The BAFTAs have us arguing over the wrong words

My initial reaction to watching Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo flinch while presenting at the 79th BAFTA Film Awards wasn’t shock or even anger. What struck me first, as they held their composure after someone in the audience shouted the N-word, was exhaustion.

In the hours and days that followed, social media boiled over with rage on behalf of the “Sinners” stars, directed at the man who shouted the slur, John Davidson, the subject of the biographical drama “I Swear.” Accompanying that rage was a fresh explosion of ignorance about Tourette syndrome, the condition that caused Davidson to tic involuntarily throughout last Sunday’s ceremony.

Davidson, who has a symptom of Tourette’s called coprolalia, told Variety that he shouted at least 10 different offensive words during the awards, and the BBC censored all of them except the N-word. This happened despite the BBC airing a pre-recorded version on a two-hour delay. That gave editors ample time to discern what to excise, which included filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. stating “Free Palestine” while accepting an award for “My Father’s Shadow,” his feature-length debut. But somehow the epithet slipped through.

I deeply empathize with Jordan and Lindo — and Davidson, who has expressed profound regret in the days since. But the person for whom I feel the most compassion wasn’t even in the room.

Shayla Amamiya is one of several Black content creators with Tourette’s who have made thoughtful videos explaining what it means to have this disability. Amamiya’s reaction to the BAFTAs circulated the most widely of all of them because, like Davidson, she also has coprolalia, explaining that even she has the N-word as a tic.

“Does this mean that I use them regularly? Does this mean that I mean them? Does this mean that I can control what I say? No, it does not,” she says. “That’s not how coprolalia works. That is not how Tourette syndrome works.”

For performing this service, Amamiya was hounded off the Internet. Racist trolls snipped excerpts of her statement to further weaponize their anti-Black racism. But some Black users heaped abuse on her, too, for saying, “This is not me saying that people don’t have the right to be offended. However, you can’t be offended when a disabled person is disabled.” Hence, my fatigue.

This situation is uncommon. Our nerves are frayed, leaving little patience for nuance. People of color are under siege right now, and so are people with disabilities. Tourette’s is misunderstood, and coprolalia, a symptom of the condition that leads to involuntary swearing, slurs, or other socially unacceptable words or phrases, is even more so. It only affects about 10-15% of people with the disability, according to the Tourette Association of America, yet it defines Tourette’s in the minds of many. It is possible to recognize that Jordan and Lindo should not have been subjected to a racist, dehumanizing slur while carrying out a venerated task, and that better care should have been taken to prevent Davidson from being placed in such a mortifying position.

But this furor lands at a time when even America’s president treats bigotry like a joke. So when an outburst born of misfiring neurons is heard around the world, the overwhelming immediate reaction is to pillory the person who said it, when we should be asking why the international media entity broadcasting it allowed it to be audible.

Regardless of circumstance or intent, that word’s impact knocks the wind out of a person. Where a portion of the public has gone terribly wrong is in indicting the people who have no control over saying it.

“The ableism is so painful to view, and so is the racism,” Amamiya shared in a follow-up text post. “Both sides are understood. But there should be no reason why I’m seeing people say that people with Tourette’s shouldn’t be out in public, that we should be separated, or that we should wear muzzles like DOGS. We are all human  . . . and I hate that two communities are people pit [sic] against each other.”

Knee-jerk rage and ignorance are the internet’s primary fuel sources, so it wasn’t a matter of whether the conversation about the BAFTA debacle would go off the rails, but when.

A week after the fact, most people finally seem to understand that the BBC and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts shoulder the blame for this situation. Both the broadcaster and the arts charity released official apologies, and the BBC promised to investigate the matter. Reaching that conclusion took a lot longer than it should have. On the same night as the ceremony, Lindo told Vanity Fair that he and Jordan simply “did what we had to do” at the podium before revealing that nobody from BAFTA spoke to them directly after they presented.

(Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA) Host Alan Cumming speaks on stage during the EE BAFTA Film Awards

Others took issue with BAFTA’s delay in sending the ceremony’s host, Alan Cumming, to the podium to read what they deemed to be insufficient efforts to make amends: After Cumming explained that Davidson’s tics are involuntary, he said, “We apologize if you are offended tonight.”

A version of the broadcast that included the slur was also still available on the BBC’s iPlayer on Monday, leading to more apologies.

Since then, Variety published a source’s assurance that Warner Bros. execs sounded the alarm with BAFTA right after it occurred and asked that the offending word be removed from the BBC’s broadcast. That this didn’t happen has sparked a back-and-forth about culpability, with Deadline reporting BAFTA’s assurance that it made the BBC and the broadcast’s producers aware that the slur was audible shortly after Davidson blurted it.

From the audience’s perspective, and especially viewers from either or both marginalized populations at the center of this, this is yet more evidence that insult and discrimination are just part of the price of visibility and achievement. But then, as my colleague Sophia Tesfaye observed in her analysis of Donald Trump’s most recent act of televised logorrhea, bigotry is now considered routine.

Welcome to the aftermath of diversity, equity and inclusion’s demise.

Trump joked about the N-word while speaking to military officials and posted a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on his Truth Social account, expressing zero shame in either case. Under his administration, official government agencies’ websites and social media pages have parroted white supremacist slogans and propaganda. Major broadcasters give these outrages the same weight as other headlines. And the issue isn’t limited to legacy media and right-wing politicians, either. Google had to apologize when its automated news alert on this BAFTAs invited curious readers to “see more on” the offending word, hard R and all.

As BBC viewers have pointed out in the BAFTAs aftermath, we shouldn’t rule out that the broadcaster that aired “The Black and White Minstrel Show” for 20 years might not have viewed the N-word as problematic language.

After all, in 2019, the BBC took heat for reprimanding journalist Naga Munchetty for saying that Trump’s call for four non-white Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to countries “from which they came” was “embedded in racism.” A year later, the BBC aired a white person using the slur during a 2020 report about a racist attack, prompting more than 18,600 complaints. Those are just a few reasons that people question the BBC’s insistence that this was a simple mistake.

Regardless, there are folks, including Jamie Foxx, who asserted that it was Davidson, not the broadcaster, who intended to do damage. There are also disability advocates, including singer-songwriter Jamie Grace — who also has Tourette’s — who agree that he should take some responsibility.

“We have a medical condition, not an excuse to be careless. They are not the same thing,” Grace says in her Instagram response. “We’re asking for accessibility, not an open door to cause harm.”

Davidson has expressed his horror at the ordeal, telling Variety that he wondered why he was seated near one of the many microphones placed throughout the venue. Once he realized Lindo and Jordan heard that offensive tic, he removed himself from the auditorium.

He also said he’s reached out to directly apologize to Jordan, Lindo and “Sinners” production designer Hannah Beachler, who revealed in an X post that the Tourette’s advocate said the N-word in her presence as well.

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“I know we must handle this with grace and continue to push through. But what made the situation worse was the throw-away apology of ‘if you were offended’ at the end of the show,” Beachler wrote in her post. “Of course, we were offended . . . but our frequency, our spiritual vibration is tuned to a higher level than what happened. I am not [steel], this did not bounce off of me, but I exist above it. It can’t take away from who I am as an artist.”

True. But it does cloud the gleam of what should be a high-spirited award season for the people who made “Sinners” and “I Swear” — two movies about resilience in the face of violent ignorance.

Yes, it’s exhausting. An awards event that should be remembered for celebrating inclusive art and advocacy ended up confronting the audience with the unglamorous reality of the world’s ugliness — and that no amount of social status or institutional power can protect anyone from dealing with it.