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Remember when racists were afraid to voice their beliefs in public for fear of being labeled “racists”? I know, it’s hard to think back that far, before 2016 when Fox News gave Tucker Carlson his own prime-time show and “Execute the [Now-Exonerated] Central Park Five” Donald Trump won the election.
We’ve slipped so far. Now barely a day goes by without a major media platform giving equal time to Jim Crow-era ideals (because there are always two sides), a member of Congress explaining away their leader’s stunningly bigoted Truth Social post, or a major cultural institution normalizing a word that should never be normalized because they failed to see it as offensive.
This week, the N-word was shouted at “Sinners” actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo as they presented the honor for visual effects during the BAFTA Awards ceremony in London. The slur was involuntarily blurted by John Davidson, whose life experience dealing with Tourette syndrome inspired the film “I Swear.” The situation was painful and humiliating, but given the circumstances, the offensive nature of the incident could have been handled with common sense and empathy. Yet the British Broadcast Co. deployed none of that.
Instead, the BBC failed to remove or bleep the slur from its initial broadcast, even though it had a two-hour delay before the show aired on BBC One in the U.K. Even after the outcry over the inclusion of the N-word in its initial broadcast, the network waited almost 15 hours before removing the slur from BBC’s iPlayer streaming service.
In a statement, the BBC said that the slur was “aired in error” and that it would “never have knowingly allowed this to be broadcast.” Yet the BBC did catch and remove a remark by “My Father’s Shadow” director Akinola Davies Jr. that it found to be offensive. His call to “free Palestine” was deleted from the recording before the show aired. #BBCPriorities.
And because everything must be swept up, co-opted and expanded upon by AI, the repeating of the offensive word wasn’t just confined to the BBC’s airing of the award show. Google apologized Tuesday after a computer-generated news alert about BAFTA’s racial slur incident included the word. Its notification alert, linked to an article from the Hollywood Reporter, invited readers to “see more,” leading them to additional context that included the slur.
In a statement, Davidson said he was “deeply mortified if anyone considers my involuntary tics to be intentional or to carry any meaning.” He removed himself from the audience during Sunday’s show to avoid another potential incident.
There’s no reason why we can’t acknowledge Davidson’s disability while also recognizing the harm that the word caused. He sees it, of course. The aforementioned film inspired by his life shows what it’s like to live with involuntary vocal tics that belie your own beliefs or intentions.
Lindo and Jordan’s Oscar-nominated film, “Sinners,” depicts another sort of struggle: Black people trying to survive, and daring to thrive, in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. White people hurl the N-word at them daily, accompanied by varying degrees of hatred, disgust and violence. The film reinforces a basic truth, that the word isn’t just a word. It’s a holdover from the Antebellum South, used to demean and dehumanize, to shackle self-determination, to keep Black folks down. How anyone in the BBC edit bay, or otherwise, could miss such a hateful, loaded slur is frankly unbelievable.
BAFTA apologized for putting guests in a “very difficult situation” and thanked Jordan and Lindo for their “incredible dignity and professionalism.” It wasn’t a great response. The actors were humiliated on a public stage, in front of their peers, then thanked for keeping their cool, as if it was up to them to save the day — when they were the targets of the slur. As a colleague of mine said, “It’s always ‘be professional,’ and ‘act with dignity and grace,’ when you just want to flip a table.”
The BAFTA slur heard round the world, or at least on both sides of the Atlantic, was not an intentionally deployed hate bomb. But it still stings, especially here in the United States, as racist rhetoric from on high has hit a fever pitch.
Trump earlier this month posted a video on Truth Social depicting former President Obama and wife Michelle Obama as apes. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially defended the post, claiming it was part of a longer video that portrayed Trump as “King of the Jungle” and Democrats as characters from “The Lion King.” She told critics to “stop the fake outrage.” The video was deleted 12 hours after it was posted, and the White House blamed a staffer for “erroneously” making the post. Trump never apologized, claiming he “didn’t see” the portion of the video’s racist imagery. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.
MAGA’s reaction to Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny performing the Super Bowl LX halftime show added to the xenophobic pile-on, from Trump calling the selection of the Spanish-language rapper and singer a “terrible choice” for the show and saying “all it does is sow hatred,” to counterprogramming for conservatives by Turning Point USA pointedly called the “All-American Halftime Show.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson rallied behind the alternative to Bad Bunny.
Today’s onslaught of racist ideology isn’t just confined to rhetoric. ICE’s immigration sweeps of American streets have targeted people who look like immigrants, and the administration is looking at ways to whitewash the horrors of slavery by changing how Black history is presented at public sites and museums. (Trump says historical sites focus too much on slavery instead of the “success” of the country.)
There’s plenty of pushback, but there’s also plenty of capitulation from media outlets who fear being sued (or worse) by a weaponized FCC.
Davidson now says he intends to apologize directly to Jordan and Lindo for his BAFTA Awards outburst. But he’s shouldering a burden that all the entities involved should claim. There’s no scapegoat here, just the daily erosion of civility and the undermining of hard-fought freedoms.
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Lorraine Ali
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