 | By Indrani Sen Culture Editor, Opinion |
You probably know the feeling: Someone has made a joke at your expense, and it hits you wrong. Perhaps it touches a nerve. Perhaps it makes light of something painful that you're struggling with. Perhaps you're just having a bad day, and your sense of humor has deserted you for a moment. |
What do you do? Most of the time, you probably do what you're expected to do: You show that you have thick skin, that the insult rolls right off it. You gulp down those hurt feelings, avert your eyes if they're threatening to water, and you laugh along with the joke. |
At first it looked like that's what the actor Will Smith was doing on Sunday night during the Academy Awards telecast, when he chuckled at the comedian Chris Rock's ill-conceived joke about the appearance of Smith's stunning wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. But her face fell. |
Then things went a little haywire. You've probably heard, if you didn't see it, that Smith walked onto the stage and slapped Rock, then returned to his seat and yelled angrily at the comedian. As Roxane Gay writes in her guest essay on the slap heard around the world, it was an awkward moment, to say the least: |
The laughs became titters, became stunned silence. It wasn't clear if this was a bit or real life, and then all was crystal clear: What we were experiencing was someone not taking the joke. We were seeing skin that had thinned to nothing. |
It was also "supremely sad" to watch three talented artists who have been open about past struggles go through this public trauma on a night that should have been a celebration — as our columnist Charles M. Blow pointed out in a rich and fascinating round-table discussion with Gay, Esau McCaulley and Lulu Garcia-Navarro. |
But there was something cathartic, too, in seeing decorum shattered in this way — the pretense of "thick skin" broken. And as Gay writes in her essay, "however disappointing the incident was, it was also a rare moment when a Black woman was publicly defended." |
Gay argues that thick skin should not be as necessary as it is — for any of us, but particularly for Black women. She points to the ordeal of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who displayed superhuman composure last week during her confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, and to the grace of the tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams when they were recently at the receiving end of another incident of unfortunate awards stage remarks. |
"It shouldn't be this way," Gay writes. |
Of course, none of this excuses violence. But I came away from reading Gay's piece wondering what petty insults or jokey microaggressions I might choose not to swallow, going forward. I won't slap anyone, but next time, I might not laugh. |
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