I had every intention of delivering a Nerf sermon this week. You know, the kind that doesn’t go very far, and can’t hurt anybody even if it manages to hit.
I brought the thunder last week, and promised you a Lenten season that provided more comfort than challenge.
Alas, there was a cultural moment, one that will preach, one that is worthy of our attention as progressive Christians, that opens good questions. So not only is this NOT a Nerf sermon, I’m not even going to deal directly with the scripture reading, which is lovely, filled with hope, but not remotely connected to our topic, which is “The Slap.”
Now, there is a chance that you’ve spent the last week in a silent monastic retreat, only leaving your cell at the monastery this morning to come to church, so in case you missed it, let me recap.
Last Sunday night, during the Academy Awards, the comedian Chris Rock cracked a joke about actress Jada Pinkett Smith’s short hair. Her husband, actor Will Smith, walked onto the stage and slapped Rock, twice shouting expletives that had to be censored on U.S. broadcasts. Will Smith was asked to leave the ceremony, and refused.
Many viewed Rock’s joke as out-of-line because Jada Pinkett Smith has been very public about suffering from alopecia, a particular form of hair loss, and candid about how the condition has proven challenging in the context of traditional standards of feminine beauty and the intense spotlight she is under as a celebrity.
This is a thing she does, sharing her own challenges, her own vulnerability, inviting people into difficult conversations, an invitation I believe leads to healing and wholeness. She is a tough and brave woman. She has to be, for women have to work ten times as hard to get half the recognition of men, and that is squared for black-identified women of color.
Alopecia has been in the news a bit more than usual in recent years. My favorite Nascar driver suffers from it, though that doesn’t really get much attention, and besides, he’s wearing a helmet or at least a ball cap most of the time in public.
Where it has gotten a lot of attention is with U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, who represents most of Boston and Cambridge in Congress. A progressive Democrat, she is part of a group of young, diverse, and progressive women known as “The Squad,” a group constantly targeted by ethno-nationalists, for they are terrified by women and people of color with power.
Pressley, who also suffers from alopecia, shaved her head. She is still absolutely stunning, just beautiful, which should matter exactly zippo nada zilch because she was not elected to look good. She was elected to be smart and wise. That has not prevented hateful men from mocking her appearance.
So yeah, men mocking women who are already self-conscious about hair loss. It’s a thing.
Now, I didn’t actually watch the Academy Awards. I rarely do. I’m not enamored of the Awards Industrial Complex. I mean, I’m totally cool with honoring achievement, but why can’t they just take their votes in secret and announce the honorees? There is absolutely no need for this to be constructed in a way that produces losers.
And this is the moment when I could go off on a rant about the masterfully filmed and thoroughly toxic “The Power of the Dog,” or maybe about the annual farce that is the Nobel Prize in Literature that is by anyone who is NOT an American novelist, but let’s save those conversations for coffee hour.
So Chris Rock mocks Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith slaps him, I’m sound asleep, and I wake up to pretty much everyone on the planet offering their hot take about what happened. People tried to divide the responses by women vs. men, some by black identified people of color vs. white people. Others tried to psycho-analyze Smith, especially his childhood, for he grew up in a home with domestic violence.
Responses went all the way from the moral outrage of “violence is never the answer,” especially easy to say if you are privileged and on the side likely to be inflicting the violence, to full throated support for the slap. But life is a bell curve more often than not, and many of us just view it as sad, unfortunate, with victims all the way around, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Chris Rock, Will Smith, Questlove, whose award for his powerful documentary “Summer of Soul” was over-shadowed by the slap, even the tennis-champion Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, for it was for portraying their father that Will Smith would later receive an Oscar as Best Actor and give a wretched acceptance speech where he tried to justify his violence and apologize at the same time, the “sorry, not sorry” that is all too common these days.
Among the better responses was one Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote on his Substack. Michael Harriot wrote a piece for the African-American news site The Grio titled “Sometimes, people get smacked,” with the lead “Some things don’t deserve hot takes, social media analysis or self-righteous virtue signaling. The Chris Rock-Will Smith Oscarmania match is just a thing that happened.”
Still, at the risk of offering one more hot-take or social media analysis, and hoping to avoid self-righteous virtue signaling, I’m going to wade into these waters. But I am not a black-identified person of color, nor am I married to someone suffering from a very public medical condition, nor am I the survivor of the particular sort of domestic violence that shaped Will Smith’s childhood. I am not, as Kareem reminds us, a millionaire at an awards show giving awards to other millionaires in what is, after all, a business promotion event.
So I am not going to focus on the righteousness or sinfulness of Smith’s response, of the slap itself. There are smarter folks than me wrestling with that moral dilemma.
I want to look very narrowly at Chris Rock’s original comment, not Smith’s response. Chris Rock made a joke about someone’s appearance, degrading a human in public, and this is what passes for humor. And I’m tempted to ask when tearing down other people became funny, but alas, it always has been to bullies and can even get you elected to the highest office in the land, can get you a stand-up comedy special.
Ticket sales to Chris Rock’s comedy tour have soared since Sunday night. Because this is who we are. We enjoy watching verbal violence.
Make no mistake. What Chris Rock did on Sunday night was verbal violence, and anyone who is a survivor can tell you that much of the violence that takes place in a situation of domestic or sexual abuse is verbal.
Several comedians have expressed concern that Will Smith will be seen as giving license to audience members who feel insulted by on-stage content to take matters into their own hands, literally. And I get that.
The peddlers of division and hate have been writing laws turning citizens against one another with vigilante lawsuits meant to silence people of color, women, and the LBTQ+ community. Why wouldn’t their voters feel empowered to cold-cock their neighbor? Their party leader assures them on a regular basis that violence is an acceptable form of discourse.
Honestly, isn’t there enough funny stuff in life, in the human condition generally? Do we really need to demean and mock and bully and call it humor?
Why do we celebrate mean? Why do we put mean, mouthy, insulting people on screen. And I’m not just talking about comedians. I’m talking about Gordon Ramsey and Simon Cowell.
It can be a fine line sometimes. I know. God help me, I think folks who take horse de-wormer and believe in Q-Anon are idiots. I can sort of excuse myself since those are choices they made, and on my better days I ask myself what sort of fear and injury, often multi-generational, took them to that place.
There has to be some space between being mean and passively conceding to a toxic and hate-filled alternate reality, which is to say, to unreality, what Marxist thinkers rightly call “false consciousness.”
I have to do better. We all have to do better. We can’t call out the sort of hateful speech directed at Ketanji Brown Jackson by racists and misogynists last week if we are willing to tolerate lefties calling Trump a fat cheetoh or McConnell Yertle-the-Turtle.
We can’t call out hateful speech, insults, the tearing down of people out of pure meanness, if we tune in and call it entertainment.
I don’t know if you can still hear it today, but when I was a kid we still had that sing-song “Sticks and Stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
Wrong.
Words can hurt and do hurt, even if it stops at words, but it rarely stops at words.
So no, I’m not going to judge the slap.
I am going to pray that the Academy remembers that Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski still have their Oscars before the Board of Governors does anything truly stupid.
And I am going to be prayerful and awake, clinging to Micah 6:8 and the command to loving kindness, in my life, and in the content I allow into my spirit. Amen.