Oscars 2016: Chris Rock Calls Out Hollywood Racism, But Also Those Who Protest It

Rock immediately dove into the #OscarsSoWhite scandal at the top of his opening monologue; referring to the ceremony as the “White People’s Choice Awards” and joking that if the Oscar host was chosen by an Academy vote, the gig would have gone to Neil Patrick Harris. He called Hollywood’s diversity problem by its proper name – racist – and advocated for giving black actors the same opportunities as white actors, no just once or twice a year but all the time. He also made an incisive observation about the separation of acting categories by gender in a mock-call to create categories based on race.

Hey, if you want black nominees every year, you need to just have black categories. That’s what you need. You need to have black categories. You already do it with men and women. Think about it. There’s no real reason for there to be a man and a woman category in acting. There’s no reason. It’s not track and field. You don’t have to separate them. Robert De Niro has never said, I better slow this acting down so Meryl Streep can catch up. here’s no real reason for there to be a man and a woman category in acting. There’s no reason. It’s not track and field. You don’t have to separate them. Robert De Niro has never said, I better slow this acting down so Meryl Streep can catch up.

But he also took aim at the protests about Hollywood racism.

Now the thing is, why we protesting? That’s the big question. Why this Oscars? Why this Oscars, you know? It’s the 88th Academy Awards. It’s the 88th Academy Awards, which means this whole black nominees thing has happened at least 71 other times. OK? You’ve got to figure that it happened in the ’50s, in the ’60s, you know? In the ’60s, one of those years Sidney didn’t put out a movie. I’m sure there wasn’t no black nominees some of those years, say ’62 or ’63. And black people did not protest. Why? Because we had real things to protest at the time.
We had real things to protest! Too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer. You know, when your grandmother is swinging from the tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short. What happened this year? What happened? People went mad. Spike got mad. Sharpton got mad. Jada went mad. And Will went mad. Everybody went mad, you know. It’s quite like, Jada got mad? Jada says she’s not coming. Protesting. I’m like, “Isn’t she on a TV show?” Jada’s gonna boycott the Oscars? Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rhianna’s panties. I wasn’t invited.

There’s no question Rock’s sendup of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy was coming from a place of amity with those who want to see a meaningful change in whose stories to get appear on screen and who gets to tell them. Rock has been an important, advocating voice against racism for as long as he has been a public figure. But there were moments during Sunday’s show that did not feel intended to empower minorities. The awful racist joke about the Asian accountants, for one. The weirdly classist visit to a Compton theater, which seems like it was intended to demonstrate how the type of films typically given award season accolades often do not appeal to mainstream audiences, but nonetheless felt patronizing to the moviegoers Rock interviewed. And segments of the opening monologue were dismissive of people who don’t have the kind of access and the platform that Rock does. Sometimes, all a marginalized person can do to make a statement is to stay silent, to not show up, to refuse to participate. Who knows – maybe Jada Pinkett Smith was motivated in part by a personal insult she may have felt at her husband’s Oscar snub for Concussion more than the industry’s persistent marginalization of people of color. But that’s not what she said in the Facebook video she uploaded to explain why she wouldn’t be attending this year’s Academy Awards.

The Academy has the right to acknowledge whomever they choose, to invite whomever they choose and now I think that it’s our responsibility now to make the change. Maybe it is time we pull back our resources and we put them back into our communities, into our programs, and we make programs for ourselves that acknowledge us in ways that we see fit, that are just as good as the so-called mainstream ones? I don’t know, but here is what I do know… Begging for acknowledgement, or even asking, diminishes dignity and diminishes power and we are a dignified people and we are powerful and let’s not forget it.

It’s perfectly understandable that a Jada joke made it into Rock’s generally very funny monologue, but I did find it a bit off-putting that he would speak for her, and for those who agree with her that the ceremony should be boycotted, in such a dismissive way. “No one with a job ever tells you to quit,” he said. I’m not seeing the benefit of shaming people of color who haven’t been the exception to the Hollywood rule because they don’t have enough work. Isn’t that the point of this discussion? Aren’t we supposed to be calling attention to the systemic biases in the industry that makes if exponentially more difficult for people who are not white and male in Hollywood to even get in the room?

Maybe I’m being oversensitive. But if I am, it might have to do with the fact that I am a woman, and I have been told for my entire life to not get “worked up” by indignities and injustices large and small, to just “let things go” and be agreeable and cooperative and to “pick my battles,” which is often a euphemism for letting people in positions of power continue to abuse it. It’s great for the Chris Rocks and, yes, the Will Smiths of Hollywood, who are worth tens of millions of dollars and have both appeared on Forbes 100 lists, that they have defied the odds and found a way to succeed in spite of overwhelming obstacles. Sure, Chris Rock can afford to believe that protesting the lack of diversity in the entertainment industry is trivial, but when he makes that protest the butt of a joke, he’s trivializing the struggles of people who continue to be sidelined by industry biases.