Reaction to Will Smith at the Oscars

This is the transcript of my video posted on Bilibili. If you like it, go check out my videos there!

Hey what’s up everyone! Okay you already know what this video is about after seeing the cover. We’re gonna talk about Will Smith, and the event that happened during the night of Oscar Awards.

I know this subject has been discussed in a few videos on the internet, but today I wanna bring in a different perspective, a perspective that came out from a recent discussion from me and my therapist, that I think isn’t talked enough about in other videos, and is probably gonna help you in some ways to help with your life in the future, at least for me it did. So yeah, let’s get started.

By now we all know what happened during the night, Chris Rock is a comedian whose job is to entertain the audience during the Oscar event, and by entertaining, a large portion of it is by making fun of the celebrities. And you know, I’m not saying making fun of people is good, especially for Jada, because her hair loss is a very sensitive topic to her. And obviously, that GI Jane joke made Jada had that eye rolling expression. Will Smith seemed initially okay with that joke, since he was also laughing with the audience, but I think that seeing Jada’s reaction eventually triggered him to walk up to the stage and had that big smack on Chris. And you know, even after that smack, I think Will wasn’t fully pissed off yet, but when he repeated himself twice with “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth”, I can really see the anger, you know.

My stance on this, is that the joke, to begin with, yeah is bad, but there’s nothing that could justify the violence, and the assault on the stage. Okay? The violence is just outright wrong. And you chose to do it in front of the national television, with millions of people watching, that became unacceptable. That set a really bad example for the people, especially the younger generation, that violence is okay, that if someone offended you, you can just walk up to them and smack them outright without being punished. And obviously that’s wrong.

So yeah, that’s pretty much what happened during the event, but I wanted to go a bit deeper on Chris’s reaction, on the transition from laughing with the audience, to the assault on the stage. And this needs us to know a little bit more about Will Smith’s background, and you know, we’re not doing this with a bad intention, we’re not doing it because we want him to look worse or more wrong, we’re also not doing it because we’re looking for some justification of Will’s behavior, we’re doing it to be able understand Will’s emotion at that moment, to be empathetic and put ourself in his shoes. And hopefully, we can learn something from it that can apply to all of us.

So first we need to talk about Will and Jada’s marriage. In 2020, they had an open talk where they sat down and talked honestly about their relationship. And I think at that time it came across as a shock to the press and media because their marriage pretty much fell apart for quite a while and Jada started to date another person, which a lot of media called it “cheating”, but technically isn’t very accurate, because Will and Jada somewhat had come to an agreement with it. For a long time, Will wanted a stable marriage, but Jada said quote unquote, “I was in a lot of pain, and I was very broken” and she wanted a non-conventional marriage. I think for a long time they called each other “parter” instead of “husband and wife”.

And combined with the fact that Will grew up in an environment where he witnessed a lot of his father abusing his mom, and not being able to protect her, says a lot about how Will appreciate his family. In his autobiography he was saying “When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of the head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood. That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am.” And at this point you probably know where I’m going.

To a large extent, he was trying to make up for not being able to stand up for his family when he was a kid. And because his father was using violence at the time, instinctively he also went with violence without thinking about it, whether if it’s out of his love for Jada or not, he put himself in a family situation, where he is a husband, and became his father type of person, by using violence.

So it happened, Will smacked Chris. What was people’s reaction?

Video of Tiffany Haddish

This is a post interview clip from Tiffany Haddish after the Oscar event. She was one of the audience who witnessed the event. I think what she said is a good summary of why a lot of people had opposite opinion and praised and supported Will.

So you know when I was hearing the words “standing up for his family”, the word “protection”, I had a genuine question, which is what was Jada’s reaction seeing Will’s behavior? Did she feel “protected”? Because I see everybody praising Will actually putting themselves in Will’s shoes and said Will was protecting Jada but what if it’s not?

So now if you were Jada, do you feel protected seeing your husband walk up on the stage and slapped someone because they made a joke about you? You know, I don’t know about you but I’ve been trying really hard to put myself in Jada’s position and my answer would be “no”. I don’t feel protected. I’d even feel embarrassed. And I might even feel scared because I’d be worried if Will’s gonna get into a fight with Chris, which luckily didn’t happen because Chris held it back. I’d also be worried if I would be treated the same way if I were to offend my husband someday and it got him triggered.

So, yeah I think everyone who’s still supporting Will, especially women, should really think about it if it happened to you. Would you like to see your partner get into a fight and call it protection? No. And I think a lot of it derives from our view of patriarchy masculinity, of us seeing men physically stronger than women, and the authority of men over women. And if all of us see it that way, celebrate violence, the same violence eventually is gonna be applied to girls and women at the same time. Because violence is acknowledged.

And I think for men, now is the time to think about how we define masculinity, without using violence, without acting out of your primal instinct. And you know, Will Smith himself has always been trying to establish himself as that kind of person, who is loving, caring, evolving, transformative, but that night obviously ruined his personal brand.

Btw Will apologized the next day, and yeah he didn’t apologize immediately afterwards, but in next day. And in his apologizing letter, he also mentioned “Violence in all of it forms is poisonous and destructive. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness”. I hope we can all remember that.

So the last thing I wanna talk with you is what lesson I learned from this incident, how do we control our emotions. And I wanna share a tip with you.

The tip is to always “turn inwards” when you feel something, whether it’s anger, or sadness, thrill, and even happiness, to give yourself a brief timeframe, to observe your feelings and ask yourself some clarifying questions, like “how am I feeling right now / why do I feel that way”. The problem is that you need to be mindful of how you are feeling, before you take action. And you need to know better than anybody else why you’re feeling that way. And a lot of the time, this will give you a great opportunity for you to learn about yourself. You can’t just slap someone and say “Oh I was triggered and I didn’t think about it”.

And in Buddism, there’s a very famous saying that when you have a feeling, you don’t have to follow it, and once you give yourself a moment to observe it, the feeling would go away.

“念起不随，念起即断，念起即觉，觉之即无。”

Okay, that’s all I wanted to talk about today. I hope this helps all of us to see it from a different perspective, and I hope the tip could help all of us to be a better person. Remember, be kind. Treat everybody the same way you want to be treated.

See you next time!