On Sunday, Feb. 22 at the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA), “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo took the stage to present an award when a voice from the audience cut through the ceremony; the N-word shouted by John Davidson, a Tourrettes syndrome activist whose life inspired the BAFTA-nominated film “I Swear.”
Davidson’s condition includes coprolalia, the involuntary utterance of taboo or offensive language. Reportedly, he left the auditorium shortly after, describing himself as “deeply mortified.”
The science is not in dispute. Coprolalia is a documented neurological symptom affecting roughly 10 to 20 percent of people with Tourette’s syndrome. A common misconception is that tics reveal what someone is truly thinking, when in reality, they often compel people to say or do precisely what they wish to avoid. This distinction is important and deserves to be explored completely.
And yet, Jordan and Lindo stood at the podium, absorbed the blow and continued their segment. Production designer Hannah Beachler later said that she heard the slur multiple times throughout the night, including once directed at her and at another Black woman present. What compounded and ultimately worsened the harm, she said, was host Alan Cumming’s closing remark apology where he used the words, “if you were offended.” That point did real damage, reframing a certainty as a matter of personal sensitivity.
The institutional failure at hand is much harder to excuse than Davidson’s tics. The BAFTAs air on a two-hour tape delay; plenty of time to make decisions regarding cutting the segment or not, which initially, they didn’t. It aired on BBC One and remained available on BBC iPlayer until Monday morning, when it was quietly removed.
Actor Wendell Pierce put it plainly: “The insult to them takes priority. It doesn’t matter the reasoning for the racist slur.” BAFTA’s eventual written apology acknowledged that the language “carries incomparable trauma and pain for so many,” but it came after the broadcast, after the harm had already been multiplied and beamed into homes all across the world.
Compassion for Davidson and accountability to the Black people in that room are not wholly mutually exclusive, yet, the responses to the situation treated them as if they were; the night required holding space for both. Black individuals are routinely asked to be the most understanding people in any given room, to absorb harm with grace while the institutions around them sort out their priorities in the aftermath. Understanding a neurological condition doesn’t mean flattening the experience of everyone who sat there in that audience that night and had to keep their composure.
While the image of what Black dignity is meant to look like continues to rise, as seen within this deeply nuanced experience, the standards for how institutions are meant to handle these situations are yet to change.
