I remember, with vivid clarity, every time someone has said the n-word in front of me. “What up, my n-word?” from a stranger in the street holding a blue Alcopop, circa 1999. “Why has she come dressed as a n-word?” from a former (stress on former) friend about a girl’s costume at a Halloween party in Dalston. “N-word, n-word,” at the BAFTAs on Sunday, broadcast on the BBC.
You already know what happened. Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson was heard racially slurring Sinners actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo as they presented an award. The BBC, a bastion of political neutrality that carefully edited out any references to Palestine in the broadcast, as well as a homophobic slur that Davidson directed at Alan Cumming, managed to leave the n-word in. They have apologized, but a bit too late, as a quagmire of disability-vs.-minority debates deepens online.
Now, any thinking person can see the difference between an involuntary tic and, well, “why has she come dressed as a n-word?” We can also all agree that someone with Tourette’s (or any other disability) has a right to attend any award show. At just the same time, I think we can agree that Black (and brown) people, famous or not, have the right not to be racially slurred, publicly or privately. These seem like basic decencies and are embarrassing to type out. Yet the BAFTA situation has been gobbled up by right-wing pundits leveraging the fracas in their war against wokeness, their idea being that Black people are hypersensitive about race.
There are, of course, two n-words. One is a racist derivation of “negro,” ending with -er. The other is a reclamation of the slur by the group it was lobbed at, ending with -a. You’ll find the latter all over popular culture—Kanye and Jay-Z are devotees, even J-Lo’s sung it. We can argue whether this usage is a form of emancipation, or whether it contributes to a Black identity built on self-hate. Britain doesn’t mirror America’s history with the word; despite the Americanized language in colloquial usage here, if you use the n-word, it’s straight-up racist. We don’t have a grey area, but we can understand that the myriad uses of the n-word in Sinners is not the same as the word that was barked at the actors onstage. People’s hot takes seem deliberately dense in that distinction.
Some time back, in the wake of a penalty shootout, I wrote about how Britain was racist. Our systems suppress not only Black excellence, but also our rudimentary human rights (do read up on how the British education system fails Black boys). Black British people are not so much hypersensitive as they are micro-aware of incoming micro-aggressions. But you are very unlikely to be called an n-word in the street, which is part of the reason that hearing it shouted on TV felt so brutally visceral, a punch in the guts—and why, even knowing what we knew, our first reaction was to say that the person shouting it was in the wrong.
In a fair, progressive society, we have to be able to reconcile collisions of disability, history, and television with our insatiable appetite for outrage. There’s always going to be an awkward negotiation between other people’s realities and our own. The only dignified response is to hold two uncomfortable truths at once: that a man can not be responsible for his words, and that those words can still wound. Sometimes progress isn’t about everyone feeling safe. Sometimes progress is imperfect, sometimes progress is pain. We are terrible, communally, at dealing with complexity, but maybe—despite the continual growing pains—this is what living together actually looks like?
