hollow apology

I am addicted, hardcore, to the Fox show Sleepy Hollow. It is utterly insane. Ichabod Crane is a former Revolutionary War soldier who wakes up in modern-day Sleepy Hollow and fights demons and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (one is headless, btw) with a small-town police lieutenant and a quirky A-Team of allies. The show just keeps throwing nutty plotballs at you (as Genevieve Valentine puts it in one of io9.com‘s delightful recaps, “use those Egyptian glyphs you carry with your Thracian Phiale to speak to Moloch in Hessian German before the cult can use Cromwell’s Tudor Norse Runes against you! Wait, what?”) but the actors keep grounding this mishegas in reality. Nicole Behaire and Tom Mison are gorgeous, have chemistry to burn, and can rock both humor and pathos (he’s a man cast alone into a brave new world; she’s got a super-damaged childhood and a lot of loss of her own to contend with). John Cho is simultaneously scary, funny and sad as a cop-turned-demon-minion, and Orlando Jones is just perfect as the police captain who does not want to believe his town is overrun by otherworldly harbingers of doom, but circumstances and AK-47-wielding monsters being what they are, he’s starting to adapt. Jones is hilariously deadpan, taking long beleaguered pauses as he and his deputy discuss her need to liberate a demon skull from the morgue to save the universe.

Jones’s apology for a tweet is what brings us here today. (Sorry it took me so long to type this sentence. Have I mentioned I love this show?) On last week’s episode, Ichabod (who is prone to namedropping the Founding Fathers) refused to believe that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. When the notion of DNA evidence is explained to him, he whitemaleprivilegedishly tries to excuse away Jefferson’s behavior; it’s not until he learns that Jefferson also stole a quip from him (“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers,” which Jefferson never actually said, but given that this show has Roanoke settlers speaking Middle English, NO BIG) that Ichabod starts to believe his former friend was truly flawed.

Jones tweeted, “Sally Hemmings — the original Olivia Pope.” This is a reference to the TV show Scandal, wherein Black political fixer Olivia (played by Kerry Washington) once controversially pondered her sexytimes with white U.S. President Fitzgerald Grant III (played by Tony Goldwyn), saying “I’m feeling a little Sally Hemings-Thomas Jefferson about all this.”

Folks on the interwebs got upset about Kerry Washington’s line, and they got upset about Jones’s tweet (since deleted). The Olivia character’s comment was iffy; there is a power imbalance between the President of the United States and, oh, ANYBODY ELSE. But Olivia Pope has a lot more power than Sally Hemings ever did. As the web site Racialicious pointed out, “Olivia Pope can consent to her relationship with Fitz; Sally Hemings could not consent to her relationship with Jefferson. In fact, she was 12 when Thomas Jefferson ‘chose’ her, AND she was his ‘property’ (and his wife’s half-sister). By contrast, Olivia Pope is a free woman who has relative autonomy and class/social mobility. To posit a false equivalency between Hemings and Pope is to ignore the very real questions of consent and agency.” Jones was obviously joking in his tweet comparing Hemings and Pope, but given how clueless plenty of Americans are about race and history and notions of sexual consent, his tweet pushed serious buttons.

Unfortunately, Jones’s apology made things worse. Several grafs into a very long tumblr post, Jones wrote, “The written word can, on occasion, be imprecise and digital media is not necessarily the best way to have nuanced discussions about important issues that require social and historical context as well as sensitivity and maturity.” He went on to talk about his engagement with fans, saying, “I need to be accountable for the things I say. But it has to be a two way street.”

I apologize that I was unable to respond until now but I felt that you were entitled to a thoughtful response which took some time to craft.

The general sentiment I’ve read was that I crossed a line and said something incredibly insensitive and disrespectful. I was sad, but not surprised, that ONLY ONE person took the time to send a private note expressing confusion about my intended meaning and asking me for clarification.

So wait, Jones is turning this around, blaming fans for failing to contact him to ask what he meant? His sin of commission and their sins of omission are equivalent?

Jones goes on to point out that Scandal was created by a Black showrunner. (Actually, he said the showrunner, Shonda Rimes, wrote the episode in question; she didn’t. But I’ll give him this one, ’cause I’m a giver.) He then says,

By way of context I will share that my grandmother gave birth to my father when she was 14 years old by a man more than twice her age. Although she never discussed or presented it as such, no rational person could reasonably suggest that she had free agency in the decision to bear a child while she was herself a child. But to then determine that the circumstances of my father’s birth meant my grandmother was somehow incapable of becoming an important and defining force in his life and as the matriarch of our family is equally as shortsighted.

That’s not context. That’s an excuse. No one is insulting your grandma. The tweet was objectionable because Sally Hemings was not able to give consent; your grandmother becoming a powerful and wonderful lady after being statutory raped is not relevant.

Jones goes on to point out that Hemings probably played a role in Jefferson’s evolving thoughts on slavery (very possible!) and further justifies his tweet and…you know what, go read the post. He concludes with “To be clear; I don’t GIVE offense, you TAKE offense. If I throw something up in the air and you chose to make it your own please remember that I wasn’t specifically talking to you. I was just talking.” OH DUDE. You know who else was just talking? EVERYBODY WHO HAS SAID ANYTHING RACIST, SEXIST, HOMOPHOBIC, AGEIST, SIZEIST, ANTISEMITIC OR OTHER BAD -IST OR -IC, EVER.

Double-plus compounding, Jones went back to add:

EDIT: A number of you wrote to me personally to offer encouraging words about this essay and then point out that my last statement about offense invalidated my previous points since I was essentially blaming others for saying something offensive. To clarify, I didn’t say (nor do I mean) that if people were offended it was their fault. It was not my intention to offend and I apologize to those I offended. What I do mean, however, is that while what is or isn’t offensive can be subjective my intended meaning did matter here and basically no one took the time to ask me that before assigning blame to me. Again, I appreciate this forum and always value thoughtful and constructive feedback even if we don’t agree.

EDIT 2: I think it’s fair to say that I have now officially earned a spot on yourfaveisproblematic.

Whole lotta ifs and conditionals in that edit. Oy. No.

Jones’s feeling that people should have addressed him directly with their concerns is understandable. He’s a person as well as a celebrity. But he is a celebrity. A fascinating one, in that he’s all over social media, tweeting and tumblring and instagramming, live-tweeting his own show, breaking down the fourth wall like nobody’s business. (He even wrote about it for the Huffington Post. All the pics in this post are from his tumblr!)

Jones is usually truly funny, and I love when culture creators embrace fan culture. But it’s vital to note that Jones is still not on equal footing with his acolytes. He’s the famous one, the one with the zillion followers, and he’s the one who gets celebrated, John-Green-style, for the very act of fan engagement. (And again, I do think it’s cool. It’s way more common — and perhaps understandable — for actors to feel the way George Clooney does: “If you’re famous, I don’t—for the life of me—I don’t understand why any famous person would ever be on Twitter. Why on God’s green earth would you be on Twitter? Because first of all, the worst thing you can do is make yourself more available, right? Because you’re going to be available to everybody. But also Twitter. So one drunken night, you come home and you’ve had two too many drinks and you’re watching TV and somebody pisses you off, and you go ‘Ehhhhh’ and fight back. And you go to sleep, and you wake up in the morning and your career is over. Or you’re an asshole.”)

I don’t want George Clooney to be right. But no matter who you are, you have to be accountable for your words. Blaming the audience for not privately calling you on your bullshit when you’re a celeb? Using your accessibility to somehow excuse icky behavior? Trying to contextualize an ill-conceived joke as a way to justify it? Just, no. And Mr. Jones, you have an opportunity here: Humans love when prominent folks use their public flails as a fulcrum for self-reflection and growth, and then apologize menschily. (See Jason Alexander; see Chuck Klosterman.) (And I don’t like yourfaveisproblematic — though I’m grateful to Jones for introducing me to it — because it doesn’t allow comments or conversation or the opportunity to respond to accusations of problematic-ness. There’s no opportunity for self-reflection or growth, on either side of the fourth wall. Bleah.