The Snake in the House: Stephen A. Smith Went Where He Was Always Going to Go
Somebody gave Stephen A. Smith a thumbs down and he took it to Sean Hannity.
The award isn't really what I want to talk about. The errand is. But you need the facts first, so: on a Saturday night in Atlanta, the National Association of Black Journalists handed out five Thumbs Down awards, the most it has ever given at one time. Smith got one, alongside FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, CBS, The Washington Post, and broadcaster DuJuan McCoy. The citation said he "has established a recurring public pattern of disparaging commentary directed at prominent Black women across politics, sports, and media." By Monday afternoon he'd posted a 45-minute video calling it "a personal hit job." By that night he was sitting across from Sean Hannity on Fox News, saying he was raised by five Black women, that the charge is "a flat-out lie," and that NABJ would regret it, because "I'm not going away."
Stephen A. Smith is a detriment to the Black body politic.
I've been turning that word over for two days looking for a gentler one, and I don't have it. So here's where I've landed. The only correction that will ever reach a man like this is the one we keep refusing to use, and it isn't a rebuttal or a debate or a thread. It's indifference. Stop watching him. Stop clicking. Stop arguing with him in public where the numbers can see you do it. All of it pays him.
The man told us his whole business plan years ago
Smith has never hidden the operating system. His own famous line: "I go to work every day with two missions. Two! No. 1: how can I make my bosses more money? And No. 2: how can I get some of it?"
That gets quoted like it's swagger. It isn't swagger, it's a worldview, and there is no third mission anywhere in it. Nowhere in there is the truth, or the people, or the record. Two missions, both of them money, his bosses' first and his second.
Set that against the actual life. Nine-figure conversations. A contract most working journalists couldn't dream of. Cars, green rooms, and a payroll of people whose entire job is to keep him comfortable, which is not a sin, and I want to be careful here, because Black wealth is not a sin and I'm not about to stand up and pretend it is. I want the man to eat. But there is a difference between eating and forgetting the table you came from, and you cannot spend twenty years optimizing for the approval of executives and still tell me your ear is to the ground in a barbershop on Kingsessing Avenue. Those are two different frequencies. Somewhere in there the working-class Black America he keeps invoking stopped being his community and became his content.
I don't think that distance is beside the point. I think it explains everything that happened next.
Why Hannity, and not one of us
Every room he needed was already open to him. Roland Martin runs a daily show. Don Lemon has a platform. TheGrio, Capital B, NewsOne, The Washington Informer, Black-owned radio in every major market in this country. Any of them would have taken that interview in a heartbeat, and half of them ran the story anyway.
Walk into one of those rooms and you get two things you can't get anywhere else. Somebody CHALLENGES you, meaning they make you answer for the pattern instead of reciting your résumé at them. And somebody UNDERSTANDS you, because the people asking know exactly what it costs to be a Black man carrying that kind of visibility in America, and they would have granted him that even while taking him apart.
That's the harder room. It's also the only one where a man comes out different than he went in.
He picked the other one. He picked the network whose posture toward Black public life is a matter of record: the house where Bill O'Reilly, back in 2017, looked at Congresswoman Maxine Waters and could only see a "James Brown wig." The same house that in July of 2024 watched Donald Trump stand on the NABJ stage in Chicago, call ABC's Rachel Scott's question "nasty," suggest Kamala Harris "happened to turn Black," and then spent the following week deciding the Black journalist was the problem.
Two years later a Black man walked into that machine carrying a grievance against Black journalists, and handed it over like a gift.
He knew what he was handing over, too. He learned this business from the men who built it. Hannity and O'Reilly proved the thesis decades ago: scolding Black people in public isn't a risk, it's a revenue line. There is a permanent, well-funded audience in this country that will pay very well to hear a Black man say the thing they can't say themselves. He didn't stumble into that market. He's a devout capitalist. He found the arbitrage and he worked it the way he'd work anything else.
"I was raised by five Black women"
The defense falls apart the second you put any weight on it.
I can't have disparaged Black women. I was raised by five of them.
Run that same architecture somewhere else and listen to how it sounds. I can't be a wife-beater, I have a mother. I can't be racist, I've got a Black friend. Proximity was never character, and being loved by Black women has never once guaranteed a man would speak well of them. Not in this country. He's answering a charge about a pattern by telling us about his childhood, and those are not the same subject.
He knows it, too. Interrogating what a man produced instead of what he meant is HIS ENTIRE JOB. Put a quarterback in front of him after four interceptions and let that quarterback start talking about his charity work and how much his mother loves him, and Stephen A. would take him apart on live television, and he'd be right to.
The counterpoint, honestly stated
Two serious arguments run against everything I just said, and grown folks I respect make both of them.
The first: ostracism is what they do to us. A community that punishes its own dissenters gets stupid fast, and free thought inside Black America is not up for negotiation. The second one I take even more seriously. Framing any of this as Black men against Black women is itself the wedge. NABJ could have said Smith harmed Black people, or that he was off code, and carried the same charge without handing anybody a division to exploit.
I hear both. The numbers don't bear the first one out.
Ostracism, the real thing, comes with a jail and a border and men with guns. What I'm describing is a man with a remote control. Nobody can silence Stephen A. Smith and nobody should try. He has ESPN. He has a platform he built with his own hands. What I'm saying is that we should stop being the unpaid labor that makes it worth anything. Call that what it is: consumer behavior. Every industry on earth understands the difference, and somehow we're the only people who get told that declining to spend our own attention is a kind of tyranny.
On the wedge, I'd say this. Look at the citation and the record underneath it. Harris. Michelle Obama. Jasmine Crockett. Joy Reid. Pretending that pattern has no gender in it doesn't protect us from anything. It just leaves us worse at describing what we're looking at.
The trojan horse
This last piece is bigger than one man, and it's the reason I bothered writing any of it down.
That "free thinker" pose does work. Not neutral work, either. Civic ignorance dressed up as independence and broadcast at that scale teaches a Black audience to distrust its own institutions and its own journalists, and once that lesson takes, it doesn't stay contained. Every serious movement we've ever built started from the assumption that we could believe each other. That assumption is the infrastructure. Everything else sits on top of it. He erodes it for a living and calls it having an opinion.
There's a line that's followed Patrice Lumumba's name around for decades. I can't source it to a speech, and I'd rather say that than pretend: the snakes inside your house that you do not see will do far more harm to you than the pack of jackals howling outside your door.
True whoever said it first. We know the jackals. We know their names, we watch the door, we've been watching that door for four hundred years. The damage that actually lands comes from inside the house, from the familiar voice, the one with the credentials and the cadence and the Sunday-dinner story, the one nobody thinks to guard against.
Smith has shown us which one he is. Repeatedly. In public.
What I'm actually asking for
Don't hate him. Hate is engagement, and it pays exactly the same.
I'm asking for something colder and considerably harder to do. Don't quote-tweet the man. Don't drop the clip in the group chat with "look at this fool." Don't build a whole segment around him. I'm aware of the glass house I'm sitting in as I type that, which is part of why I wanted to say it all the way through one time and then be done.
And I want to be clear about who did this. Not Fox. Not ESPN. We did. Our clicks, our outrage, our appetite for watching somebody get read on the internet. We built the habit and then turned around and complained about the habit.
Break it.
We pay for our attention whether we notice the charge or not. I'd just rather stop paying it to people who bill us for the privilege of being insulted.
Informed. Intelligent. In The Black.
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