Tourette’s Tic Blamed For N-Word Hurled At Michael B. Jordan And Delroy Lindo At BAFTA Film Awards

Sometimes the most dangerous thing in the room isn’t the racist slur. It’s the audacity to tell Black folks we didn’t hear what we heard, and to demand that we understand it before we’re allowed to feel it.

At this year’s BAFTA Awards, that dynamic detonated in plain sight when John Davidson, the real-life inspiration behind the film I Swear, shouted the N-word as two Black actors, Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, stepped onstage to present an award.

Davidson, who suffers from severe Tourette’s syndrome, had been audibly cursing throughout the ceremony, with organizers attributing the outbursts to involuntary vocal tics. But the slur directed at the two Black presenters cut through the room. Host Alan Cumming later urged the audience to extend understanding, explaining that Davidson lives with Tourette’s and cannot control certain verbal eruptions.

Across the mainstream entertainment coverage, a very specific rhetorical choreography kicked in almost immediately. The incident was treated less like a racial harm event that happened to two Black men and more like a “disruption” that happened to the show.

Entertainment Weekly and Variety didn’t deny what happened, they diluted it. The coverage described what viewers heard as “strong language” and folded the racial slur into a broader category of “curses and slurs,” emphasizing that the outbursts were “involuntary” and part of how Tourette’s manifests. That framing subtly trains readers to think “general profanity,” so the racial slur becomes one item in a chaotic mix instead of the reason Black viewers were jarred in the first place.

Then comes the tone-management pivot. Multiple outlets foregrounded Alan Cumming’s call for “understanding” and language about creating a “respectful space for everyone.” So compassion becomes the headline, the host’s reassurance becomes the narrative anchor, and the n-word  itself recedes into the background. 

There’s also what you might call the disability-as-closure arc. Diagnosis is offered not just as explanation but as resolution. Tourette’s is a disability. The tics are involuntary. He has “no control.” Apologies are extended “if you are offended.” 

If. As though the harm is hypothetical and the racial slur exists only in the realm of personal sensitivity.  If. As though what happened depends on whether Black people choose to register it. That phrasing shifts the harm from something that happened to something people might feel. The problem subtly relocates from the racial act to Black folks’ reaction.

Even the production details do softening work. Outlets noting that the BBC aired the show on delay and would edit the broadcast frames the moment as something that can be managed in post, trimmed, bleeped, cleaned up, rather than something that landed in real time on two Black men standing on that stage.

Some outlets named the racial specificity more directly, but even there, the emotional center often rests on the apology and the explanation, not on the impact on Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo. The slur is treated as an “incident during the show,” and as another beat in the recap cycle, rather than as a rupture.

That’s the throughline, folks. The coverage doesn’t erase the slur. It domesticates it, renames it as “strong language,” absorbs it into general outbursts, and elevates compassion as the takeaway. 

Close the file.

Now, if you are irritated, you are not crazy. You are not being hypersensitive. And you are not required to override your nervous system in the name of someone else’s diagnosis.

What happened on that awards stage was not just “bad language.” It was a racial slur with a documented history of violence, shouted precisely at the moment two Black men walked onto the stage. He did not direct slurs at white presenters earlier in the night. He did not reach for anti-white epithets. The word surfaced at the sight of Black men, and that timing is exactly why Black viewers are not confused about what we saw.

The racial outburst only occured two Black people appeared, so we are absolutely right to question whether Davidson’s behavior was purely neurological or whether social association is what shaped the tic’s content. Tourette’s tics can be stimulus-sensitive. They can be triggered by environmental cues. But that doesn’t erase the social meaning of the trigger.

What Black viewers are reacting to isn’t ignorance of neurology. It’s pattern recognition. It’s the long history of harm. We are not reacting to a random curse word. We are reacting to a word that was historically screamed during lynchings, carved into laws, weaponized in schools, courtrooms, and streets. That word is not some neutral “taboo language.” It’s racial terror language. So, of course, Black folks are not going to calmly relocate it into a clinical box labeled “neurological tic” and just move on.

And when people rush to explain that moment away through neuroscience alone, many Black viewers experience the familiar suggestion that our discomfort is irrational. It isn’t.

So let’s be precise and grown at the same time.

Yes, Tourette’s syndrome is real. Yes, coprolalia, which is the involuntary utterance of taboo and racist language, is a documented symptom in a minority of severe cases. Yes, the brain can misfire and release words without conscious intent. The neuroscience behind that is not controversial.

Because neurology explains the release of the N-word, but it does not explain its acquisition.  Coprolalia can produce involuntary utterances. It does not choose words from outside a person’s linguistic world. A tic may be triggered by an environmental stimulus. But the stimulus in this case was Black presence. That’s what people saw.

You can explain basal ganglia circuitry. You can explain cortico-striatal loops. You can explain how taboo language becomes neurologically “sticky” due to its emotional charge within a culture. You can do all of that. And still, the timing and context matter.

The problem is not that Black folks are incapable of understanding neuroscience. The problem is the expectation that understanding must equal emotional compliance. Because that’s where this starts to feel like gaslighting.

No one blurts out the Pythagorean theorem as a tic because the Pythagorean theorem is not emotionally encoded in the brain as forbidden, charged, or explosive language. Tics draw from what the brain has tagged as high-voltage. And high-voltage language is socially learned. Brains are not born with slurs pre-installed. A brain cannot involuntarily blurt out a word that was never encoded and stored there. That slur exists somewhere in the person’s cognitive inventory. 

So the question isn’t “How did the tic fire?” The question is: How did that word get stored in Davidson’s head in the first place? How did the n-word become neurologically available?

Who taught him the N-word? Where did he hear it? How often was it circulating in his world? How often does it still circulate in his world? In what tone? In what context? These are legit sociological questions.

Even with his disability, Davidson is still a white man who knows that word. Tourette’s may explain the release, but it does not explain the racial architecture that made that word available to him. Disability does not override the social world in which someone was raised. And it does not place anyone outside the history of race. And while the utterance may have been involuntary, the impact was not, and it does not erase responsibility for the harm that lands.

We all know that brains are not born with slurs pre-installed. Language enters through family, schoolyards, jokes, popular media, whispered stories, and overheard conversations. Through a culture that circulates certain words. Tourette’s does not manufacture vocabulary. It discharges what is already wired through any of these mechanisms.

That does not mean someone consciously endorses every word their brain has stored. Humans absorb language long before they understand its moral weight. Children hear words before they grasp their violence. But the storage happens.

And so when Black people ask, “How did that word get in his head?” we are interrogating culture. Because in order for that slur to be neurologically “sticky,” it had to be socially powerful in a person’s environment. 

It had to be heard, repeated, coded as forbidden, charged, and significant. Which means Davidson may have been formed in a social world where that word lived, had currency, and carried charge. It means that he may have grown up in a society where that word circulated with enough force to embed itself in memory. A neurodivergent brain cannot store what culture never supplies. It is evidence of cultural saturation and evidence of a racial vocabulary so normalized in the background that it becomes neurologically accessible under stress. Taboo language is built by society. The brain just reflects it.

When we talk about dementia and Alzheimer’s, we acknowledge that disinhibition can expose older, socially encoded language. We do not say the disease “created” the slur. We say it removed the filter. When we talk about Tourette’s, we say the utterance is involuntary and more like a neurological spasm than an ideological statement. But the lexicon still reflects what culture has stored in the brain as taboo and charged.

It is entirely possible that he does not consciously harbor racist ideology. It is entirely possible that the tic was involuntary. Black irritation is not a refusal to understand disability. It is a refusal to pretend that culture played no role.

We can accept that the utterance may have been involuntary. We can still ask how the vocabulary was learned. We can extend empathy. We can still interrogate the social environment that made that slur linguistically potent.

Because the deeper conflict here is not just about one man’s brain. It is about the society that feeds certain words into brains in the first place, and then acts surprised when those words resurface.

At the end of the day, two things can be true. Having Tourette’s does not necessarily equal being a card-carrying racist. And a neurological explanation does not magically dissolve racial harm. Despite the media attempts to quickly move past this, we are still left with ethical and social questions.

Should someone with severe, stimulus-triggered coprolalia be placed in high-profile live public events without safeguards? What responsibility do organizers have to protect people who could be targeted by involuntary slurs? How do we hold space for disability without erasing racial trauma?

The danger in moments like this is the false binary that gets created. Either you accept the neurological explanation and silence your discomfort, or you are accused of attacking a disabled person. That is a trap. We can reject that trap. We can say: I understand the science. And I am still allowed to feel what I feel.

It is not anti-disability to say that racial slurs land differently on Black bodies. It is not cruel to acknowledge that hearing that word shouted in response to Black presence feels targeted, even if the mechanism was involuntary. It is, in fact, ableist to weaponize disability as a shield against accountability, as though disabled people are incapable of existing within racial history or social responsibility. What is also ableist is pretending that only one kind of nervous system matters, and refusing to account for the trauma those words carry in Black bodies.

Black people are experts in the social life of that word. We know its trajectory. We know its violence. We know its function. And Black people are not required to quietly metabolize racial harm in the name of compassion or just because neurology is invoked. Too often, the burden falls on us to be endlessly understanding while the structural questions go unasked.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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