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My Only Real Takeaway From the Will Smith Debacle Before I Never Talk About It Again: Black People Are Never Allowed to Mess Up
One final piece of commentary before I hope we can all turn our attention back to the issues that actually matter.
Kendi King
Apr 3
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Will Smith accepts the Actor in a Leading Role award for ‘King Richard’ onstage during the 94th Annual Academy Awards (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
Will Smith is kinda seen as a genius in the realm of Black filmmakers.
Not because of his stellar acting and performance skills, or the fact that I grew up watching him in some of the most iconic films of my generation, or the fact that he’s been able to grow his fame through both film and music.
Will Smith is a genius because he knew from the very beginning how to game the system.
He was able to analyze the film industry and quickly realize that, as a young actor coming up in the 80s & 90s especially, the only space film and television mostly carved out for Black men was the role of the thug - and Will Smith did not want to play a thug. He crafted an image of himself that relied on neutrality - not in the way of denying who he is or denying his people, but by building a career around neutral film and television roles.
Will Smith figured out that if he stuck to action and science fiction movies (Men In Black, Independence Day) he could transcend the social construct of race, reaching people at the most basic human level. The main conflicts of these films are not man vs. man or even man vs. world, but man vs. intergalactic threat.
The movies that made Will Smith involved some form of human unification in order to defeat a larger, apocalyptic threat. He was the hero of people, not just of Black people, he just happened to be Black.
It worked so well that it felt like a trick.
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Will understood that audiences would “forget” about his race if they could instead focus on the larger issue of an alien invasion or the end of the world. But he has also always been undeniably Black and told Black stories throughout his career (Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness, and most recently his Academy Award-winning performance in King Richard).
In order to bring these Black stories to life, he first had to build his audience. He had to make a name for himself outside of the Fresh Prince era where he got his start and transition into the realm of “serious actors”.
It’s an admirable victory most artists of color struggle to navigate.
And when he slapped Chris Rock on live television, I knew all of that would come tumbling down in an instant.
I saw what none of my non-Black friends could see - that the moment he stepped out of the character he has spent decades carefully crafting, it was an excuse for the forces of white supremacy in America to tell him he was absolutely everything they always knew he was - everything they tell Black men they are from the moment they are born.
A human prone to violence who cannot act with restraint.
Will Smith spent what has essentially been his entire adult life cultivating an image to help himself and his career, not only for himself, but for us too. Will Smith gave us what very few actors or artists in general could, a consistent Black male role model in popular media.
I can’t remember a time in my life when that man was not on a movie poster, and that cannot be underestimated. No media frenzy can take that away. A talented, intelligent, strong, conventionally handsome Black man with the perfect nuclear family (as we all know now, no family is perfect, but the Smiths were about as close as you could get in my eyes) who always had a movie out.
So as you wade through the commentary, tweets, and reposts, remember what is actually going on here.
Try and find the nuance where people prefer none.
Remember that the small part of this man’s inner life that we get to see is just that -an incredibly small part.
And know that if the Academy decides to revoke his Oscar because of social pressure (which would not be a shock, as he has already resigned from the already painfully un-diverse Academy with 81% of voting members being white, and 62% men), all the people who have openly condemned this man who’s been about as perfect as a celebrity can be will eat their words at the realization that their “outrage” was mostly just pandering to white America.
Kendi is currently a student at New York University and is the author of multiple award-winning poems, short stories, stage, and screenplays.
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