As an early 80’s baby, Will Smith has been famous for pretty much my entire damn life. While most folks my age met Will in 1990 as the star of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, my fellow hip-hop heads and I met him at different points throughout the 80’s as one half of the multi-platinum rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. In the mid-to-late 80’s, I vividly remember sitting on my grandmother’s couch and watching music videos like “Girls Ain’t Nothing but Trouble” and “Parents Just Don’t Understand”.

For the next 30+ years, from that same view on my couch, I got to watch him grow to become one of the highest grossest lead actors in the history of Hollywood. I got to watch a Black man, with humble West Philly beginnings, transform into a globally-loved, internationally renown superstar. And though rumours and innuendo swirled about entanglements, a covertly open-marriage, and the unprecedented manner in how he and Jada choose to raise their Black kids as Black parents, he has been virtually scandal-free his entire career.

And then he slapped a nigga.

And not only did he slap a nigga, he slapped a famous nigga on what may be the most prominent stage in North America.

And while a million different hot (trash) takes emerged from this single instance in time, perhaps the most puzzling reaction was the grumblings from within the Black community that his behaviour has somehow “set us back”.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar essentially took that stance in a recent essay, where he opines that Will Smith’s slap “advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community.” He went on to write:

“The Black community also takes a direct hit from Smith. One of the main talking points from those supporting the systemic racism in America is characterizing Blacks as more prone to violence and less able to control their emotions. Smith just gave comfort to the enemy by providing them with the perfect optics they were dreaming of.”

And this is where my confusion sets in.

The history of global white supremacy has never (and I must stress, NEVER) been reliant on an accurate accounting of Black behaviour. The idea that a global racial caste system was developed with white people propped up as judge and jury based on their collective endless achievement, while Black folks have found ourselves squarely as the accused, desperately seeking a stay of execution because of our collective inability to “act right”, is fucking insane. Not only is it ahistorical, but it doesn’t even hold up logically because in our society, while people of all races (unfortunately including our own) are quick to castigate individual Black folks for damaging the rest of us, when the hell has any individual Black person been used as a beacon to “set Black folk forward”?

For eight years, we got a front seat to America’s first Black family. They were scandal-free, drama-free, and presented a pristine image, not just of Blackness, but of any idyllic nuclear family – and, if you were in a coma for President Obama’s two-terms and had to consume mainstream media to get a measure of the man, you might walk away thinking he was the head of an international crime syndicate. He battled endless racism in ways that, even for us Black folk, was sometimes a little shocking and unprecedented. When he left office, the majority of white folks believed he made race relations worse and many white folks, including a majority of white women, responded by electing Donald Trump – an actual criminal whose behaviour, not even once, was held up as a reflection of any other white person other than himself.

And these stories are endless. We have countless Black men and women who’ve achieved at the highest levels, or who have done nothing more than lead principled lives and never once does the entirety of our community benefit from their successes or their achievements. Oh, there are absolutely Black individuals who benefit by, for example, having doors opened for them by other Black individuals, but it’s interesting how Black collectivism fades in those moments. If the first tenured Black professor at a university mentors a young Black neophyte from teaching assistant to being the first Black Dean at that same university, white folks will gather around to endlessly praise their character and what they went through. What they won’t do, is ascribe that individual’s hard work and relentlessness as characteristics that must mark every other Black person they’ve met or will ever come in contact with.

And if you’re saying, “well of course one person’s good deeds shouldn’t roll over to everyone else who happens to share their racial identity” then I ask you, why the fuck are we even having a conversation about one person’s bad deeds being indicative of everyone else who happens to share their racial identity?

To subscribe to the theory that Black moral failure somehow “sets us back” is like playing Monopoly with your little brother and letting them set the rules as the game goes on. All his little ass is gonna do is keep switch the rules up on your ass so no matter how well you play the game, you always lose in the end. The truth is, as much as white folks may love our culture, they don’t love us as a collective. And using their perceptions of us as a measuring stick of our own intrinsic worth is nothing more than an exercise in futility.

So maybe the next time one of heroes acts in a less-than-desirable manner, we weigh the entirety of their life’s good work against a moment of poor decision making (obviously, context and the weight of that decision matters here) we don’t immediately fall victim to the illogical calculus of erasing their entire catalogue of good to assert that they detrimentally affected our entire community.

This Is Your Conscience