It hurt when the N-word was shouted out at the Baftas – because we are also hearing it so much outside | Nadine White

5 hours ago 4

At the outset of the Baftas, the gilded crowd anticipated historic wins, emotional speeches and enjoying the familiar glow of a cultural institution congratulating itself on progress – whether fully warranted or not.

Then, as proceedings began and as Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo, two of the leading actors of our time, stood on stage, there was the N-word – shouted from the audience by John Davidson, a Tourette syndrome campaigner who also lives with TS and is the inspiration for the Bafta-winning film I Swear.

The BBC later apologised, attributing the outburst to involuntary verbal tics associated with TS and adding that the language was “not intentional”. This is now another very difficult moment for the BBC: what was its judgment, should the epithet have remained audible in a pre-recorded broadcast. Clearly, it should not. One hopes someone will apologise soon to Jordan and Lindo.

But what unsettled me most unsettles me still. I was disturbed by the word, of course. It remains abhorrent and I don’t use it. It carries, in this context, a history drenched in violence and dehumanisation.

Yet I was also struck by a quieter realisation: hearing that terrible word in a mainstream cultural setting no longer felt extraordinary. The shock has dulled. It speaks to our time. And that hurts in itself.

The medical facts are clear. Coprolalia, a symptom experienced by a minority of people with TS, can involve the involuntary utterance of socially taboo language. Neurologists are clear that such tics are not expressions of belief or intent. They are not intentional - and not deliberate. Disability advocates rightly warn against stigmatising those who live with the condition.

But two truths can exist at once. A neurological condition can be real and worthy of understanding, and yet the harm or hurt caused by a racial epithet such as this – at a time like this – can be real.

Think of how this feels today as akin to punching on a bruise. I have reported on race throughout my 14-year career, from discriminatory policing and hostile environment policies to the creeping mainstreaming of xenophobic rhetoric as we heard, for example, in Keir Starmer’s island of strangers speech. And in the past two years in particular, I have been called the N-word online more times than I care to count.

Moderating the Instagram comments section on my platform, Black Current News, over the past few weeks has been sobering. First the posted piece, then underneath, appended with alarming speed, the racial abuse. N-word insults, exhortations to “go back to where you came from” and the panoply of other racist insults.

Today is unsettling because what once would have been shocking has become routine digital background noise.

Many of us Black users have left X, citing the platform’s tolerance of abuse. Only days ago, I covered on my site a story about a poster displayed in Scotland calling for the deaths of Black people which used the N-word. Earlier this month, Jim Ratcliffe, one of our most prominent businesspeople and co-owner of Manchester United, claimed in a Sky News interview that the UK is being “colonised” by immigrants. While he didn’t refer to race, his assertion was understood to have racial connotations, hence the swift response by the likes of the football antiracism charity Kick It Out.

In political debate and online, divisive, hurtful rhetoric is no longer fringe. It is treated as provocative, perhaps, but permissible. That’s the nerve that this unfortunate incident hits.

Desensitisation is dangerous, not because it makes us indifferent, but because it normalises proximity to what is egregious and offensive. The epithet remains violent. What changes is our threshold for reaction.

This is why the Bafta debate that will follow should not focus on words said by one man with a condition, and shouldn’t be a binary argument about disability v racism. It should usefully, however, prompt discussion about the language we use to each other and the cultural environment that exists outside that Bafta ceremony.

I would like to have been more shocked, but when slurs begin to feel almost ordinary, the line between outrage and resignation begins to blur. We never want to hear that word, and right now, we are seeing and hearing it far too often. If you were shocked by hearing it said out loud at the Baftas, imagine some racist shouting it at you in the street.