To White People Who Are Sick of Hearing About Will Smith and Chris Rock

We need to keep talking about what happened between two Black men at the 2022 Oscars.

Chris Rock onstage at the 2022 Oscars (Photo: YouTube)

The second half of March must have been a White supremacist’s nightmare: As of April 2, for two weeks and counting, the news cycle has been dominated by Black people. During week one, it was all about the US Senate confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the US Supreme Court.

Ketanji Brown Jackson and the Belated Outrage of White Liberals

Then at the beginning of last week, we got a twist nobody saw coming: Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at the 2022 Oscars after the latter told a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, Will’s wife — or more specifically, a joke about her shaved head. Complicating matters, Will was a Best Actor nominee for his performance in King Richard (he later won the award), and Jada Pinkett Smith has alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss.

Are You Defending Will Smith Because He Was Right or Because He’s Not White?

These are strange times indeed. During the SCOTUS confirmation hearings, the Ukrainian War stopped being the top trending topic for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Then on Wednesday, the family of Bruce Willis, one of the biggest box-office superstars of the ’80s through the ’00s, revealed he has been diagnosed with aphasia, a degenerative brain condition far more serious than alopecia. I expected it to pull attention away from Slap-gate at the 2022 Oscars, but that didn’t happen: Bruce Willis’s health crisis became second-tier breaking news because everyone was still going on and on about Will Smith and Chris Rock.

Interestingly, the one thing nobody seems to be talking about is the way Jada rolled her eyes at Chris’s crack about her hair the moment he made it, while Will (and Oscar winner Lupita…