Deeper Than Hair – The Oscars' Incident

At the 2022 Oscars, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock after he made a joke about Jada Smith’s hair. Before Will Smith walked up on the stage to slap Chris Rock, Jada expressed vexation towards Chris Rock’s remark of her resemblance to a movie character named G.I. Jane who also has a shaved head. 

In the past, Jada has made statements about her hair, explaining how she is dealing with alopecia, a condition responsible for hair loss. She explained that when she was first dealing with this condition, she felt fear of losing clumps of her hair, so she decided to follow in her daughter’s (Willow Smith) footsteps and shave her head as well. 

In today’s age, the discussion of black women’s hair is a popular topic. Though black women’s hair is often trending and uplifted in the media, it’s also the most frequent to be degraded. Decisions black women make for their hair are the quickest to receive judgment within and outside of the black community. It wasn’t until 2019 that the CROWN Act was passed in various states that made it illegal to discriminate against natural hair in corporate jobs.  

In 2009, Chris Rock made a short film on black women’s hair called Good Hair in an attempt to document black women’s hair and natural beauty. The incident at the Oscars made lots of people suspect that his film was performative and that he strayed away from this ideology. As the film speaks on representation of black women hairstyles, people see it now contradicts Chris Rock’s past intentions of uplifting black women’s hair seeing how he reduced Jada Smith’s hairstyle. Brennan Johnson, a PR consultant from NBC News, comments, “As a Black woman who willingly shaved my head 11 years ago, I can absolutely relate. I don't have alopecia, but I've dealt with the same humiliation that Pinkett Smith and a lot of other Black women experience by wearing our hair in its natural state… the underlying context remains the same: Black hair is not beautiful or socially acceptable.” 

After the incident, Jada Smith posted on her instagram “This is a season for healing and I’m here for it.” With no further insight into the response to the incident, fans saw this as Jada Smith’s way of addressing the negativity that revolved around her hair and took it as an opportunity to heal and grow with it. 

By Kayla Beasley