The Character Assassination of Jada Pinkett-Smith by the Cowards on Social Media
I told myself I wasn’t going to write about The Slap, and I had two very specific reasons for this. One was practical, the other a bit more personal.
Practically speaking, I just didn’t see an angle. Within 48 hours of the incident, there were already dozens of opinion pieces on this platform alone, covering everything from toxic masculinity, white supremacy, cancel culture and the death of stand-up comedy. I genuinely didn’t feel I had anything to add to the conversation that wasn’t already being said, or would stand out in an already cluttered subject space. I still don’t. And I don’t want to write just for the sake of what’s trending #notsohumblebrag.
The second more personal reason is that the whole thing just made me sad. Will Smith has always been my guy. He’s entertained me in more different ways than any other celebrity over the last 30 years. His TV show defined my adolescence, his music was my gateway drug into Hip-Hop (I really do mean that as a complement), his movies, at least in the 90s were the event of every summer.
Chris Rock is also my guy. In fact he’s my favourite stand-up comedian of all-time. He’s probably not the greatest stand-up of all-time; that would be Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks or Dave Chapelle. But he is without a shadow of a doubt my personal favourite, and much like a Will Smith movie; a new Chris Rock stand-up routine in the late 90s and early 00s, was a drop everything moment. I didn’t wanna talk about what happened between these guys and the impact on their reputations. I love these guys.
Do I think Will Smith was out of line? Yep. Do I think his acceptance speech threw Chris Rock unfairly under the bus? I do. Do I also think Chris Rock’s joke wasn’t one of his finest, regardless of if he knew about the alopecia or not? I guess for me all of these things can be true.
And just like that…I’m already talking about the damn slap. But The Slap really isn’t what this article is about. This article is about what The Slap was about. Jada Pinkett-Smith
So in addition to those aforementioned think pieces; another more insidious post-slap discussion point arose very quickly from the four corners of the internet: How could a happy-go-lucky, goofy guy like Will Smith be reduced to an act of aggression not seen before from even the most asshole celebrities? The answer in the eyes of the internet became quite obvious. Jada. The Femme Fatale in the Hollywood drama that was Will’s life. The woman who never wanted to marry him, who spurned the kind of romantic gestures that other women would dream of, the woman who in one look on the biggest night of his life, brought it all crashing down.
We’ll touch on how this toxic narrative surrounding women on social media (particularly Black women) has been established and cultivated later on. But first let’s just look at the slap for what I promise is one final time and while we’re doing that ask one simple question: What was Jada Pinkett-Smith actually supposed to do in this situation? She clearly didn’t think the joke was funny, which is entirely her right. It wasn’t that funny. Objectively, it wasn’t. It didn’t warrant Will Smith’s reaction, and it didn’t cross the line of bad taste, but if we’re critiquing the joke purely on it’s quality; it wasn’t great. Regina Hall told a much funnier Lebron James hair joke, earlier in the show. Jada Pinkett-Smith actually reacted in exactly the way that comedians themselves need us to react to their weaker jokes to keep their work at a premium. She didn’t laugh. That’s all she did.
“But why didn’t she stop Will rushing the stage? Any real wife would do that?”
So there’s two problems with this take. First of all, it’s pretty clear that nobody knew what was going to happen next. Chris Rock smiles as Will Smith walks to the stage, the audience laughs and you can actually catch a guy in a white suit to the right of the shot clap during the approach. The “wow” that Chris Rock utters after the slap, I suspect was also going on in Jada’s head. There are any number of things I’d imagine she, just like the rest of us, assumed could happen when her husband took to the stage. Possibly at worst a Kanye, “I’m gonna let you finish” moment, but maybe Will planned an eloquent explanation of her condition that would make Chris Rock feel 2 feet tall. If she had grabbed her husband by the arm and screamed “baby don’t do it!” before sitting him down, then the narrative would have quickly formed that she is an attention seeking control freak. As nobody, nobody would have believed a story that she just prevented her husband from smacking Chris Rock in the face and damaging his career. Will Smith smacking Chris Rock, at the Oscars? Please! She overacted and embarrassed him again…etc, etc.
The second problem with this take is that it ignores one inconvenient fact: women are not responsible for the violent behaviour of the men they marry. They’re just not. At all. A woman can be a bad wife, an unsupportive wife — just like a man can be a bad and unsupportive husband. But women are never responsible for violent male acts directed at them or anyone else. We kinda need to own that as men. Even if we think we’re acting in a woman’s name, it’s always about our ego. And deep down, we know this. Women being the cause of male transgressions has a fairly obvious source origin, but it’s very much here to stay.
So how did this portrait of Jada Pinkett-Smith as the Femme Fatal come about, even prior to The Slap? And why is there such mileage in it? Well, the answer here comes from another inconvenient but undeniable fact: a lot of men are angry and confused right now. We just are. A lot of us are not quite sure where the line starts and ends with masculinity and toxic masculinity…or if there even is one anymore. We’re also equally unsure how to balance being the men we must now be with the men we’ve been conditioned to be for centuries. For this reason there is a certain type of male angst that can be weaponised in the media by creating a narrative of emasculated once powerful men, reduced to a shell of themselves by manipulative women. We’ve seen this case study play out already with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry and we’re seeing it happen again with Will and Jada. Both Meghan Markle and Jada Pinkett-Smith are intelligent, articulate Black women who have had the temerity to not smile and be happy with every aspect of the part they play in their more famous husband’s lives. It’s a real trigger point for angry and confused men — something all of us can be at times. Something in the moment Will Smith walked on stage he may have felt like.
“But isn’t at least some of this on Jada? After all she made Will a subject of ridicule in her Red Table Talks, right?”
Not exactly. One of the most critical parts of the “entanglement” Red Table Talk that the memes and social media trolls overlook, is that in this episode of the show; Jada herself was the subject and Will was hosting. For that one episode at least, it was his show. He called the shots, he asked the questions, and he was the one that pushed as interviewer to get better insights for the audience. Jada herself was being overtly vague, even the use of the “word” entanglement speaks to this. She wasn’t specifically trying to blow this up, but instead do a degree of damage limitation on something that had already hit the public domain. Will Smith could have stopped this level of discomfort at any time, or as Jules Winnfield once told Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction “If my answers frighten you, then you should cease asking scary questions.” In fact Will Smith only really seems truly hurt and uncomfortable in the interview at the point that he asks what she hoped to get from the extra-marital relationship and his wife’s response being that she wanted to “feel good” after so long. That was the sting. As it would be to any male ego. It wasn’t the relationship, as he clearly already knew about that, and they were separated at the time.
But…yeah ok. Fine. It is fair to say that Jada Pinkett-Smith had more to gain from the Red Table Talk discussion than her husband. And it probably is also fair to say that if you choose to put the finer points of your marriage on the streets, then you can’t predict where the colleterial damage is gonna land. Or when. You do vacate the right for people to not have their opinions on you, when you’re the one setting up the discussion point. That maybe is more on Jada. But she wouldn’t be the first. Beyoncé dropped a whole album putting a lot of her marital problems on display. Jay-Z did likewise. Both albums were some of their best work. Sometimes our greatest stories come from our most painful experiences and everyone has the right to explore that.
Will and Jada have been married for 25 years. That’s longer than a lot of pro athletes have been alive. When they got hitched, Bill Clinton was still President of the United States, you couldn’t use your phone and the internet at the same time and social media, literally did not exist. Chances are they know a lot more about marriage than most of us. In fact chances are they know more about marriage than any other celebrity couple that has ever existed, as very few others in Hollywood have been putting up these kind of numbers.
Just to be clear I’m definitely team Chris Rock in terms of what actually happened on that night. But as I’ve watched the memes, the sexist character assassinations, and stories that Will would have been better off with any other woman up to and including his fictional fiancée on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Well now I’m just team Jada. I hope Will Smith will be ok, both personally and professionally, as comparing his actions to those of the Harvey Weinstein's and Roman Polanski’s is absolutely ridiculous. But he alone is responsible for how things turned out.
If speaking just in terms of the blowback from his behaviour, I absolutely agree with him: we should keep his wife’s name out of our fucking mouths.
