breached all the protocols white folk have set up for Black actors like Smith to behave themselves.

If interpersonal violence is the stuff that preoccupies our imaginations and fuels the industries we have created to profit off it via literature, film, and comics, then Black people live in a civilization where our expression of it is a political threat. It gives us access to all the complex emotions that fuel interpersonal violence and then injects it into white spaces. But the emotion whiteness has its worst relationship with is accountability. They have a bizarre and unfounded fear that Black personhood wants to engage in interpersonal violence with it for all the years of slavery and oppression and the prison-industrial complex. Thus, policing has to occur.

In Sunday’s wee hours, Smith did Black culture in a very white space on international TV without arrest or sanction. I doubt Rock will ever say something publically about Jada again. And in the meantime, white people will continue to figure out how such Black cultural expressions don’t make it within their spaces in the future.