Your Folks Have Jokes: Best Black Twitter reactions to Jussie Smollett getting all 16 charges dropped

Jussie Smollett walked away a free man today after all 16 charges against him were dropped. Of course, Black Twitter had jokes.

Mar 26, 2019
Jussie Smollett thegrio.com
In March, Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx dropped charges against Jussie Smollett, a former actor in the hit TV show Empire, for allegedly staging a racist, homophobic attack against himself. (Photo by Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images)

Concluding what has to be the most ridiculous and frustrating celebrity crime “saga” this side of O.J. Simpson, Empire star Jussie Smollett was suddenly and unexpectedly cleared of all charges related to the Jan. 22 alleged hate crime attack that the Chicago Police Department claimed was completely fabricated.

 

 

The whole thing threw everyone’s Tuesday in a tailspin of skepticism, inscrutability and mistrust of the Chicago Police Department. There was also a press conference from a pissed-off lame-duck mayor. It gave Twitter something to do on a Tuesday:

 

First, there was the elation that the dropped charges seem to vindicate Smollett:

 

 

 

There were also the folks who flipped Smollett’s own words when he likened himself to a “gay Tupac.”

And of course, there were folks patting themselves on the back for accomplishing the impossible: shutting the f— up until the whole thing played out.

 

 

The Chicago Police Department was perhaps the biggest (deserving) target of Black Twitter ire. Everyone wondering how the manifold charges against Smollett were just dropped out of nowhere called shenaniganry on the department, which we haven’t really trusted as a collective since the LaQuan McDonald coverup. If you don’t want to read a lot of “I-told-you-sos,” just mute any mention of CPD now.

 

 

 

 

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is the other primary target of skepticism in the whole affair as far as the CPD is concerned. Smollett’s family asked Foxx to intervene shortly following the alleged attack. Since her office dropped the charges against Smollett, it creates a division between the CPD and the state’s attorney office that I doubt we’ve heard the last of.

 

 

 

Chicago’s outgoing mayor Rahm Emanuel had quite a few words for the whole thing, calling the whole issue a “whitewash of justice” and getting louder than we’ve seen him get, perhaps because he has nothing to lose now. But no…Black Twitter is not having it from Emanuel.

 

 

 

The whole issue seems to bring about more questions than answers:

 

 

 

At the end of the day, every last one of us is left with one question that will probably never get answered at this juncture:

 

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Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com. 

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