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The Clown Prince of Bel Air
The BET awards break out at the Oscars
Just when those on-the-fence whiteys started to think “Maybe Black people are getting more civilized and we should give them their due,” along comes Will Smith to bring them crashing back to reality.
I don’t have to tell you what happened last night at the Oscars. You’d have to live on another planet to not know. But just in case — Chris Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife’s hair loss whereupon Smith walked up on stage and smacked Rock in the face.
If he’d just done that, the quick deviation from the proceedings might have gone almost unnoticed. But when Smith returned to his seat and shouted “Keep my wife's name out your fucking mouth” — twice for effect — the crazed look on his face told it all. This wasn’t a staged moment. Will Smith is not that good an actor.
I ask you this: How many white people saw this and shook their heads and thought “You can take a black guy out of the hood. But you can’t take the hood out of the black guy!” Smith did his race an immense disservice in that one minute.
In fact, Smith is not from the hood in the first place. He grew up in a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia and attended a private Catholic school until high school where by his own account, he was punched in the mouth the first day he…