Who Really Slapped Chris Rock? A Deep Dive into Hollywood’s Hypocrisy and Our Violent Shadow
Nota Bene: I’m sorry this essay is so long, but the devil truly is in the details for this issue, and I don’t think it can be appreciated fairly, or that we can learn the important lessons from it, without these details. Please refer to the bold type for salient points if you prefer to skim through. Also, I have never hit or slapped anyone in my life, except perhaps my brother during a sibling rivalry long ago.
I f I were a conspiracy theorist, I might believe the Oscar incident was a perfectly and brilliantly choreographed skit by, and about, Hollywood itself. Ultimately it was the latter, albeit impromptu and unwitting.
While many are dismissing the Oscar incident as superficial — and it is at face value — it is also pregnant with many crucial social issues worth deeply discussing: racism and feminism, medical conditions and illnesses that also extend to mental illness and how treat we those who have them, the varied manifestations of violence (most saliently, verbal and physical), perceptions of beauty, self-awareness, self-reflection and impulsivity, laws around violence, toxic versus healthy masculinity and femininity, taking responsibility and making amends, appreciating nuance, racism and rage, context and history around individual events, white privilege, celebrities and elitism, emotional shadow and its projections, compassion and passive-aggression. The list goes on.
In this essay I share some less obvious, or at least less discussed, views about what I think contributed to Oscar night and to the backlash satellite issues the incident invoked. I discuss “shadow” (defined below) and its projection. I also applaud and criticize other perspectives, I hope fairly. I cannot possibly address all the major dynamics, much less their nuances and deep lessons (I will try in another essay), in what is already too long a read for most.
Elephants and Shadow Projection
By “shadow” I refer to our psychological shadow, which represents all the qualities and emotions we don’t identify with and repress. Shadow projection refers to the tendency to attribute to others what we hold in denial and repression — in shadow. Shadow projection describes our tendency to accuse others of qualities we don’t want to admit about ourselves. Shadow displacement refers to expressing (read: dumping) onto others the emotions that we have not reckoned with ourselves. This doesn’t mean that every time we call another out or express ourselves to them that it’s coming from our shadow. But there are clues that make shadow projection more likely than not, especially when supported by causal evidence, some of which we explore further along.
Elephants in the room are clues that shadow projection may be afoot, because the denial that drives shadow creates invisible elephants. Irony describes the results of projection and displacement and its hidden shadow, because we deny what we project, thereby (ironically) accusing, and dumping onto, others what we ourselves harbor. So, every time you see mention of “irony” mentioned ahead, it indicates the possibility or likelihood of shadow projection and displacement.
Before I delve into the anatomy of the Hollywood elephant, I think it’s important to acknowledge other significant invisible elephants in the Oscar room, that are likely directly influencing all our perceptions and reactions at this moment in history, including the entertainment industry’s. These two big elephants are the war in Ukraine and the ongoing pandemic, and to a lesser degree, other global crises, including the climate crisis, which is a result of our violence unto the Earth itself.
Putin’s grotesque war on Ukraine has left many of us heartbroken and emotionally frozen, and we aren’t even in Ukraine. How much of the revolt against Will Smith (and to a lesser degree Chris Rock) is a backlog of anguish and outrage over violent atrocities we get to witness yet do virtually nothing about, especially when processing overwhelming emotions isn’t our collective forté? It’s so much easier to let that vitriol fly in the face of a manageable, hell-of-a-lot-safer incident going down in a decorated, modern institution devoid of rockets, bullets, bombs, and madness. So, I simply name this contextual elephant so we can be aware of it, just as one might want to be cognizant of other daily stressful dynamics that can fuel and bleed into how we treat our partners, children, or anything else.
Similarly, Chris rock or Will Smith might have had some stressor in their day that fueled their violence.
Another contextual blindness surrounding this event is our penchant for superficial, black or white thinking devoid of nuance and degree of separation. Yes, it was a hurtful and abusive “joke.” Just because it was a joke doesn’t mean that it’s okay and that it didn’t hurt. And just because bald jokes have been made for decades doesn’t mean it’s okay today, or that all bald jokes are equal and affect individuals equally — especially Black women, who already struggle inordinately around hair issues and who are disproportionally affected by alopecia. Chris Rock even made the documentary “Good Hair” around all this. Eusebius McKaiser insightfully and eloquently elaborates on this issue, along with poignant commentary about comedy and other salient themes, which essay you should read. Will’s slap was also violent and ill-advised, but our perception of it, as I will argue, is also cloaked in crucial bias and unobvious context.
Insults and traumas large or small affect people uniquely based on their individual response to them. Through this event, I learned that alopecia affects African American women more than it does those of other races. Maybe it’s time to clean up comedy, just as we have other social institutions, so comedians aren’t getting rich at other peoples’ expense, and they learn to tell jokes that are truly funny.
In counterpoint, for millennia humor has been a way to help us grapple with our shadow. Humor helps us laugh and shyly giggle when it exposes what we have thought or believed but were afraid to admit, or simply haven’t been able to express due to social norms. So, while sardonic humor may be hurtful, it has also been helpful to help us reckon with our shadow by making us laugh, together, so it’s more palatable. The fine line between helpful humor and hurtful rhetoric is often vague. The line has been crossed many a time! Therefore, I propose that we collectively sit with this conundrum and see what seems best over time.
Perhaps we allow humor to proceed as it has, control any violent reactions to it best we can, or limit them to verbal retorts and not physical violence, while not being so surprised if occasionally someone gets too pissed off and acts out . . . because humor should not be a free pass to be carelessly violent.
At the end of the day, this was a moment between acquaintances, not strangers; one grown man dishing a verbal assault and another grown man slapping him for it. And it ended, for now. Unless Jada, Chris, or Will reports more serious injury by the exchange than we currently know . . . BFD. Chill out, Hollywood; you are guilty of worse.
Hollywood’s Dumbo
The biggest elephant in the Oscar room is Hollywood itself, comprised of the most celebrated celebrities and movie stars in the world. The industry has profited obscenely from the depiction, glorification, and dissemination of violence. Hasn’t the Best Actor award historically been given to characters acting out violence on the big screen? Will Smith and thousands of others have been celebrated for violent roles in other fims.
So why so much outrage over a slap? Yes, Will, “should” have chosen otherwise, and he bears some blame. He had a human moment, a moment enacted in households across America and around the world. And it was a relatively mild moment, as far as violence goes. Chris Rock also had a relatively mild moment dishing out his verbal violence. It’s important to look at the degree of violence by both men, as well as the degree of reported injury by those directly involved, and then to measure the degree of our outrage from the public, and see if they are commensurate.
It’s important not to escalate violence. But because the verbal assault by Rock is not appreciated for the violence it was, Smith’s act is disproportionally — and I argue, inaccurately — inflated. So, it’s easy to say that Will Smith escalated the violence (and I think he did at least a bit), and even easier when physical violence is viewed as a worse offense than verbal violence. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. In this case, which was more severe is a close call, and depends on who you ask. For Jada, or others who have been the butt of multi-dimensionally mean “jokes,” maybe they’d have (even secretly) preferred a full-on punch by Will. To wit, here’s a clip from an article about pandemic violence I just read focused on verbal assault and its abuse:
“. . . while emotional abuse doesn’t always lead to physical abuse, that doesn’t make it any less dangerous. “We tend to place these types of abuse at a hierarchical order,” she said. “It’s true that someone may never experience physical violence, but abuse is abuse, and the essential element here is one person trying to maintain power and control over another.”
— Crystal Justice, Chief External Affairs Officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline
So, here is a theatre and backstage population of elites that have dedicated their lives to promoting and popularizing violence — to people of all ages all over the world, including children. Is there really that big a difference between watching movie stars torture and kill each other on the big screen of box office hits versus one man verbally assault and another slap him for it on a TV screen?
But when one of Hollywood’s star members, whom the Academy was about to crown Best Actor, slaps another man with an open palm, all hell breaks loose and he is condemned from every angle. Will Smith suddenly jumped off the big screen onto the small screen and cracked Hollywood’s tidy glass box. Will gave everyone a tiny taste of the violent, murderous scenes depicted in movies for decades. Just like Chris has given others a taste of shadow through his history of poking fun at others, Will gave Hollywood a taste of its own shadow. And Hollywood didn’t like it. In the process, Will also made himself Hollywood’s scapegoat, an object for its shadow projection, as well as an individual deserving some condemnation. Will also made himself the scapegoat for all the other celebrities and talking heads using him to vent their outrage against what might be a hefty dose of their own shadow violence, as we explore further later.
We all know that violence isn’t “just in the movies.” The violence in motion pictures, and video games for that matter, don’t stay in the virtual realm, any more than Jada, Chris and Will’s altercation are believed to remain on television. That’s a big chunk of the criticism isn’t it — the concern that others, especially children, will mimic Will’s example? That’s a reasonable concern, but how many kids are really at home watching the Oscars or the replays? Children are more likely playing violent video games, or maybe even watching one of the thousands of violent Hollywood movies. So, how much is this children trope being used as false justification for heaping hate onto Will?
Hollywood and its celebrities are harshly condemning one person for a controlled slap while the incident of verbal abuse has gone largely ignored. Another chapter of #metoo may be upon us, and I hope we turn these pages together to examine Hollywood’s complicity, as well as our collective denial of the impact of words.
Hollywood appears all too eager to cast this incident as superficial and punitive. To what degree is it protecting its own image (and profits), much as our government downplays and shoves into shadow (denies and represses accountability) its own violence in the celebration of freedom and independence via imperialism? Heaping on blame to Will, without looking in the mirror, is troubling. The elephant in the room isn’t Dumbo, but dumb Hollywood itself.
First Punch
Rock threw the first punch, a slap to Jada Pinkett Smith. But this wasn’t registered by most because we don’t appreciate the impact of verbal abuse as much as we do physical. Some of this might be due to a fixation on the laws against physical versus verbal injury (i.e., free speech). But laws, compassion, and justice don’t always overlap, as many of us know, especially Black people.
We are also culturally obsessed with the exterior body, with what is visible and overt, (all represented by the slap and its effects) — which are all masculine qualities. Compare these with the more subtle, invisible, inner body — which are all archetypal feminine qualities (pertaining to Chris’s “joke” and its effects).
This tunnel-visioned, black or white view, in addition to the projection versus the owning of emotional shadow, is what seems radically violent, of which the celebrities and condemning media talking heads may be guilty in the heavily weighted condemnation of Will’s violence without considering the shadow, Yin-Yang nature of the altercation. This simplistic, unilateral view, ironically, is itself toxically masculine, versus the more complex and subtle, integrated view of an archetypal feminine interweave. And this shadow, this denial, manifests in a unilateral, projected disdain for Will’s actions, which action also had its own element of toxic masculinity (but far less than may be merited).
Many, of course, don’t see it this way. Many of the celebrities and public figures commenting on the Oscar moment may be steeped in their own toxic masculine shadow, such as being unable to appreciate the subtle and invisible effects of verbal assault and call it what it is: a violent, multi-barbed dart. I am also not convinced that Chris Rock didn’t know about Jada’s alopecia. They travel in similar circles, and Jada has been quite public about her struggles. Chris knows that admitting he knew is pivotal for public perception and who gets blamed.
Glennon and Kareem
More shadow projection seems to come in the form of apparent virtue signaling, like that of celebrity Glennon Doyle who tweeted ‘violence is never “proof of love.”’ I find this to be a New Age, black or white, non-integral, perfectionistic appreciation of love.
“Proof of love” also seems to be a strawman position, because arguably nothing is “proof” of love, including what appears to be; how do you prove something emanated from love, except to trust the words of the giver or receiver of the gesture?
Will Smith attested to acting out of love when he said, “Love makes you do crazy things.” Proof aside, protecting what we love can be evidence of, or a clue to, a loving act. Doyle’s polarization is also emblematic of a puritanical understanding of love, reminiscent of hypocritical, violent religious traditions. Ironically, such linear, sterile appreciations as Glennon’s undergird a toxic, patriarchal (and dare I say, toxic masculine) view of love.
I agree with Glennon that we should not use “love” as an excuse for domestic and all forms of violence. But this was not domestic violence. Will didn’t slapped Jada; he (ostensibly) defended/stood up for her against Chris’s violence.
Because Will couldn’t possibly have been acting out of love, which he claims he was, Glennon shames Will (and maybe Chris too, if Glennon were to directly acknowledge his verbal violence). Glennon then encourages us to “think hard about that take” (hers). I have for many decades, and I did again when I read her tweet.
Perhaps Glennon could think hard about the paradoxical nature of love, that sometimes violence is needed to preserve it, such as in examples of tough love. So, it’s not true that violence is always opposed to love. As but one example, I imagine most of the people reading this, as well as the Oscar elites, would agree that Ukrainian people are full of love and valor, perhaps even mirrored by Will Smith’s character for which he won Oscar gold. Yet, Ukrainians are preserving and acting out their love for life by killing Russians.
Paradoxical love requiring a measure of violence also occurs when putting down a pet or disconnecting a loved one’s breathing tube when suffering is too great and the prognosis bleak. Or maybe you wouldn’t call these acts violent because they were for the force of good? Will Smith claims his slap was too. So, the problem with this reasoning is it dismisses the visually apparent, self-evident nature of the act itself, which would then be subject to condemnation by Glennon Doyle’s paradigm, because it would excuse that act as having an ulterior meaning. It would be a double standard.
We see then that violence is not so linear, so neatly defined. Perhaps we’d like it to be, so we wouldn’t have to face how violent we all are in ways that escape our defining lens of the term. What we call violent has as much to do with our perception and context as it does with any single act. This is the light in which I am trying to frame the events of Oscar night 2022. And towards the end of this essay I present a scenario that really puts the shape-shifting trickery of perception into focus.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar, a celebrity and part of an elite group that is kissing cousins with Hollywood, also offered a perspective. Kareem has appears to do some good activism to protect racial and social justice. But for this Oscar event, amid some good points, I think he missed the mark in many ways, especially by employing mischaracterizations and black or white thinking to justify a largely unilateral condemnation of Will Smith.
As but one (and there are many others in his linked essay), he claims that Will’s slap prevented Jada from acting. He writes of Will Smith: “By hitting Rock, he announced that his wife was incapable of defending herself.” That’s just not true. Ironically, (shadow projection clue), this perspective itself may be sexist. Jada had, and still has, her own power to act as she wished and wishes, notwithstanding what my friend Catherine points out: she wasn’t really welcome on that stage; it’s for the motion picture actors directly involved in that evening’s performance. Jada could have screamed her own protestations from her seat, or whatever else she chose. But we, and Jada, “knows” that “women aren’t supposed to do that.” So, if Jada was inhibited, maybe we can look to toxic feminine dynamics of systemic sexism (for example, “women are supposed to be quiet and good”) for why Jada didn’t do anything more than roll her eyes and appear somewhat disgusted. Not blame Will for it.
For all we know, and barring systemic repression, Jada chose to do what she wanted and was not held back by her husband’s actions — unless we hear otherwise. Just because she didn’t act similarly to Will doesn’t mean she didn’t choose her response, then or after the show. Isn’t it also subtly sexist to judge and guess at her motives using Will’s actions as a default standard from which actions Jada was prevented?
Jabbar builds on his apparently false premise by taking his argument to another level claiming that, “This patronizing, paternal attitude infantilizes women and reduces them to helpless damsels needing a Big Strong Man to defend their honor least they swoon from the vapors.” Please.
Notice the dramatic and condescending language, language that in effect displays the Strong Man tone characteristic of what Kareem (wrongly) accuses Will of doing. Kareem invokes pejorative perspectives, when even a mild dose of critical thinking identifies his premise as more than likely false. Why would Jabbar assert that Jada was hindered by her husband? First, she did respond, just not as dramatically as her husband. That aside, is it simply because Will consumed the time and attention available for a response? Does Kareem secretly assume that Jada, and perhaps women generally, are subordinate?
Jabbar also states, “The Black community also takes a direct hit from Smith. One of the main talking points from those supporting the systemic racism in America is characterizing Blacks as more prone to violence and less able to control their emotions. Smith just gave comfort to the enemy by providing them with the perfect optics they were dreaming of.”
Smith may have given racists comfort, but let’s place blame where it’s due. For example, consider the alternative: had Will Smith decided not to slap Chris due to concern of playing into a Black stereotype (emotionally generated violence via belief), this would mean he would be tip-toeing around a prejudice instead of exercising his courage (justified/right/legal or not, this is not the point here) as a racially equal man, such as what a white man would feel entitled to do.
In other words, Jabbar ironically places the blame on Will for injuring the Black community, implying that Smith should obey the racial boundary created by white people. Isn’t that like placing blame on women for not being more resilient in the face of rape or abuse? I place the blame on the white community for upholding the prejudice and shallow understanding of the violence against Black people that foments Black rage (a term from the book Black Rage, depicting the inner conflicts and desperation of a Black man’s life in America under systemic racism, which also led to the legal defense concept of black rage), to the degree this rage played into the slap by one Black man to another — which, given the dynamics of systemic racism, we assume it had some role, as a contributing factor among many others.
A similar mischaracterization seems to be made in this arcticle published in the Hollywood Reporter, and echoed in this video clip. I don’t doubt that some Black rage as a result of racism seeped into this Oscar moment, but to describe the incident, essentially in its entirety, as a result of Black oppression and history doesn’t seem accurate, especially because relatively mild, workaday, violent moments like this happen all the time, in one form or another, among people of all colors. If they happen more frequently in Black communities, this would signal a more significant contribution of racism.
People of color I’ve discussed the issue with view the incident as largely between two men in conflict, not so much one generated by racism, systemic or otherwise. But if Will, Chris, or Jada were to report that this issue stemmed largely from racism, then I’d be all ears. It’s their story to tell because that determination would have to be made subjectively by them.
Jabbar should not be blaming Will for giving white people “comfort” and delivering a hit to the Black community. If there is racial blame to dole out for the slap, place it on racists, on racist and imperialist and slave-driving America, not on a member of the perpetrated. To do otherwise seems, ironically, racist.
In these instances, Kareem seems the one engaging in accusatory violence and projecting an emotional bias via shadow projection, which careful scrutiny and adherence to contextual facts indicates. Maybe he should have reflected more before releasing his commentary the very next day after Oscars night. Ironically, maybe he knee-jerked just like Will did.
Numerous parts of Jabbar’s commentary, as well as Glennon Doyle’s assertions about love, wreak of shadow projection. They lack depth, nuance, and accuracy, which this event demands, and its protagonists deserve, to be treated fairly — and, I feel, wisely. In the process, Glennon and Jabbar have also slapped Chris Rock.
Action and Reaction
An important dynamic I’ve contextually introduced here is distinguishing between the slap itself and our reaction to the slap. How much of the vitriol against Will is truly about Will? My educated guess assigns it a low percentage. This seems especially so when we consider the biases and context that inform nuance and degree of violence. Of course, this is a moral measure, not so much a legal one.
Naturally, we can’t assert that every crime go unpunished due to context that can’t be well-quantified, even though some degree does bleed into law, such as assessing mental health status and displays of remorse when sentencing murderers. It’s nonetheless morally helpful to appreciate degrees of violence and their context. The slap, however, has largely been appreciated as “violence,” not as a shade of violence.
Per the dynamics of denial and projection and our collective tendency to not think critically, we hold our own violence in shadow. This is perhaps why violent entertainment, or news stories, are so titillating. After all, our tendency to be violent is hardwired (genetically inherited) and part of our nature. In fact, we crave violence just as we do sex and food. And while it’s reported that men commit more violent acts than women and are more aggressive, women tend to engage more “indirect violence.”
“Men are far more likely to express their aggression directly: through physical violence or verbal abuse. Women are more likely to be indirectly aggressive: to focus on damaging someone’s social standing or spreading rumors to hurt someone’s reputation.”
Learning more deeply about violence is something we all might engage to make the most lemonade from Oscar night 2022. I found all the linked resources above enlightening.
If we brought our violent nature out of shadow, by admitting and owning it, rather than repressing it so much, would we have a different appreciation for Oscar Night? If so, when someone is not able to repress the urge to be violent — which urge most of us have even occasionally (think Putin, #45, or animal torturers) — or when a violent outburst occurs — especially in the mild form of a mean joke or slap — we might simply acknowledge it as expected and part of nature, albeit a breach of social code.
Just because we are inherently violent doesn’t mean we have to be owned by our genes to act violently. We can mindfully choose to repress certain urges, and we have to repress violent urges, as we should, in order to live civilly. This way, we prevent our violent nature from snowballing, such as when a verbal insult leads to a punch which leads to a gunshot which can lead to a war. For this, both intellectual honesty and emotional health are required.
Allowing physical violence is ultimately too slippery a slope to tread. I reconcile our inherently violent nature with our need to control it by way of a fine delineation that separates our intent to refrain from violence from its (relatively frequent) occurrence: while we can and should strive not to be non-violent, and to not escalate violence, we should not be so surprised and outraged when it occurs, especially when mildly expressed. This disposition is possible by embodying and grokking our violent shadow — that we are violent by nature and it can’t, and isn’t, always repressed. When we don’t expect perfection, we are more able to tolerate ultimately mild outbursts.
Because we don’t accept our violent nature, public reaction to Will’s slap seems more shadow projection and displaced outrage than an unbiased, commensurate response to it.
Violent crime offenders the world over are not carefully psychologically rehabilitated as much as locked away and isolated from caring interactions. Jail is big business and it’s expensive to truly care for criminals. So when a violent incident like “the slap” receives scrutiny, it also receives the impact of our emotional shadow. Combine this strong stigma against and denial of violence of any kind with our intolerance for imperfection, and you get the unduly harsh condemnation we are seeing for Will Smith. Will was imperfect that evening, as was Chris, but neither, to my sensibility, were egregiously so. They were both “wrong,” and Will was not as wrong as we are making him. I don’t know how much more Jada was affected by the joke because I haven’t heard.
A lack of appreciation for nuance, the shades of grey, also extends to Chris’s verbal violence, which hasn’t garnered nearly the acknowledgement of Will’s slap. Speaking of which, we might ask, was Will’s slap commensurate violence to the violence that Rock dished? At face value, roughly, I’d say yes. But, this too is not so easy to discern without examining our tendency to downplay verbal assault and therefore, by contrast, the degree of retribution effected by Will Smith.
There is also the context of existing history of conflict between the two men. Chris might have even “merited” more retribution (not necessarily in the form of physical assault), or vice versa. Again, we don’t know all the details; they are hidden in the mens’ relationship. Yet so many, especially the celebrities, were so quick to judge and vehemently condemn (disproportionally?) — a sign, not a determination, of shadow projection.
The joke-and-slap reminds me how in basketball one player will mouth off to another behind the referees back and provoke a push or physical encounter so the one who reacts gets called for the foul. Will Smith got that call. But then, taunting in basketball or football is also grounds for a foul. You’d think that this sports dynamic would have informed Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s perspective on all this.
So much around lies under the surface of this Oscar moment, and we see how much is invoked by an apparently simple incident! To peel back just one more of the band-aids being thrown over it, consider another dynamic that might reveal how biased, contextual, and non-linear our interpretation of violence is: What if Jada had gotten up and slapped Chris? Would we be condemning her as we are Will? Yet, a slap is a slap; violence is violence, right?
Common knowledge of predominantly male-dominated aggression — from warring to domestic violence to governance to rape — silently informs our reactions to this event.
Had Jada done the deed, how many would be condemning her for it, and to what degree? How many might be chanting, “You go, girl!”? If Jada had struck Chris, would we be talking more about invisible illness, toxic femininity (the tendency for women to remain submissive in the face of male aggression) and feminine power, and how cruel society is towards those who often silently suffer and become the inadvertent butt of ignorance, displaced anger, insensitivity, and mean “jokes”?
We might also be talking more about the damage that verbal abuse causes: the invisible wounds inflicted on the brain, nervous system, and physiology that result from psychological traumas large and small. Physical violence often causes a degree of invisible psychological damage, just as overt verbal or psychological violence (gaslighting, manipulation, verbal abuse) causes internal physical damage. For someone who has been verbally and psychologically assaulted for a time, even what an outsider judges as a “small joke” or no big deal can feel like a serrated dagger to the heart.
“Survivors of domestic violence sometimes take longer to heal from the emotional abuse they experienced than the physical.
Many people think of horrific physical abuse when they hear about domestic violence, but many survivors suffer silently through verbal and emotional abuse day-in and day-out.”
Many Hands
So who really slapped Chris Rock? It certainly wasn’t one hand, and here are some possibilities for the others, which I see illustrated in my mind’s eye as Will’s hand backed by a dozen or more other hands, lined up like dominoes:
Hollywood slapped Chris. Our collective shadow slapped him. Racism, slavery, and Black rage slapped him. Imperialism slapped him. The climate crisis slapped him. Every celebrity that has gotten (filthy) rich from violent “entertainment” slapped him. Childhood trauma slapped him. Displaced anger against Russia slapped him. The knee-jerk commentators dishing out mischaracterizations and platitudes slapped him. Pandemic and climate stress slapped him. The Academy, movie industry, and violence-cheerleading celebrities slapped Chris. And Will Smith slapped him. And all these hands may also have propelled the unscripted, mean joke from Chris that evening.
But Will gets the lion’s share of the blame for all the invisible, shadow hands raised against Chris’s face that evening in response to the invisible punch thrown by Rock. Because we seem not to acknowledge the hidden roots of the slap may explain why we are so unilaterally enraged at Smith. Ironically, I see the largest reservoir of toxic masculinity as the projection of shadow violence by those so harshly condemning Will Smith for his toxically-tinged moment (more on this ahead). In light of a broader and fair context, it seems Will is taking a lot more heat than he deserves. For this reason, the slap reverberated not only through the Dolby Theatre that evening, but through the soul of our country.
Trauma Therapy
I’ve read that Will is going into therapy to “deal with his demons” that may have contributed to his acting out. I hope he finds some demons, because that’s good shadow work. But it’s also reasonable that his momentary, yet controlled, outburst had little to nothing to do with demons, evidenced by what I see as a roughly commensurate response — albeit not the wisest, higher road means to express himself.
So, I hope Will is not merely falling prey to so many others’ harsh judgment and pathologizing of him, such as this psychiatrist does unfairly, unjustifiably, unskillfully, and unprofessionally. A good, compassionate mental health professional does not establish a causal relationship between an action in the present to some event in the distant past, and assert it as a certainty, without ever meeting Will and helping him to discover and report the potential link as a subjective personal truth (which is the most reliable, if not the only, way it can be verified). That is a violence in itself. Due to the highly subjective nature of psychodynamic trauma, such an assumptive conclusion by a shrink is unskillful and adds to the injury and burden of the Smiths.
If Will or Chris were to report that after some reflection, maybe even some therapy, they discover their part in the altercation was due to a traumatic past, then we could give these drivers more weight. Until then, I think we can safely assume what is most likely true: the incident may have contained an element of past trauma. But until Will and Chris tell us more about this, we don’t know, because why they did what they did is almost entirely subjective — meaning, it’s theirs to discover through introspection, not ours to guess.
Toxic Masculinity and Restorative Justice
A cure for shadow projection is to withdraw the projection. This could look like celebrities and talking heads that have knee-jerked, applauded, and promoted violent Hollywood movies, along with other unreasonable violence, to acknowledge their complicity in endorsing and spreading this violence.
It could also look like Chris Rock acknowledging that he too was violent and offering an apology. But so far, he can’t imagine forgiving Will Smith. Maybe if he were to acknowledge the violence in his “joke,” or at least any degree of hurt he caused Jada, he could have an easier time of it. That’s what empathy does, which is the opposite of toxic masculinity. Sure, he may be hurt too, but he could also apologize. His disposition seems toxically masculine. Ironically, Will Smith, who did apologize, is the one being unilaterally accused of toxic masculinity, which he also seemed to display, to a degree.
Toxic Masculinity (“TM”) is characterized by three salient qualities, according to verywellmind:
1. Toughness: This is the notion that men should be physically strong, emotionally callous, and behaviorally aggressive.
2. Anti-femininity: This involves the idea that men should reject anything that is considered to be feminine, such as showing emotion or accepting help.
3. Power: This is the assumption that men must work toward obtaining power and status (social and financial) so they can gain the respect of others
I think there is an element of TM on Will’s part, but not as much as he is being blamed for. He was tough, but the other two criteria don’t quite fit. More, his “toughness” seemed to come more from his passionate heart, a moment of protective, fierce love — though the better choice would have been to not express it physically. But I think we all recognize that he didn’t think about it much; it was largely an impulsive reaction.
That Will looked at Jada and saw she was upset indicates to me that he acted at least in good part because he was empathizing with her. And while he said “love will make you do crazy things,” this seemed like a defensive justification while he was still shaken, and likely shocked, about what he did. Shortly after, upon more reflection, he corrected his course and said, “Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. My behavior at last night’s Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable . . . I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be.” His first sentence aligns with Glennon Doyle’s simplistic take discussed previously. He also expressed his emotions to Chris verbally, held Jada’s hand for much of the rest of the ceremony, then gave a tearful apology, and is now reportedly seeking therapy — hardly toxically masculine.
Wil Smith engaged in more repair and humble, compassionate expression than Chris Rock did. You might say, well, yeah cuz Chris didn’t really do anything. In this essay I have tried to show how Chris did do something, as well as how his violence has been underappreciated. This, in combination with Will’s actions being contextually exaggerated, creates a doubly-lopsided perspective. Chris has largely gone under the radar while Will has filled it, in my opinion, due in good part to biases, nuances, social conditioning, and shadow.
Group Effort
Many have been blindly permissive of Chris Rock’s largely unacknowledged violence by way of his abusive “joke.” You might listen to other alopecia sufferers if you want a reality check on this, just as you would have to ask a person of color what it feels like to experience racism. To boot, alopecia can be especially painful for women because their self-image and sense of beauty is attached to their hair. Alopecia can be even more painful for Black women, because they may already feel insecure that the hair they have is inferior to white women’s hair.
When shadow projection occurs, one has to also condemn oneself for Will’s slap and for Chris’s first punch. Will would then not be a scapegoat for repressed and denied collective violence, but perhaps something more like a momentary fallen hero whom everyone around him has helped to tumble . . . and from whom they could learn.
Chris’s verbal stab can’t be viewed as one person benefitting at another’s expense, any more than Will’s slap is about one man slapping another . . . if we hope to get closer to a constellation of truths and maximize the takeaways. As an isolated event, the joke and slap were relatively insignificant, and therefore, a polarizing debate about who was right or wrong, in my opinion, largely misses the mark. Both seem to have been both appropriate and inappropriate, and to varying degrees, depending on whom you ask.
If the event can get us inquiring into the substrata of corruption, shadow, and violence, and learning about other important cultural dynamics the moment surfaced, some of which I’ve tried to present here, we can all gain. Otherwise, the same dynamics, and on a larger scale, will continue to galvanize public attention and cause more harm.
My hope is that from our many voices we arrive to a new level of understanding for the many facets and forms of violence causing unnecessary suffering. As many have said, “this is a teachable moment.” May we sift through the perspectives carefully, compassionately, and critically to arrive individually and collectively to learn what seems most likely true, helpful, and just. And may the bulk of our compassion and material aid go to those suffering far worse violence around the world.
