Opinion | Should Will Smith’s Slap Be Condemned More Harshly Than Chris Rock’s Words?

Will Smith did not slap Chris Rock in a vacuum. He slapped him after years of offensive statements Rock had made about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Black women’s hair more broadly. Black women have been and continue to be targeted by hair discrimination, so the topic of Black women and their hair is a loaded one. In Pinkett Smith’s case, she has a medical condition known as alopecia that disproportionately affects Black women. To be sure, Rock is a comedian, the Oscars is a time to “roast” celebrities, and it was meant to be a joke. But clearly, to Smith, it did not land that way. Instead of siding with Smith or Rock, I believe the situation is far more nuanced. And it begs a broader question: Should a physical assault always be judged more harshly than a verbal assault, no matter the context? I don’t think so.

Verbal assaults, or verbal abuse, are often excused away as “just a joke,” yet as a psychiatrist, I know that verbal assaults are a form of abuse, and can lead to depressive symptoms and even suicide. The age-old phrase, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is disproven time and time again when I watch the mental health, and subsequently physical health, of children and adults decline due to verbal abuse or bullying.

Once, I was seeing a child patient in the hospital who suddenly lost the ability to walk. After an extensive medical work-up, it was determined that his inability to walk was psychological, so I was called in. It is not uncommon to see scenarios like this in psychiatry, where poor mental health begins to take such a toll on a person that their body begins to develop physical symptoms. I walked into the patient’s room and sat down across from the shy little boy with long hair. We laughed about video games and then I asked him how school was going. The light left his eyes, and the child suddenly became withdrawn. Later, I spoke separately with his parents. I learned that the child was being bullied, under the guise of jokes, about everything from his voice to his hairstyle, and the school had done little about it for years. I called a school administrator and emailed them a letter advocating for the child to be separated from the bullies. “Well, we didn’t see anything physical on the videotape, so we had no idea it was that bad. I mean, we knew kids had made some hurtful jokes, but we had no idea he was struggling that much.” I explained that these jokes had resulted in the child’s hospitalization.

Now, you may say this was an extreme case, and indeed it was. But I have seen countless adults and children who are in therapy and struggling mentally because of jokes made about them that they have never found comical. Yet, these jokes are minimized, excused, and even condoned, without consequence, and any sort of physical altercation, no matter how damaging, is judged harshly.

Another time, a Black child patient of mine slapped a white child patient in the face. The white child was not injured, but a whole protocol was mobilized to address the slap. Yet, the white child had been calling the Black child the “n word” and making comments about his brown skin for weeks, and an all-white staff had watched it happen with no intervention. They documented in the chart that the white patient had used “insensitive words, and was struggling,” but the psychological damage of hate speech on my Black child patient went unmentioned. While it makes absolute sense to address the slap, I could not fathom why a physical act was treated so much more seriously than racist hate speech, which is psychologically violent and has a detrimental impact on the health and well-being of Black children. I also could not understand why the punishment of the Black child was not contextualized as a direct response to weeks of racist hate speech, instead of just a violent act that came out of the blue. In the end, the Black child was punished and called “a violent child” and the white child was protected. To me, that too was condoning violence — verbal violence.

To be clear, I am not saying that people should support physical violence. What I am saying is that if you are going to be anti-violence, then be anti-all types of violence, not just the forms that personally matter to you. If you claim to be sensitive to the potential effects of physical acts, you should also be sensitive to the potential effects of verbal acts. Sometimes, jokes are not entertaining to those targeted by them, and can be just as detrimental as physical violence. Words can, and do, hurt.

Amanda J. Calhoun, MD, MPH, is an Adult/Child Psychiatry Resident at Yale Child Study Center/Yale School of Medicine. She is also a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project at Yale University.