A Black writer on culture comments on Will Smith. Very good article!

[Coventina]

Will Smith Carefully Edited His Image For Years. It Has All Come Undone Now.


For whatever it’s worth, I think The Slap was unnecessary and wrong, and shouldn’t have happened. For a couple who has been in the public eye for 30 years, and who, in recent years at least, have been intentionally and strategically open about all kinds of vulnerable personal subjects, I’m befuddled by the Smiths’ response to Chris Rock’s joke. If you’ve seen one Academy Awards, you’ve seen them all, and the couple, both of whom have been famous for decades, and who have attended several Oscars before, surely knew what to expect at such a hypermediated event. Before this ceremony, hadn’t they laughed at jokes aimed at other celebrities, including those about people’s appearances?

***snip***

What I do actually care about, and what does interest me, is this instance of public anger and its relationship to other incidents in American pop culture, particularly those involving Black men. I’m compelled by public spectacles of Black internecine conflict, particularly in predominantly white spaces, and the ways in which those spectacles are instantly racialized, the fact that they are charged by internal respectability politics, and the process by which they instantly become entertainment fodder.

I attend Quaker meetings occasionally (as recently as this past Sunday morning), and the tenets of peace, nonviolence, and silent waiting are evergreen through lines. I believe in those values. I’m also from Philadelphia, where slapboxing and all kinds of public rituals of physical combat are common, especially among men and boys. I also have warring thoughts about what I actually want men to do for women in moments of public discomfort. I’ve been in arguments with men I’ve loved because they’d failed an expectation I had for them to speak up for me. But they were also uncomfortable, like many people are — like I am — at the prospect of escalating physical conflict. No one should resort to being violent with other people. I’ve also cringed, and then silently, and guiltily, assented to a friend’s description of himself as a “beta male” because he failed to stop a catcaller from approaching his girlfriend. I know it’s all fucked up, and certainly retrograde.

Because of my lifelong intimacy and familiarity with retaliatory violence, I have serious discomfort with the notion of women praising a man’s physical retaliation to a joke. I wonder, for my own sake, and for my affinity with other women, How can we expect that type of energy to not eventually come back on us? Plus, the responses to the joke that claim Smith was defending his wife’s honor in a room full of white Hollywood establishment figures still center white people. Why should anyone really be bothered with what white people think about an exchange between three Black people? The celebrity Oscar attendees actually have more in common with each other — wealth, privilege, influence — than with all of us watching at home.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nielaorr/will-smith-chris-rock-oscars-black-anger

Excellent article - highly recommended!

[old as dirt]

1. On Revolution and Equilibrium - Barbara Deming

Last edited Mon Apr 4, 2022, 03:23 PM - Edit history (2)

I attend Quaker meetings occasionally (as recently as this past Sunday morning), and the tenets of peace, nonviolence, and silent waiting are evergreen through lines. I believe in those values.

Often viewed as a secular manifesto on nonviolence (as opposed to, say, MLK or Gandhi, for example), Barbara Deming was actually a Quaker who, although coming out of a long and proud Quaker tradition, couches her philosophy of nonviolence in strictly secular and utilitarian terms.

It's only fairly recently that the full text is actually available on the internet.

First published in 1968 (and the male-centric language of the time shows!...lol.):

https://canvas.santarosa.edu/courses/36501/pages/on-revolution-and-equilibrium-barbara-deming

[RobinA]

2. I Read The Article

and have no idea what it is she's trying to say.

"Why should anyone really be bothered with what white people think about an exchange between three Black people?"

Here's the thing. I'm white. Most of my friends are white, and nobody I've heard from, white or black, has all that much to say about this incident. The people I hear talking about this are paid opinionators, who seem to want to make all kinds of male/black/female/white points about it. The rest of us? It never was that huge of a male/black/female/white deal.

[Coventina]

3. What I understood her to mean is that Will Smith destroyed the public narrative of his life.

And her larger point is that famous people can never really be "known" by the public because we (usually) only see what they want us to see, and that is problematic when attempting to judge someone's character.

I also liked her point that men using violence to "defend" women is not reassuring when violent men tend to be abusive to the women in their lives.