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There are some people who believe that a Black person with
enough power, status and privilege can dissolve their way into
Whiteness. I disagree. Vehemently. But I will concede that there are
levels. And someone as rich and famous and universally adored as
Smith is closer to social Whiteness than I am. If I, for instance,
happened to win a contest for two Oscar tickets, and I happened to
attend the Academy Awards with my wife, and Chris Rock
happened to dig at her hair and I happened to slap him, I wouldn’t
have even made it back to my seat before getting tackled — shot? —
by security. And I couldn’t write this, because my arms would likely
still be broke, and also because I’m sure there’s no Internet access at
Guantánamo Bay. In fact, this hypothetical is an impossibility
because I wouldn’t have been able to get close enough to the stage
before somebody (Security? An usher? Judd Apatow?) stopped me.
What happened after the show, though, is a reminder of the
distance between proximity to Whiteness and occupancy of it. I’ll
admit that what Smith did was jarring. I’m one of maybe 17 people on
Earth who happened to catch the slap, the Super Bowl wardrobe
malfunction, the Malice at the Palace and “George Bush doesn’t care
about Black people” each live when they happened. None were as
shocking as the slap, and it’s natural to be upset. But the way some
(mostly White) people reacted, you’d think he shot him.
And I can’t help but wonder how much of that reaction was
partially due to some subconscious — or, maybe, a very conscious —
response to Smith’s apparent descent into a sphere of
consequencelessness exclusive to men who are rich and famous and
beloved, like he is, but not visibly Black. Would there have been as
much (White) outrage if he’d been “punished” immediately? It took
him doing the Whitest thing I’ve ever seen for (White) people to
loudly remind us that he’s Black (as if we ever forgot). That he can
be as rich and as famous as he wants to be, but he’ll never be White
like them boys in Buffalo with those masks and jockstraps. Skiing
through the slush with no cares and no worries except the desire to
fabricate danger to feel more alive.
Because “And yeah, they were” doesn’t just mean they were
White. It also means they were safe. It also means they were fine.T
he second Whitest thing I’ve ever seen happened the third
month of my first semester at Canisius College. It snowed
several inches overnight, because the school is in Buffalo,
and that’s just what happens there. It was one of those wet and nasty
storms, though. Not the pure white you see in snow globes and
Lexus commercials, but the grime that coats the Earth in sloshy
gray. As I was staring out the window of my dorm, I saw two guys
skiing in the parking lot slush, wearing nothing but jockstraps and
hockey masks. (I’m still curious if they planned their outfits or if the
coordination was serendipitous. I pray for the latter.)
Sometimes when we (Black people) share a story like this, where
no race is explicitly articulated, we’ll cap it by saying “And yeah, they
were.” Which means exactly what you think it means. And for 24
years, that was the most “And yeah, they were”-ass thing I’d ever
witnessed. Something so quintessentially White that a qualifier was
redundant. Time-consuming.
Until March 27. When Will Smith left his seat, calmly walked to
the stage, assaulted a Black man in front of millions of people, sat
back down, cussed out the man he’d just hit, won an award on that
very stage less than an hour later, and devoted his speech to
explaining the rationale for the slap — a culmination of activity
White enough to win 200 electoral votes.
Smith, of course, is Black. Which maybe makes this choice of the
Whitest thing I’ve ever seen a curious one. (It’s also maybe curious
why I’m choosing to write about this now, more than a month after
the Oscars. I regret to inform you that this story has no expiration
date. There will be slap-related podcasts, books, oral histories,
anniversaries, limited series, baseball cards and theme park rides.)
But Whiteness is a violently arbitrary social construct that’s less
about skin and more about status. You can earn, blend, bleed and
breed your way into Whiteness, as Irish and Italian immigrants to
America did. (And as many lighter-skinned Cubans and Mexicans
currently are doing.) The main qualification — well, the only static
qualification — is that you’re not visibly Black. Otherwise, to quote
Earnest from FX’s “Atlanta,” Whiteness “is where you are. It’s when
you are.”
The Whitest
thing I’ve
ever seen
illustration: monique wray