It took outcry, 15 hours for BBC to remove slur from BAFTA broadcast
Remember when racists were afraid to voice their beliefs in public for fear of being labeled “racist”? I know it’s hard to think back that far, before 2016 when Fox News gave Tucker Carlson his own prime-time show and “Execute the”. [Now-Exonerated] Central Park Five” Donald Trump won the election.
We’ve slipped so far. Now not a day goes by when a major media platform doesn’t devote equal time to Jim Crow-era ideals (because there are always two sides), a member of Congress doesn’t call out their leader’s shockingly bigoted Truth Social post, or a major cultural institution doesn’t normalize a word that should never be normalized because it doesn’t see it as offensive.
The N-word was shouted at “Sinners” actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo as they presented the visual effects award at the BAFTA Awards ceremony in London this week. This insult was unintentionally blurred by John Davidson, whose life experience with Tourette syndrome inspired the film “I Swear.” The situation was painful and humiliating, but given the circumstances, the offensive nature of the incident could have been handled with common sense and empathy. But the British Broadcasting Company implemented none of this.
Instead, the BBC failed to remove or bleep the insult from its initial broadcast, despite a two-hour delay before the show aired on BBC One in the UK. Even after an outcry over the inclusion of the N-word in its initial broadcast, the network waited almost 15 hours for the slur to be removed from the BBC’s iPlayer streaming service.
The BBC said in a statement that the insult was “broadcast in error” and that it would “never knowingly allow it to be broadcast”. However, the BBC caught and removed a statement by “Shadow of My Father” director Akinola Davies Jr. that it found offensive. His call for “Palestinian freedom” before the program was broadcast was deleted from the records. #BBCpriorities.
And as everything has to be swept up, adopted and expanded by AI, the repetition of the offending word wasn’t just limited to the BBC broadcasting its awards programme. Google apologized on Tuesday after the word appeared in a computer-generated news alert about BAFTA’s racial slur incident. The notification alert, linked to an article by the Hollywood Reporter, invited readers to “see more,” directing them to additional content that was offensive.
Davidson said in a statement that he would be “deeply ashamed if anyone thought my involuntary tics were intentional or had any meaning.” He distanced himself from the audience during Sunday’s show to prevent another possible incident.
While we acknowledge the harm that word causes, there is no reason why we cannot also acknowledge Davidson’s injury. Of course he sees it. Inspired by his life, the film in question shows what it’s like to live with involuntary vocal tics that belie your own beliefs or intentions.
Lindo and Jordan’s Oscar-nominated film “Sinners” depicts another kind of struggle: black people struggling to survive and daring to thrive in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. White people hurl the N-word at them every day, accompanied by varying degrees of hatred, disgust, and violence. The film reinforces the fundamental truth that a word is not just a word. It’s a relic from the Antebellum South, used to degrade and dehumanize, to thwart self-determination, and to keep Black people down. It is truly incredible how anyone in the BBC’s editorial department could have missed such a hateful, loaded insult.
BAFTA apologized for putting its guests in a “very difficult situation” and thanked Jordan and Lindo for their “incredible dignity and professionalism”. It wasn’t a great response. Players were humiliated in front of their peers on a public stage, then thanked for keeping their cool when they were the target of the insult, as if it was up to them to save the day. As a colleague said, “Always ‘be professional’ and ‘act with dignity and grace’ when you want to turn the table.”
The BAFTA smear heard around the world, or at least on both sides of the Atlantic, was not a deliberately deployed hate bomb. But it still hurts, especially here in the United States, at a time when racist rhetoric from above is at its peak.
Earlier this month, Trump posted a video on Truth Social depicting former President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially defended the post, claiming it was part of a longer video depicting Trump as the “King of the Jungle” and Democrats as “Lion King” characters. He told critics to “stop the fake outrage.” The video was deleted 12 hours after it was posted, and the White House accused a staffer of making the post “accidentally.” Trump never apologized, claiming he “didn’t see” some of the racist imagery in the video. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.
MAGA’s reaction to Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny performing the Super Bowl LX halftime show added to the xenophobic pile, from Trump calling the Spanish-speaking rapper and singer’s selection a “terrible choice” for the show and saying “all this does is sow hate” to counter-programming in which Turning Point USA explicitly called the “All-American Halftime Show” for conservatives. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson have rallied behind the alternative to Bad Bunny.
Today’s onslaught of racist ideology is not limited to rhetoric. ICE’s immigration sweeps on American streets, To look Like immigrants, the administration is seeking to gloss over the horrors of slavery by changing the way black history is presented on public sites and museums. (Trump says historic sites focus too much on slavery rather than the country’s “success.”)
There’s a lot of pushback, but there’s also a lot of capitulation from media outlets afraid of being sued (or worse) by an armed FCC.
Davidson now says he plans to apologize directly to Jordan and Lindo for the BAFTA Awards outburst. However, it shoulders a burden that all organizations involved must shoulder. There is no scapegoat here, just the daily erosion of civilization and the undermining of elusive freedoms.
