On March 21, a young woman I've known since she was a child was shot dead in New Orleans. She was twenty-one. Beautiful, sassy, brilliant, she would have been a force to be reckoned with as a grown woman. Her life was cut short by violence as an answer to disrespect. In my community, young people don’t take the time to work through their problems. If you have a beef with someone, you hit them. And if that doesn’t work, you kill them.
I was thinking of that young woman as I processed what happened between Will Smith and Chris Rock during the Academy Awards. Smith was secure in the knowledge that Rock didn’t have a gun. He didn’t have to worry that Rock was going to leave the stage, go get his friends, and shoot up Smith’s house. And the folks in the audience didn’t have to worry that one of the actors would pull out a gun and whether those bullets would hit them.
When I learned that some people have defended Smith for protecting his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, I was shocked and appalled. It recalled the time my boyfriend got into a fight to defend me: Another man had slapped me on the butt, which my boyfriend felt gave him a legitimate reason for fighting. But while the two of them tussled, I was praying that the other guy didn’t pull out a knife or a gun, or that his friends who were watching didn’t decide to jump in.
Luckily, neither of those things happened. Both my boyfriend and his opponent were older men, who still respect a sort of “street” honor code when it comes to fighting. But even after it was over, I didn’t feel good. We spent the next year and a half looking over our shoulders.
Now think about the message that Smith defending his wife with violence, with few apparent consequences, sends to young people. When adults give a pass to using violence in the name of feelings, we expect young people to understand that this doesn’t apply to them. But think about how that sounds to someone who is still developing, whose hormones are racing, or who might be dealing with trauma or mental illness.
In New Orleans, childhood trauma is an epidemic. Sixty percent of children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In New Orleans, childhood trauma is an epidemic. Sixty percent of children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and are four-and-a-half times more likely than the national average to show signs of serious emotional disturbance. Many of the schools here lack counselors, and mental health services are hard to come by. That means that if a child makes an irrational decision because they’re suffering from some kind of mental illness, depression, or trauma, they will most likely end up in a juvenile facility. Instead of getting treatment for what caused them to act out in the first place, they’ll end up behind bars.
I remember being ten years old when a little boy made “yo mama” jokes at me for an entire year. I had a lot of fights with that boy. One of the jokes he made about my home, because I did live in poverty, was “your house is so small, if you order a large pizza you have to eat it outside.” It turned out, as these things often do, that he actually really liked me. But bad attention was the only kind of attention he knew how to get, so bad attention was what he knew how to give and some of the jokes on reflection were actually funny.
Sometimes you have to take a moment to breathe and think about things. That’s what we learn as we mature. Interactions look very different if you just take a few minutes, and that’s the lesson we are supposed to teach our children.
I look at the Will Smith incident through the lens of someone who has worked with hundreds of people on the trauma spectrum. I see and understand trauma, and he is definitely suffering with some level of it. However, his behavior was unacceptable and should not be praised.
Since the pandemic, along with other mental health issues, the suicide rate among Black children has gone up, with Black girls experiencing the greatest increase at 6.6 percent per year between 2013 and 2017. Our children, now more than ever, feel isolated and confused. In this respect, Smith’s actions, due to his status and influence, will have consequences that stretch well beyond that night.
Celebrities, in particular, need to pay attention to who is watching, who is listening, and whether the messages they send out may worsen outcomes for our children.