Amid the glitz and glam of awards season, the BAFTA Film Awards are usually treated like the annoying little brother—or odd, distant cousin—of the much more prestigious Academy Awards and the much more intoxicated Golden Globes. But this year, a surprise outburst at Sunday night’s BAFTA ceremony has them trending in the discourse on two continents, after a man named John Davidson yelled a racial slur (yes, that racial slur) at actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo as they presented the award for Special Visual Effects.
Davidson, 54, is afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological condition whose symptoms cause involuntary tics, including coprolalia—or, to the layperson, shouting swear words. A film based on Davidson’s life, rather providentially titled I Swear, was up for six BAFTAs that night; the audience had been alerted that someone with Tourette’s was in the building, and BAFTAs host Alan Cumming acknowledged the outburst with an apology from the stage. But Davidson’s involuntary shout was picked up by the cameras, as were Lindo and Jordan flinching a bit in response, fueling a controversy that has continued to escalate in the days since.
Within 24 hours of the incident, two distinct teams had emerged: Anti-Racists on one side, Anti-Ableists on the other, locked in battle over who had been the victim of the greater offense.
For anyone who lived through the era that my friend and podcast co-host Phoebe Maltz Bovy refers to as the Long 2010s, the rhetoric coming out of the Team Anti-Racist camp will be the more familiar of the two. Woke may be in cultural decline, but its die-hard adherents still exist in alarmingly large numbers, and they’re starving. Davidson looked like so much fresh meat.
