Chris Rock is speaking out with a new comedy special and he’s taking on a clear target: Selective Outrage. So what exactly does he mean by that, and does he have a point that today’s brand of outrage is causing a lot of our problems? To Rock, selective outrage isn’t just what you get mad about, but also what you decide not to be mad about, because it doesn’t benefit you. And a selectively outraged mindset may be behind larger problems in our society like hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, and compassion fatigue.
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About a year after the infamous Oscars slap, Chris Rock is speaking out with a new comedy special and he’s taking on a clear target: Selective Outrage. So what exactly does he mean by that, and does he have a point that today’s brand of outrage is causing a lot of our problems?
Rock’s jokes were met with a very mixed response. To some, he seemed to be following in Dave Chappelle’s footsteps with a takedown of “woke culture” that at points critics found lazy or not that funny. But Rock did also accuse people on all sides of the political spectrum of this tendency to pick and choose their outrage.
Chris Rock: “When did white men become victims? White men actually think they’re losing the country. To who? It ain’t us!” – Selective Outrage
To Rock, selective outrage isn’t just what you get mad about, but also what you decide not to be mad about, because it doesn’t benefit you. And a selectively outraged mindset may be behind larger problems in our society like hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, and compassion fatigue. He ultimately ties this all back to what, if we’re being honest, everyone tuned in for: his thoughts on The Slap.
So here’s our take on Chris Rock’s attack on outrage culture, what he gets right and wrong, and whether becoming more conscious of this outrage cycle can break us out of today’s tired back-and-forth culture-war conversations.
Initially, Rock describes selective outrage as a sort of cognitive dissonance people engage in to mask the hypocrisy and superficiality of their stances on what’s acceptable and what’s not. It’s an outrage we engage in only when it’s convenient.
Chris Rock: “Same crime. One of them just got better songs.” – Selective Outrage
There’s also the problem of faux- or exaggerated outrage – performative virtue signaling to an in-group that already agrees with you, which doesn’t really attempt to do anything about deeper problems. This behavior has a strong link to capitalist culture – as Rock points out, corporate rhetoric today about being moral citizens is more-or-less nonsense from entities that exist for a bottom line.
So it’s all this hypocrisy and absurdity that Rock takes issue with. And he’s arguing that today’s quickness to outrage can grow into a sense of false victimhood – using examples like Meghan Markle as someone who isn’t really what most people would think of as a “victim” (and,in Rock’s joke, probably shouldn’t have acted so surprised at the royal family’s behavior)
Chris Rock: “ ‘I had no idea how racist they were.’ It’s the royal family. You didn’t google these motherfuckers?”
Chris Rock: “They invented colonialism! They’re the OGs of racism.” – Selective Outrage
Today more than ever, through who they follow in internet bubbles, anyone can curate their own reality, where they’re often told what to get mad at. They bond with a mob of like-minded folk in not only shared hatred, but also a sense of moral superiority. Woke outrage is a topic that the right likes to harp on, but Rock does allude to the fact that conservatives are at least as (if not more) driven by outrage narratives.
Outside of the special, one clear example of this sort of cognitive dissonance can be seen in the right’s intense backlash toward Samantha Bee for her comments to Ivanka Trump about the White House’s family separation policies, despite those outraged being seemingly okay with Donald Trump’s “locker room talk” tapes.” Jon Stewart spoke to the idea of selective outrage at the time, saying, “Please understand that a lot of what the right does, and it’s maybe their greatest genius, is they’ve created a code of conduct that they police, that they themselves don’t have to, in any way, abide.”
A ton of today’s public discourse is based on people practicing selective outrage, but never ever admitting it, and never getting called on it by their in-group, thus fueling the other side’s outrage and continuing the cycle.
Outside of the blatant hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance, there are two main problems with selective outrage. The first is it breeds compassion fatigue, and the second is it benefits not the victims of real issues, but rather bad-faith politicians and the media.
Let’s start with the media. With the higher ad rates of physical papers mostly gone, journalism lives or dies based on clicks, and feels intense pressure to pander with entertainment and sensationalized headlines over hard news. In a Vox article from 2015, Alex Abad-Santos wrote, “In recent years, those clicks have dovetailed with the prominence of social media — especially Facebook — so most news outlets began to regularly cover stuff that people will want to share on those platforms. Part of that strategy means fueling outrage, because it’s so powerful.”
Basically, outrage equals dollars. Even the reactions to this very special signify the magnetic allure and distracting nature of outrage. Countless think-pieces, tweets and tiktoks came out criticizing Rock for misogyny, misogynoir, anti-black rhetoric, pandering to white audiences, and more – thereby… kind of proving his point.
On the one hand, more liberals seemed “outraged” by some of Rock’s jokes. One tweet wrote that his special belongs on Fox News. While Fox News and the like have praised Rock as “brave”
Ben Shapiro: “...He’s expressing what a lot of people, of various ethnicities, various races, various political points of view. There is going to be an anti-left revolution in this country, and you’re just seeing the first glimmers of it.” – The Ben Shapiro Show
On the other hand, Fox News is the prime example of a media outlet that funds itself through feeding on outrage. And it’s the right’s politicians and political commentators that have made culture war outrage their focus because they know it’s easy, and can pay, to get people selectively angry on topics that distract from concrete needs that their policies aren’t meeting.
Take, for example, the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which many politicians and political commentators on both sides are attempting to shame the other side for. The left is blaming Trump-era politics, and the right is blaming Pete Buttigieg and Biden. Both camps are creating outrage in their bases and forcing people to go after the opposing team, rather than Norfolk Southern, the company that ran the train, and all this just distracts from the sufferings and needs of the East Palestine residents.
So selective outrage is highly unproductive, and inherently empty. Still, on some level it does make sense why it falls within human nature. We can’t get mad about every single issue or wrongdoing we encounter, or else that leads to what some call compassion fatigue.
And that’s the other problem with selective outrage. When we get mad about so many different issues, and often performatively so, we can lose the energy we need to actually do something about it. But as we spoke about in our video on Nepo-babies, anger and outrage have the capacity to enact change, if channeled correctly, rather than performatively. So instead of tweeting at Trump for his deregulation policies, why not give to the people of East Palestine? Maybe instead of going after a comedian about his perceived attitudes towards wokeness, we go after the systemic challenges faced by marginalized groups under heavy fire, like trans youth.
So how does all of this relate to Chris Rock getting slapped by Will Smith in front of the whole world? After a couple of hints, finally at the one-hour mark, Rock wants to talk about the Smiths . To Rock, Will’s reaction is a perfect example of selective outrage. Rock surmised that the true source of Will’s outrage was his wife cheating. But that Will chose not to express his outrage at Jada; instead they sat down on Red Table Talk, from which many memes were born. And again, Will chose not to express outrage at “everybody in the world” who jumped on him after the cheating scandal.
Chris Rock: “Everybody called him a bitch. Everybody!” – Selective Outrage
He only chose to shatter his calm, collected persona when Rock made his heavily dissected joke on stage. Many accused Rock of being insensitive about Jada’s battle with alopecia – however, Rock’s brother Kenny confirmed that the comedian didn’t know about the condition.
Ironically, the reaction to the slap also proves Rock’s point -people will only get mad at something that serves their agenda or doesn’t hurt it. Despite letting Smith keep his Best Actor trophy that he took home the night of the slap, the Academy was able to flex its disciplinary muscles. In addition to condemning Smith’s actions, they banned him from Academy events for a decade.
They positioned themselves as a moral arbiter, however, the hypocrisy is blatant when you realize that the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski still have their Oscars. Weinstein’s actions were famously an open secret for decades in Hollywood, but the Academy selected not to be outraged by that – instead, opting to reap the rewards and publicity of his highly successful films and stars.
The Academy even awarded Polanski his Oscar when he was out of the country – fleeing to avoid conviction for sexual assault. It’s hard not to think about this when reading the Academy’s statement on Will Smith – in which they wrote, “we do not condone violence of any form.” It seems that the only violence they do not condone is violence that occurs in front of their faces… on a live show they’re broadcasting to millions.
In other words, it seems like the Academy had to be outraged about the slap, rather than this coming from a genuine place.The selective outrage label could also point to the audience, who, to the confusion and shock of many, gave Smith a standing ovation when he won the Oscar for King Richard.
Jim Carrey: “I was sickened by the standing ovation. I felt like Hollywood is just spineless en masse.” – The New York Post
And, in truth, Chris Rock’s emotion at the end of the special makes it clear he’s still pretty outraged at Will Smith, and even more so at Jada.
The truth is, every time we succumb to outrage it’s selective.And what you don’t get angry about can also define you in a revealing way. But the problem here isn’t truly selectivity – we have to choose the causes we care most about, as we only have so much time and so many resources. It’s just important that we choose consciously and carefully.
As Chris Rock is taking issue with, discrepancies in your targets and non-targets of outrage can expose your morality as hollow. And blowing up at the wrong target because you’re misdirecting or not dealing with the true sources of your complicated feelings is not a mature, effective way to function in the world. But there are plenty of real problems and injustices that we should be outraged about –and what’s even more important is choosing to do something about that outrage – besides “dunking” “destroying” or “roasting” someone online.
Sources
Abad-Santos, Alex. “2015: a year of fake outrage and backlash that made us feel better.” Vox, 23 Dec. 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/12/23/10659910/2015-outrage
Ricketts, Andrew. “How Marlon Wayans Achieved Something Chris Rock Couldn’t.” Okay Player, 10 Mar. 2023, https://www.okayplayer.com/originals/chris-rock-selective-outrage-netflix-review.html’