Writing for the New York Times, Roxane Gay argues that you should never have to take a joke. Instead, thin skin and fragility are the way to go.
Gay is careful to note that her piece is not a defense of Will Smith sauntering onto the Oscars stage to smack Chris Rock over a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. “Instead, this is a defense of thin skin,” she writes. “It is a rejection of the expectation that we laugh off everything people want to say and do to us.”
Gay writes that calling for people to have thick skin when it comes to jokes benefits “those who want to behave with impunity.” “If we all had the thickest of skins, no one would have to take responsibility for cruelties, big or small,” she writes, with “cruelties” apparently standing in for “jokes” in the context of the incident at the Oscars.
It’s understandable what Gay is saying, but she is misguided. The purpose of having thick skin is not to give a pass to people who mock or belittle you (or, less importantly, comedians). It is to prevent you from living a miserable life, where every comment directed against you is internalized and you are in a perpetual state of being offended. You have thick skin so as not to let bullies (or, less importantly, comedians) live rent-free in your head. Insults are supposed to get under your skin and make you miserable. You don’t have to let them, especially if you don’t respect the person making them.
Of course, the real issues here are politics and racism. Gay turns her attention to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing, at which “that distinguished jurist endured all manner of insult, racism and misogyny from Republican senators.” Gay concludes that “most black women” are “constantly a target” of “jokes, insults, incivility and worse.” The piece isn’t about thin skin or having a sense of humor. It’s a racial grievance, bending to find some angle of racism in an incident in which a black man made a joke about a black woman.
The stand-ins for all black women in Gay’s piece are Pinkett Smith (a multimillionaire celebrity), Serena and Venus Williams (multimillionaire athletes), and Jackson, a powerful judge who is being questioned about the sentences she handed down to criminals. (Oh the horror!) The jokes, off-the-cuff comments, and analysis of judicial records directed toward celebrities and prospective Supreme Court justices are not exactly proof of the everyday racist sexism that black women, and apparently only black women, live through in Gay’s view of the world.
Race-baiting aside, Gay has the wrong message. You are allowed to be offended by things people say, but when you decide to go through life with thin skin, you aren’t holding those people accountable. You are making yourself miserable and letting other people’s negativity define you. That is not the kind of life you should aspire to have.
