Is it too early to start rehabilitating Jussie Smollett?
The television actor has just been charged with faking a hate crime against himself. But his heart was in the right place: He was trying to bring down two white Donald Trump supporters, one of whom shouted “This is MAGA country” before punching him, calling him racist names, and putting a rope around his neck.
Is there anything too bad for white Make-America-Great-Again Donald Trump supporters?
Let’s say he made it up, like the Chicago cops say. Let’s say instead of being actually attacked by two white Trump supporters he didn’t know, he was fake-attacked by two Nigerian brothers he knows and paid $3,500 to do the deed. Hypothetically.
How much of a problem should this be, really? Since the white Trump supporters who attacked him don’t exist, how can he be guilty of bearing false witness? I mean, you can bear false witness against your neighbor. But can you bear false witness against nobody?
Furthermore, let’s face it: white Donald Trump supporters saying Make-America-Great-Again would definitely attack Jussie Smollett on racist and anti-homosexual grounds, right? I mean, if they knew who he was.
Maybe that was Jussie’s actual mistake: Assuming that the people who hate him just for being who he is … know who he is.
In that vein, this approach might be a way forward for all those prominent Washington Democrats who tweeted condemnation of the terrible racist and bigoted attack on Smollett and lamented about how it says so much about our country.
My personal favorite is the tweet of Adam Schiff, the California member of Congress who managed to name-drop and place-drop his virtue at the same time:
Schiff subsequently deleted this tweet, which is unfortunate, because it implies that there’s something wrong with it.
But is there?
So the facts have changed in this story. Big deal. Facts change all the time. The underlying truth remains. Even if this terrible deed didn’t actually happen, there’s no question that it would have happened if Jussie had waited long enough. Because it’s going to happen to all of us eventually. That’s who these Trump people are. They attack other people just for who they are and what they believe, without any respect for the truth.
Speaking of which, this truth-construct is itself a problem — the idea that there is “a” truth, something we can all work toward and accept. This is Eurocentric, heteronormative thinking. Jussie’s truth is that he was attacked – and indeed, if you saw his performance on TV, it’s clear something happened, even if it’s only in his mind. To my way of thinking, that’s still on Trump.
Donald Trump has created an atmosphere in which a celebrity feels the need to hire two men to jump him so he can show the world just how bad Donald Trump really is.
Not only that, but consider all the people who doubted Smollett’s story before Chicago police announced they had an air-tight case against him for felony disorderly conduct for making the whole thing up and lying about it.
Many of these people publicly doubted the accepted version of events before the people who accepted the accepted version of events stopped accepting it.
There’s only one word for this kind of behavior: racism-homophobia.
Some have pined about the impact this incident has had on America, or on Chicago, or on Trump supporters. But what about the impact it has had on Jussie Smollett?
Once again, there’s no question who’s to blame: Donald Trump.
