We're All Still Pretty Pissed Off

The Slap reminds us that the pandemic changed our relationship with violence. We're still guessing at why.

My first instinct was to ignore Will Smith and Chris Rock. Honest.

We are awash in hot takes about the privileges of wealth and celebrity, Black women as rhetorical punching bags, Black men as literal punching bags, cancel culture and respectability politics. References to the Boondocks and Charlie Murphy stories abound.

Famous multimillionaires do not have problems that I care about. I have enjoyed both Smith’s and Rock’s movies and respected their public commentary over the years, but I write about why poor people have been shooting each other, and these two men have nothing much to do with that.

Still. It’s a remarkable moment.

Consider that a person who said “We are talking about race in this country more clearly and openly than we have almost ever in the history of this country. … Racism is not getting worse, it’s getting filmed,” just slapped a person who said “When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. … The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let's hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”

An insightful, thoughtful, accomplished man known for personal cool and an image as a positive role model just lost it smacking a man known equally for the same things live on TV. It is only by the power of celebrity, the dint of that history of thoughtful accomplishment — and perhaps absolute shock — that Smith wasn’t frog-marched out of the building by security.

Nonetheless. I don’t actually care about what happens to Smith. He’ll be fine. So will Chris Rock. It’s dramatic, and they’re both actors. Drama is the point.

But this moment is a window into a larger social phenomenon that’s devastated America and isn’t well understood: the uptick in violence at all levels since the beginning of the pandemic.

People everywhere — this is not specific to America — have grown more violently confrontational over the past two years. Domestic violence rates have increased almost everywhere. Shootings have increased broadly.

Researchers started noticing it early in the pandemic, because it was pretty obvious. Never mind the uptick in murders; people were getting into fist fights over being told to wear a mask. People were flipping out in airplanes, or in restaurants, or on the road, or at school board meetings.

Financial stress explains some of the increase, particularly in domestic violence. People haven’t been as able to run from a bad situation, which raises violence risks. Tight quarters, long COVID-19-driven court delays and financial problems make violence more likely.

Policy makers have been focused on the top-line problems: gun violence and domestic violence. But that’s not the whole story. In Atlanta, we’ve seen some stunningly trivial disputes become lethally violent. The Loca Luna shooting comes to mind, which started after two women got into an argument in a parking lot. Workmen have been shot over loud noise in the morning.

Broader pandemic rage is real. We tend to view it through a lens of people being angry at the pandemic, or at people who are flouting pandemic restrictions, or people imposing those restrictions. But it’s more than that. An uncounted number of us are stalking the world with frayed nerves and a hair trigger in ways that weren’t as prevalent as before.

And, really, we don’t fully understand this phenomenon yet. It’s still too new. The academic literature and research data isn’t especially robust, because there hasn’t been enough time or academic firepower to get at it. Most of the research has been focused on murders and domestic abuse. The World Health Organization reports a 25 percent increase in anxiety and depression since the start of the pandemic but doesn’t connect it directly to increases in violence.

Atlanta’s police chief, Rodney Bryant, has been begging people all year to find a way to resolve interpersonal disputes without resorting to violence, because a disproportionate and unusual amount of the violence his department has been addressing this year is … well, idiocy.

I’ve spent the last year looking at the reasons violent crime increased in Atlanta, and the reasons are many. Gang violence has exploded, fueled by music industry cash and street beef. Domestic violence increased. Young people have been only casually connected to school rooms in remote learning conditions. We’re swimming in a flood of guns. The police have a recruiting and retention problem. The public still hasn’t come to terms with cops over police misconduct issues, and cops still haven’t come to terms with City Hall over the same issues. Deep poverty in the most unequal city in America multiplies all the other problems.

But there’s one thing that’s hard to quantify that’s still hanging over all of these solvable problems: we’re all still kind of pissed off at each other. The pandemic has created a broad-based mental health pandemic every bit as real as COVID-19. And we see bits and pieces of it poking out at us in the headlines … or on TV in the palm of Will Smith’s right hand.