On Sunday, much of America — those on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, in particular — lost their collective mind when actor Will Smith sauntered up to a grinning Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars and smacked him across his face.
Chris Rock’s lame GI Jane joke at the expense of an alopecia-stricken Jada Pinkett didn’t warrant Smith’s theatrical display of machismo.
While the David-vs.-Goliath match-up didn’t sit well with fans of either man, the outrage expressed on social media and in the news was out-of-proportion to the incident — and dwarfed public fury over the real-life horrors on the streets every day, including those Smith and Rock grew up on.
I was initially mostly agnostic and dismissive of the whole affair before seeing a friend’s Facebook post and others who characterized the slap as “horrific.”
“Horrific? Horrific was Junior Guzman-Feliz being killed inside a Bronx bodega,” I replied. “Horrific was a homeless maniac shoving a young woman [Michelle Go] to her death in front of an oncoming subway train.”
As the week dragged on, we saw the inevitable use of a racial-inequality lens to refract thinking about The Slap.
The Guardian declared, “White outrage about Will Smith’s slap is rooted in anti-Blackness.”
“Will Smith and the unfair burden Black men face,” harrumphed USA Today.
AP went with “Will Smith’s slap sparks debate on defense of Black women.” (Frankly, I’m surprised — but not triggered — that the Associated Press even uses that cisgendered term.)
It was the equivalent of these writers and news outlets telling white people, “Leave Will Smith’s name out of your f–king mouths.”
Yet while the Smith-Rock dust-up drew so much of a stir about violence, the daily carnage in New York City and other urban areas barely gets even mere handwringing — except, of course, to blame police, unemployment and the lack of opportunity.
You want “horrific”? On Oscars weekend and during the week that followed, the city witnessed these incidents:
- On the Friday before the telecast, a 16-year-old boy was shot a few blocks from Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens.
- A 3-year-old girl was struck by a stray bullet while walking past a Brooklyn day-care center also on Friday.
- Two 15-year-old boys were shot in their legs during a dispute near a public-housing complex in East Harlem on Wednesday night.
- While sitting in a car on Thursday night, a 12-year-old boy was shot in the head and killed in East Flatbush.
And that’s just a taste of the week’s violence in the city.
It angers me to no end that the daily tragedies visited upon New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, South Central LA, Philadelphia and other urban communities don’t merit similar attention — and loud demands for law and order — as The Slap Heard Round the World.
Did The Post’s extraordinary Oct. 1, 2021, front page, which featured 21 kids killed in street violence last year cause outrage or trigger elites? Ha! The sound of crickets was the response from far too many people, despite the numerous unfortunate young black males gone too soon.
Yet Smith slaps Chris Rock and everybody loses their minds, whether they support or condemn him.
People are “traumatized.” It was “horrific.” Whites are holding Smith to a higher standard.
Meanwhile, dozens of inner-city minorities are getting their lives shredded at the hands of their peers and . . . crickets.
That in itself is outrageous. Inner-city violence and chaos should be far more “triggering,” traumatizing and life-altering than Smith’s and Rock’s sandbox behavior.
On inner-city streets, any number of slights — from a dumb joke about your girl to someone accidentally stepping on your brand-new kicks to a diss about your Facebook post — can result in senseless stabbings and shootings.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all the A-listers (and ordinary folk) horrified by Will Smith’s behavior last Sunday night turned their outrage against violence into action that saves the lives of young black men in the ’hood? Wouldn’t it be nice it some of them actually dedicated themselves to supporting violence-reduction and positive interventions?
C’mon: Let’s be “horrified” enough to actually end the bloodshed so that every mother’s son and daughter alive today are alive to celebrate Mother’s Day with their moms next month — and many more thereafter.
Michael Benjamin is a member of The Post’s editorial board.
