This BAFTA Shit Ain’t Hard, Disability is Real, but Y’all Just Don’t Care about Black Folks

What day we on for this shit? Three? Four? Midterms? And yet it feels like we are having a dishonest conversation. Or rather one where folks are trying to solve the wrong problem. To catch you up to speed, The British Academy Film Awards went down on February 22nd in London. While Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting the award for best visual effects, they were accosted in the room from a guest repeatedly calling them the Jim Crow special, the N Double G Nuclear. The hard R, if you will. Didn’t even rotate the slurs like Uncle Ruckus told them too. Now listen, I’m gonna get these jokes off and it’s more of laugh to keep from crying type shit, but seriously, there’s a lot at play here. For one, the one yelling the slurs was John Davidson, a man living with Tourette syndrome and the real-life inspiration behind the film I Swear. As Tourette syndrome is a genuine disability and this was not the only occurrence of a verbal disruption during the night, it was the most noteworthy for what we can all agree are obvious reasons. I am 1000% not qualified to speak on the intricacies of Tourette syndrome and there is about an 80% chance that YOU reading this aren’t either, so what we not going to do is litigate the legitimacy of it in this instance or in general. And it’s not necessary, as the discourse among serious folks is not that Davidson’s involuntary tics make him racist or harboring some racial resentment towards anyone.

Image courtesy of Getty Imag…