Will Smith gave Hollywood exactly what it wanted to see from a Black actor winning the Best Actor Oscar this year. Provoked by all those who have been producing the Oscars and veterans who sat back and watched the jokes being developed about a Black man’s wife being disrespected in front of an international television camera, knowing the reaction that any honorable husband, father, brother or son might have seeing his wife, mother, daughter, girlfriend or any other Black woman humiliated — has been denied human dignity by the privileged class of creatives in Hollywood.
The White lands of Hollywood love Black violence drama, crime and fund it on every single level. The murderous, treacherous, violent behavior of Black sinister characters is popularized at every turn as we watch the New York columnists say we’re watching the decline of the Oscars.
In a very privileged, delineated film of what a real film should be, the highlighted films that were all-White with mostly White casts really denotes the type of films that deserve an Oscar that omit Black people, omit the size of life the Black people provide to this society, omit the example of a father raising his daughter with his wife, omit the father who inspired.
For 400 years, Black Americans have been forced to constantly defend the image of how and who they are going to be in Hollywood. Who wrote the lines, who said the lines, who is paid, who reviewed the lines and who knew what he was going to say, and thought it was funny to disrespect a man’s wife on international television seen by millions.
Best actor Will Smith did exactly what the bad joke required.
If you listen to his heart and the love for his wife, which we all continue to ask and invade their personal space with our own intrusive, good for nothing interest in the personal lives of celebrities that are permitted under the First Amendment, which needs to be overturned when it comes to going into the lives of individuals who love their wives but doesn’t want to be disrespected on national television and provoked to create a violent moment and yet we know Samuel L. Jackson has been seen in Hollywood saying there’s a moment the violence in killing is necessary. Smith was at the breaking point, which is another movie that we’ve seen, and yet Hollywood acts as though it was nothing. Black women should be disrespected on television, Black women should definitely be put down in a joking manner, joked about as though they’re not queens, as though they didn’t create a miracle for the coronavirus, as though they didn’t come up with the way for us to approach insults to our Black culture.
Whenever there is a Black movement in an industry like Hollywood or a neighborhood that is controlled by a privileged class, there must be a moment that is set up so that Blacks will step back or have another hurdle or have an incident, which will demand that changes be made that will affect the lens on which we look at Black participation.
Someone Black and White knew these lines were about to be read and allowed for the disrespect and disregard for Mr. and Mrs. Smith to take place. Sadly, the price of being in Hollywood can cause disrespect disregard and humiliation as a course of action in order to receive awards and accolades.
Chris, instead of stating the fact that I got slapped, an apology would’ve been the most appropriate thing to say immediately after you have been course-corrected. You should’ve seen the accident and the blue lights and the white hoods and the babies crying and the brothers and sisters hanging and Ahmaud Arbery and everyone else in this country waiting for the movie of Black life and Black disrespect to be removed from television and a slice of life about how we can actually not live a dream, but be respected in this country without it.
We demand respect, not a dream.
