Thread by @lisasharper

Perhaps the violence displayed between #WillSmith and #ChrisRock at #Oscars2022 was “scarier than a Southern Baptist Convention” because it was an open display of the outcome of four centuries of violence by Southern Baptists on bodies, minds and souls of African descent.

https://twitter.com/BethMooreLPM/status/1508278862509137920

It was #ChrisRock’s bow to white patriarchy by undercutting a sharp Black woman’s hair and calling her less than a woman in front of billions of people.

It was #ChrisRock’s choice to belittle a human being with a disability (alopecia). The roots of white supremacy do not consider the disabled human, therefore they are unprotected from humiliation.

It was embedded in #WillSmith’s trauma triggered response. Will was abused by his father. That abuse was likely generational; tracing back to the trauma of plantation beatings, whippings, family separation, Jim Crow terror, and grief. Now Smith holds that trauma in his own body…

And we all saw the outcome of body trauma. And it shook us…
Because we were watching internalized violence spill out on an international stage.

And no one knew what to do. So, they did what we have done in this nation since 1619–nothing. Literally, no-thing.
#Oscars2022

I have watched the responses—the White women’s calls for criminal prosecution, the Black women’s protection of #WillSmith saying they hope their husbands would respond the same way. Neither of these paths get us to peace or justice—and that is what we all want.
#Oscars2022

The US is the most violent and incarcerated nation on the planet. Violence dehumanizes. Dehumanization is our norm. We dehumanize when we criminalize. And we dehumanize when we justify and accommodate violence because we lack hope for the healing of our trauma.
#Oscars2022

There is another way! There is a way that humanizes all. There is a way that holds the complexity of trauma-infused flesh and trauma-infused families and trauma-infused communities living inside constantly trauma-inducing white patriarchal society.
#Oscars

The journey of this life is NOT to be perfect. It is to be radically reconnected to God, self, others, across genders, between ethnicities, between nations and to the rest of creation. Disconnection got us to that slap.

Radical reconnection is the way to repair.

#Oscar2022

Rather than asking how #WillSmith and #ChrisRock should be punished, we must ask what they need to be reconnected to their own humanity and the human value of the other.

And, How do we transition from a white patriarchal retributive society to the Beloved Community?

#Oscar2022