Chris Rock

Victoria Gagliardo-Silver, The Independent

The Internet is abuzz with Oscars news. Who won, who lost, and who got snubbed were overshadowed by one solitary moment: when Will Smith got onstage and — to the shock of everyone present and watching — smacked Chris Rock across his face. How did we get here? Chris Rock made a joke on the Oscars stage about Jada Pinkett Smith starring in G.I. Jane 2, referencing the 1977 film G.I. Jane, in which the main character has a shaved head. While this slight may not seem like the worst thing in the world, last year, Pinkett Smith publicly shared her struggle with alopecia, a disease that causes hair loss. Will Smith, in response, walked on stage and slapped Chris Rock for saying that, while adding, “Keep my wife’s name out your mouth!”

In 2018, Pinkett Smith shared her experience with alopecia on Red Table Talk. “I was in the shower one day and had just handfuls of hair in my hands and I was just like, ‘Oh my God, am I going bald?’” she said. “It was one of those times in my life where I was literally shaking in fear. That’s why I cut my hair, and why I continue to cut it.”

It’s difficult to imagine how violating, how intrusive and how hurtful it is to hear a public joke about your hair loss in front of the entire world when you’ve chosen to be vulnerable like that. Would Chris Rock have made the same joke about a woman who lost her hair due to cancer? Would all the guests laugh along? I think not. So why is an autoimmune disease any different? How did Pinkett Smith feel, with cameras on her, as she was forced to maintain her composure? If she reacted angrily, she’d have been painted an angry Black woman. If she cried, her tears would have likely been mocked. How many nights has Will Smith held his wife as she cried in his arms about losing her hair?

Black hair is often the butt of public jokes and certainly the subject of negative public discourse. For decades, traditional Black hairstyles were painted as “unprofessional” and Black women were attacked for the texture of their natural hair. Even as a backlash in recent years led to more widespread acceptance of these styles — and, in many cases, appropriation of them by white celebrities desperate to pick and choose Black traits in order to appear cutting-edge or cool — many Black women with hair loss were left behind. With cultural styles like weaves and braids being inaccessible to Pinkett Smith due to alopecia, she loses access to one of the ways Black women commonly express our cultural identity. Chris Rock was uniquely positioned to be sensitive about this issue, which is what makes his joke even more difficult to understand. In 2009, he fronted a documentary called Good Hair that explored the ways in which Black women’s hair is stigmatized in western societies. At the time, he explained the reasoning for why he wanted to make the documentary, saying that his three-year-old daughter had asked him, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” That was supposedly a lightbulb moment for Rock, where he came to realize the pressure Black women are under to have hair that meets an unattainable standard. He spent time visiting hair salons and stylist competitions, and speaking to multiple Black women and experts, during the making of the documentary. It beggars belief that just a few years later, he would stand onstage and make the second joke of his career about Jada Pinkett Smith (in 2016, he said, also at the Oscars, “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s parties. I wasn’t invited!”), this time centred around her lack of hair.

To minimise the work Jada had done to bring attention to alopecia — and to minimise the work he himself had done supposedly in pursuit of de-stigmatising hair issues for Black women — was a horrible misstep for Rock. To paraphrase what Will Smith said to Chris Rock, keep her name out of your mouths.