Stay Solid 2020 ?

A post shared by ???? ????? ?? (@chethanx) on Dec 31, 2019 at 4:18pm PST

The photo above is of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s 29-year-old son, Chet Hanks. Tom and Rita have two sons, Chet (née Chester) and Truman. Colin and Elizabeth Hanks are Tom’s kids with his first wife, Samantha Lewes. At Northwestern University, Chet began a rap career, going by the name Chet Haze. But Chet has had a bumpy time of it. Chet was infamous at Northwestern for some antics and a general whiff of entitlement. He also developed very sad addiction to drugs that crushed his parents. In 2015, Chet really went off the rails and made news regularly for all the wrong reasons. He used and then defended his right to say the N-word, he allegedly trashed a hotel room and got into a Twitter battle with Howard Stern for calling him out for cultural appropriation. In 2016, though, Chet finally got sober when his girlfriend, Tiffany Miles, got pregnant with their first child, a daughter named Michaiah. In 2018, he joined the cast of Empire. It seemed like Chet finally shed all the negative press that followed him around like a bad smell.

But I guess he missed it, because on the night his father accepted the Cecil B. DeMille award at the Golden Globes, Chet decided to do this on the red carpet:

BIG UP FIMI WHOL FAMILY SOON COM AT DI AWARDS NA SEEN ? ? ? CHUNE IN

A post shared by ???? ????? ?? (@chethanx) on Jan 5, 2020 at 7:41pm PST

Right, so Chet thought the best way to honor his dad was to exclaim his joy for the event in patois. Chet is not from the Caribbean. Tom and Rita are not of Caribbean decent, nor are any of Chet’s siblings. I think we can rule out “honoring his Jamaican heritage” as his reasoning for this. I can’t hazard a guess as to what motivated him, except maybe he was just really proud of his patois? Whatever it was, he is clearly not bothered by the attention it’s brought him. He posted a headline from CNN to his Instagram page with the following caption:

Average citizens: damn this is scary I can’t believe we’re on the verge of WW3 let me check the news smh
@CNN:
????????????????

Given Chet’s history with cultural appropriation, at best, this was a questionable choice. At worst, this was an insensitive ploy for attention in which he held no regard for its offensiveness or how it detracted from his father’s night. Because of his dedication to remain sober for his daughter, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I can’t do that when, instead of addressing the public’s questioning of his performance, he wrote it off as a joke.

Rumor on Twitter is that Chet texted throughout the whole GG ceremony. Wonder what dialect he texted in?

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Photo credit: Instagram and Getty Images