It was the topic of conversation everywhere I stopped Monday morning: Team Chris? Or Team Will?
“Will,” said the man next to me who got his iced matcha milk tea to go at the Capitol Hill coffee shop. “You’ve got to protect the queen.”
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After Chris Rock made a bad joke at the Oscars about the sleek head that alopecia gave Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith took to the stage and slapped him, the exchange unseated Ukraine, congressional hearings and Ginni Thomas’s texts as the No. 1 concern, even in Washington.
“That was an opportunity squandered,” said Yehya Abuzaid, 23, an intern in the House of Representatives who understands the desire to lash out. “But I can’t do that. I don’t do that. And Will Smith overshadowed his accomplishment when he did that.”
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Smith became only the fifth Black man to win the Oscar for best actor, the first in 16 years. And instead of being remembered for that accomplishment, he made his mark by hitting another Black man onstage.
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The national fallout became about more than gossip and drama, though, with discussion veering into the male hero complex, freedom of speech, cancel culture and more.
Even the freshmen at my son’s high school knew it was a bad move for an actor who was about to make history.
“Everyone is kind of with Chris,” my son told me, after the students and teachers discussed the incident in their classes and in the hallways of Duke Ellington School for the Arts. They’re training to be actors in his theater program, and it doesn’t bode well to see someone onstage assaulted for a performance — even a bad one.
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The students at Duke Ellington are aware of the consequences of a comedy bit that hits an unsavory note. They collectively convulsed when one of their most famous alums — comedian Dave Chappell — was recently embroiled in controversy for his bits on the transgender community and his interactions about it with the students.
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“This on top of all the other cancellation really starts to erode a comedian’s right to do comedy,” said Carla Sims, Dave Chappelle’s publicist and a member of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. “I supported Chris from the beginning as I saw it happen.”
Dave Chappelle visits Duke Ellington students
“But people who were mad at him didn’t hit him,” my son, who is 15 and a freshman, said of Chappelle (with logic that seems to escape him when it comes to arguments with his older brother).
That older brother, who goes to an all-male Jesuit school with the motto “Men for others,” said it was the talk in every class and some of his Black peers were passionate in their stand.
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“The Black students said they supported Will Smith, that standing up for Black women is important to them,” he told me. They talked about their mothers, sisters and girlfriends and the verbal abuse they endure.
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A Black woman in the coffee shop who was talking about The Slap with Abuzaid — they were strangers, but this topic got everyone talking — said she wasn’t impressed with Smith’s version of chivalry.
“What about Will Smith’s assault? He’d be arrested if he wasn’t a movie star,” the woman said. “There are other ways to defend your wife.”
It’s a complex moment that spoke to the changing roles of women and men, their partnership, the balance of power in relationships, race and the squiggly line between support and suffocation.
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In the moment, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) praised Will Smith with a tweet:
“#Alopecia nation stand up! Thank you #WillSmith Shout out to all the husbands who defend their wives in the face of daily ignorance and insults,” she wrote, with a picture of herself with her husband. “Women with baldies are for real men only … Boys need not apply.”
Just-deleted tweet from Rep. Ayanna Pressley #Alopecia #WillSmith #mapoli #Oscars pic.twitter.com/fcupeGVOBX
— emmaacp (@emmaacp) March 28, 2022
The tweet was deleted, though, after she was criticized for condoning violence. I didn’t hear back from her office on her stance.
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It’s not a clear-cut case as we balance the increasing role of women in power and the bygone notions of where support and protection merge — the whole can’t-stand-the-heat argument made to women who have their own agency and don’t need protectors.
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The truth is, women in power have always withstood the heat on their climb.
We watched it last week, the public, verbal, sanctioned abuse of Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearings for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
These were the tears of hope we needed right now.
Who doesn’t think her husband, surgeon Patrick Graves Jackson, didn’t at least imagine decking Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) as he grilled his wife about her faith and religion?
But the judge’s husband knew his wife would use her mind and her cool temperament to deflect the attack herself. Women don’t need men to speak for them. They need them to listen.
Jada rolled her eyes and grimaced at the joke. She wasn’t amused, but she didn’t ask for violence.
In the debate over whether you’re with Team Chris or Team Will, the best answer may be Team Jada.