Social media is having a field day with comedian Chris Rock’s Netflix special “Selective Outrage.”

Every review I’ve read about the hour-long show has zeroed in on the last eight minutes. That’s when Rock addressed the big incident – Will Smith came up on the stage at the Academy Awards and slapped him.

Netflix viewers came to hear what Rock would say about Will Smith. They wanted blood. They wanted vengeance.

But I tuned in because I’ve seen most of Chris Rock’s stand-up specials, and they were raunchy but funny.

As the special progressed, I stopped wondering about “the slap” and was, instead, intrigued by a couple of stories Rock told.

One was when Rock’s daughter, Lola, snuck out on a high school field trip, went to a bar and got drunk with some White friends.

The school threatened to expel them. The parents banded together and said they were going to get lawyers and sue the school for not supervising their daughters.

Then Rock overheard his daughter and her friends laughing about the incident and how they’d all get out of it. Without telling her or his daughter’s mother, Rock drove to the school, found the dean and told him to expel his daughter.

The dean complied. Rock said his daughter had to write letters and essays to other high schools to find admittance.

She did it.

When it was time to apply for college, she had to write more essays and took responsibility for her actions. She wrote those as well.

Today, she’s in culinary school in Paris doing extremely well.

But that story wasn’t in any review I read. Nor was the story he told about his mother having to go to a vet for dental work when she was a child because White dentists wouldn’t treat Black children.

I thought a lot about those two stories and why the media didn’t at least mention the incidents about the women in his family. For me, those were powerful stories, ones worth hearing and understanding.

But people didn’t tune in to hear Chris Rock talk about parenting or prejudice. They wanted to hear how he was going to get even with Will Smith.

Sensationalism is what gets people to click on articles which generates income. Take a look at the headlines on your news feed. There are certain phrases webmasters consistently use to get you to click on their story – “tragic mistake,” “baffled viewers” and “shoppers swear by this” are a few of the most common ones I see.

Probably a headline promoting how to handle the hard things in parenting wouldn’t generate the same clicks as “A serial murderer lived on my street and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

We’re being led down the path savvy marketers and artificial intelligence wants us to travel. They wanted us to watch the Chris Rock special to find out how he felt about Will Smith. They completely bypassed the first 50 minutes of the special to get to the “juicy” salacious, gossipy part.

And even then, they thought Rock was too easy on Smith or he deserved to get slapped. Our society has gotten quite good at negativity, criticism and sinking to the lowest common denominator.

I wouldn’t put Chris Rock down as a parenting expert. But I would put him down as someone who watched his mother overcome prejudice and poverty.

I’d also say he made some tough decisions to ensure his daughter grew up taking responsibility for her decisions.

Too bad he only gets credit for the “big slap” at the Oscars.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.