I admitted last week that I don't know the best way to respond to someone consistently and publicly disrespecting your wife. I suppose the preferred way is to simply be so powerful that no one dares to, but that isn't always practical. Without knowing a perfect response, I agree that there are problems with even a mild physical assault.
Obviously the Academy had to respond in some way; it was their event. A ten year ban from attending any Academy events seems severe, but that was their decision.
Other people wanted something much more severe, calling for Smith's complete expulsion or to have his Oscar taken away.
An Oscar won being revoked would be very unlikely. That has only happened once, because it turned out that the movie was from the wrong year. Even with the revoked nominations they were generally for very technical reasons: something believed to be original having been based on an existing work or coming from the wrong country.
https://www.oversixty.co.nz/entertainment/movies/oscar-nominations-that-were-revoked
For getting expelled from the Academy, there are currently only five: four sex offenders and one person who bootlegged Oscar screeners.
https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/every-celebrity-who-has-been-expelled-from-the-academy/
Interestingly, Roman Polanski has been known as a sex offender for a long time, and still got a nomination and a win and Harrison Ford delivering his Oscar because Polanski is still hiding out overseas to avoid jail. He was only expelled when the new Code of Conduct came out. It took a long time (and two really high profile cases) for the Academy to decide that being a sex offender was a problem. Normally we expect that a woman shocked to be kissed without consent will play it off as a joke (and will be asked if it was "good"), or that there might be a whole musical number about having seen the breasts of various actresses, including one where it happened in a rape scene and that has all been fine.
That's not really what this post is about though. I am more interested in how comfortable people were with quickly condemning, inflating, and calling for vengeance, and some of the ways in which they did that. It is not a coincidence that the examples I am going to use are all white.
This is not about you: Amy Schumer "traumatized" and complained about not being able to make an Alec Baldwin joke.
https://www.nme.com/news/film/amy-schumer-alec-baldwin-joke-wasnt-allowed-to-say-oscars-3198409
It would be a really weird juxtaposition, except then I remember her "parody" (is that the right word?) of Lemonade and "Formation", and I guess that's kind of just her. Regardless, they did not just "let" Smith slap Rock. If Smith had asked permission, they would have said "no" and in the absence of that he was expelled.
That doesn't even make sense: A doctor (so obviously an authority) pointed out that such a slap could have killed Betty White.
If you want to condemn the slap, that is fine and you have lots of company. You don't need to add a ridiculous hypothetical. I neither believe that Betty White would make a joke that would upset Smith that much, or that he would respond that way if she did. A reminder that it is easy to cause serious injury in that circumstance could be fine, and not unreasonable. All you did was inspire a bunch of parodies of your own tweet. Could it be that you were afraid people were not getting how dangerous this Black man was? That would remind me of this next one...
Your house is glass: Judd Apatow tweeted out about how Smith could have killed Rock and his out of control rage.
https://www.newsweek.com/judd-apatow-blasted-after-saying-will-smith-lost-his-mind-oscars-1692408
Those tweets were quickly deleted after backlash. Apatow himself says that he wasn't watching, and he heard "punch", not "slap" -- which, hey, I noticed that miswording myself, but I suspect the thing that really got him to delete the tweets were questions about him not stepping in when James Franco assaulted Busy Philipps on the set of Freaks and Geeks.
https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/busy-philipps-james-franco-assault-freaks-and-geeks-1202973054/
Hypocrisy can be embarrassing, true, but it could have been avoided if he hadn't been so quick to condemn something that he hadn't even seen with his own eyes. Why would you feel compelled to vividly describe and analyze something you had not even seen? To hear about it and think, "That's not right," is one thing, but there is no need to interject, except maybe there is a sense that it is allowed, and that sense relates to institutional racism.
Speaking of hypocrisy: Jim Carrey also felt free to criticize Smith, though he also got called out on some of his own inappropriate behavior, forcing a kiss on a young Alicia Silverstone when she presented an award to him. (But that wasn't the earlier reference; that was Adrien Brody and Halle Berry.)
Skills that were needed and not present here include de-centering, grounding, and self-reflection.
I do believe there is an eagerness to be able to cast judgment and sound wise. It is really easy to botch that; maybe we generally aren't that wise.
If we want wisdom, it's going to have to include engaging with the past. That includes individual failures and collective ones. There are going to be threads of race and sex and exploitation, and we have to face them.
That is the only way anything is going to get better.
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