The tic and the taboo
The BAFTA Tourette's scandal is stupid and so is "the N-word."
The 79th British Academy Film Awards were interrupted last week when a man in the audience shouted “nigger” as actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan stood on stage presenting an award, yet incredibly, the situation managed to get even worse when we all found out that the man who shouted “nigger” was John Davidson, whose life story inspired the film I Swear about his struggle with severe Tourette’s syndrome, and instead of showing him some measure of compassion and understanding, people accused Davidson of racism and demanded that he apologize, then SNL mocked him for good measure, specifically making fun of his condition, even calling the skit “Tourette’s” and comparing him to the likes of Bill Cosby. At this point, even if he had actually shouted “nigger” in pure racist hatred, it would not have been as bad as this because one racist in the audience is not remotely as serious a moral concern as the fact that we have created a situation where hundreds if not thousands of people are perfectly willing to bully an innocent disabled man over a misunderstanding.
Of course, we’ve been doing this to innocent people for years, and the favorite tactic of attack has always been to pretend someone is racist so you can tear them down. Now it’s happening to a man with a disability that, until last week, everyone with a room-temperature IQ understood makes you say things beyond your control. People are even claiming that if you defend Davidson, you’re a white supremacist. The Sinners actress Wunmi Mosaku said she’s “not sure” if she can forgive BAFTA and that the traumatic experience “kept me awake at night.” People have begun using the term “black fragility” to describe such clownish reactions, a term the always insightful John McWhorter has been using since at least 2021 when he wrote about the preposterous sensitivity to “nigger” among black Americans:
Law professor Jason Kilborn cited the N-word (and the B-word) on an exam thusly: n****, b****. It was in a question about an employment discrimination case. He has done so for years previously to no comment — as all reading this but a sliver would expect. But this year, a group of black students initiated a protest against him for harming them in exposing them to this expurgated rendition of the N-word. That is, in a class training them in litigation in the real world. One black student claimed that they experienced heart palpitations upon reading the words.
Heart palpitations. Upon reading a word on the page. Not even the word “nigger,” but merely a hint of the word as “n****.” Kilborn then attended an hours-long Zoom talk with a black student representing the protesters who wanted him gone for his heinous crime, in an attempt to clear up any misunderstanding, after which the student reported to the dean that Kilborn might even be a “homicidal maniac.” By the time McWhorter was writing his essay, Kilborn was no longer teaching the class, was relieved of his administrative duties, and because of the possible physical threat he posed to black students as a “homicidal maniac,” was even barred from campus. Sadly, that is how sensitive many black Americans have become to this word. That is the black fragility McWhorter references in the title of his essay. But while “white fragility” essentially refers to having a healthy sense of self-respect, such that one will speak up in order to reject racist guilt-tripping — that’s basically how the term is defined by Robin DiAngelo, who coined it — “black fragility” instead refers to having a profoundly unhealthy sense of self, to the point of narcissism, and is synonymous with narcissistic injury, meaning the grossly disproportionate psychological wound that a narcissist feels when they perceive themselves to be disrespected.
Consider, for instance, what other black entertainers said about the BAFTA scandal: that this proves “we still don’t understand what inclusion means,” that the experience was “painful,” that in the future any white men with Tourette’s in the audience when a black person is speaking “better double up” on their meds, and even that “he shouldn’t have been in the room.” That’s right, we should start prohibiting people with disabilities from attending public events in order to avoid hurting black people’s feelings. News reports cannot even bring themselves to repeat the word “nigger,” not even in print, as if merely citing what happened, which is why the news exists, would be seen as furthering the imaginary harm done, or perpetuating the racism that never actually took place. So instead, news reports talk about “a racial slur” or, if they’re feeling brave enough to inch a little closer to the facts, they might say he uttered “the N-word.” People are even complaining that BBC didn’t edit it out, as if merely hearing the word on TV, even though we know it was the result of a motor disorder, might cause devastating harm. As if black people are constitutionally so fragile that the psychic shock of those two syllables might cause them literal trauma, perhaps bringing back all the horrific memories of slavery that neither they nor their grandparents suffered.
Later at the NAACP Image Awards, Lindo opened by saying, “We appreciate all of the support and love we have been shown in the aftermath of what happened last weekend.” Give me a break. “All the love and support”? Did Lindo just recover from a life-threatening bout of cancer? Did he just come out recovery from meth addiction? “In the aftermath of what happened”? Wait, what happened exactly? I must be completely lost because I was convinced that what happened was that absolutely nobody did absolutely anything wrong, that nobody hurt Jordan or Lindo in any way, but that at the back of the room, one man was struggling with a disability. Others assumed malicious intent despite knowing Davidson has Tourette’s. Jamie Foxx, who has said he loves killing white people in movies, decided to wade in by saying, “Out of all the words, you could’ve said Tourette’s makes you say that?” and “Nah he meant that shit.” Well, Jamie, it’s 2026 so I can say this now: Stop being a retard.
Tourette’s is best understood not as a disorder of speech or personality, but as a disorder of neural inhibition. It involves dysfunction in the brain circuits responsible for selecting and regulating motor output. The most important of these circuits is the cortico–striato–thalamo–cortical (CSTC) loop (yes, I had to look that up and don’t ask me to remember it later), a feedback system linking the prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus. When this loop functions smoothly, it allows desired actions to proceed while preventing unwanted ones from breaking into conscious behavior. In Tourette’s, that gating system is unstable. Fragments of motor programs “leak” through. Many individuals with Tourette’s describe a rising internal tension, or pressure, that’s temporarily relieved when the tic occurs.
Also, only about 10% of people with Tourette’s have coprolalia, which is what makes you say offensive things. Emotionally charged language — especially taboo words — activates limbic structures more strongly. These words carry high emotional weight and are tightly regulated by social norms. It’s precisely because of this that they are heavily “tagged” by inhibitory systems. It’s a survival mechanism. The brain marks these words as powerful and potentially dangerous in social contexts. So in a way, you could say Davidson had that tic not because he’s racist, as some have foolishly claimed, but because he’s not, and therefore in his mind flagged that word as extremely taboo. You could also say this happened because leftist black Americans and their woke allies have decided to make the word the most taboo word in the English language, investing it with so much social power that it becomes the most likely word to get tagged in a way that would turn it into a tic.
I truly feel for Davidson. This latest chapter in the culture war is so frustratingly stupid it’s like a really bad episode of The Jerry Springer Show. And yet this is a painful but needed reminder for our nation that the absurd hypersensitivity Americans have around the word “nigger” is actually really unhealthy and will inevitably lead to situations in which innocent people are trampled over pretend harms, which is precisely what happened here. We should be ashamed of ourselves for becoming so profoundly unkind in the name of kindness. In the end, that’s the real takeaway. But I have two personal stories I’d like to share about this word before I go.
One is that I remember sitting with my cousin Anthony one time when someone used the word “nigger” nearby. My mother’s side of the family is Bahamian and most of my relatives down there are black, including Anthony. I grew up with him, have taken great pride in watching him mature into manhood, brag about him all the time to anyone who will listen, and love him very much. At the time, we were out at a bar drinking Hennessy and talking about life. He was beginning to show an interest in electrical engineering, an interest that only blossomed since, and he was telling me about building circuit boards and how he was using them with electromagnets when someone in the crowd shouted the word in anger and it sliced the air.
Although the person wasn’t directing it at Anthony, I noticed a subtle shift in his expression, a kind of flinch like he’d been jabbed with a small needle, and even though I know that unconscious pain is something society has helped shape in him by convincing him the word has such power, nevertheless he has been convinced, and now that he has, it does hold that power for him, and so while I want the word to lose that power, I also don’t want him or others to suffer hearing such hateful terms and then feel that twinge of pain. Nobody wants those they love to feel hurt. But also, Anthony is much younger than me, and as such, I have always looked on him as a kid brother. Maybe it’s the protective big brother in me, but I don’t want him to harbor that pain either. I want him to outgrow it. I want him to be someone who, if a racist spat that word in his face, wouldn’t tremble and run home to nurse his injured soul. Instead, I want him to be someone who’d shrug and think to himself, What a piece of shit, but otherwise feel nothing. And if hearing the word more often means it loses its sting and hurts him less in the long run, I think that’s the better path.
The other story I want to share is that when I was teaching in China, a student named Hang once asked me if there were any words he should know to avoid using when he visited America. Naturally, the first one that came to my mind was “nigger.” That, above all words in America, is the one you don’t want to say. And I knew that he was a fan of rap music, so there was a risk. I wrote “nigger” on the board along with a few other words to avoid. Also, in Mandarin Chinese, the filler word used when you’re thinking what to say next, where you would say “um” in English, is neige, literally meaning “that.” But it can sound like “nigga,” depending on one’s accent. I told him to be careful about that too. A teacher who worked in the same building as me, an American woman, saw what was on the board and became livid. Even though I explained to her what I had been doing, she didn’t care. There was no reasoning with her. I thought she had nearly lost her sanity. This was long before “woke” existed in a pejorative sense, and I had been living in Asia at this point for nearly 20 years so I was out of touch with American society. I had no earthly idea back then that so many of my fellow citizens would take her side, given half the chance.
Clearly, when we are attacking disabled individuals for having a disability, things have gone horribly wrong. And when it comes to this word, things went wrong a long time ago. We should’ve never pretended that any single word can be so powerful, and we should’ve never taken anyone seriously who claimed to be so mortally wounded by the word that its speaker ought to pay some price. We should’ve never stopped reading Huck Finn out loud. We should’ve never fired any professors who did. We should’ve never stopped singing our favorite rap lyrics. There was a girl who got in trouble in the UK because she posted her dead friend’s favorite rap lyrics on Instagram in memory of him, and that should’ve never happened. There was a professor who got in trouble for teaching Mandarin grammar by explaining the filler I mentioned above, and that too should’ve never happened. This is all absolutely insane, but it’s also the direct consequence of our sensitivity around this word and around racism in general. Yes, kids, racism is bad. It’s evil. But words are not evil. Not even really, really hateful words. However, if you make a word taboo, you won’t have to wait very long before somebody gets hurt because they used it.
Because of this, we should all stop using “the N-word” as a replacement because this suggests that “nigger” is so incredibly harmful that it cannot even be uttered or reproduced in print, not even in reference to the word itself. So maybe we should just go one step further and remove it from the dictionary. I’m kidding, of course. That would be the height of pearl-clutching buffoonery. Except guess what, it’s already happened. That is how you invest a word with such power that we end up with situations like Davidson being crucified as a shitty person simply because he has a disability. But while we’re on the topic, where did “the N-word” come from? Here’s Wikipedia:
One of the first uses of the N-word euphemism by a major public figure came during the racially contentious O.J. Simpson murder case in 1995. Key prosecution witness Detective Mark Fuhrman, of the Los Angeles Police Department—who denied using racist language on duty—impeached himself with his prolific use of nigger in tape recordings about his police work. Co-prosecutor Christopher Darden refused to say the actual word, calling it “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” Media personnel who reported on Fuhrman’s testimony substituted the N-word for nigger.
The tapes became one of the most explosive moments of the trial and were devastating to the prosecution. Darden, himself a black man, did not defend the language. But in court, he made a show of describing it as the worst word in history and refused to repeat it. Did he really mean every bit of that, or was some small share of his rhetoric merely courtroom theatrics? I leave that to you to decide, but imagine for a moment if the entire country went down this insane path simply because one lawyer wanted to make a rhetorical point in court and played it up a little too much.
Not to mention, why is this the only word we cannot say? Why are blacks the only people in existence whose slur you cannot speak? Jews suffered slavery for twice as long as black Americans and genocide, yet we don’t go around saying “the K-word” as a replacement for “kike.” Nor should we. But one thing I will say for SNL is that although I thought their joke was in poor taste, I appreciate that they are free enough to make it. But even if I opposed them making it, I still wouldn’t want to censor the skit because I know that’s a sure-fire way to amplify it. If we really want to drain this dirty term of its racist potency, we should consider permanently retiring “the N-word” and teaching new generations of children the old rhyme about sticks and stones.
Great post. This episode is an example of the moral blindness and hollow performative virtue signaling of the woke. A supposedly harmful word became the pretext for piling onto a man with a genuine disability. So much for compassion.
What a well-written and thoughtful piece