M.S. Bellows, Jr. on Nostr: Hoo boy. I have a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings around the BAFTA incident, ...

Hoo boy. I have a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings around the BAFTA incident, in part because I have Tourette's (though, thank God, not coprolalia) AND am a lawyer/mediator specializing in disability accommodations (in educational settings). In a nutshell, though:

1. Unless he's a secret racist who shouted the n-word intentionally, the utterance itself truly was an involuntary act for which the speaker should not be blamed. Coprolalia isn't random; it makes people say the MOST transgressive thing possible in the context, which is exactly what happened here. It's troubling to me that some people refuse to accept this reality, which is a form of ableism.

2. The harm to Black people hearing that word nevertheless is extremely real, and the organizers completely fucked up both in how they structured the show and in responding to it afterwards. I understand that the speaker is a Tourette's activist, so I'm guessing both he and the organizers wanted some of the obscenities to be heard by the audience because, yeah, sometimes one person's disability is a little awkward for the people around them, and the people around them need to grow the fuck up and learn to accept it. But that doesn't mean that the harm to hearers can be ignored, especially when racist terms, not just obscene ones, are part of the person's known vocabulary. Disability accommodations require creativity and compromise; that doesn't seem to have happened here, other than a statement given to the audience at the start explaining his disability (which: good, but that approach alone fails to account for the substantial difference between ordinary vulgarities and racist obscenities). And the subsequent rationale that "Look, this is just the nature of Tourette's!" as if disability trumps racism is pitifully inadequate, because it ignores the harm to Black viewers. Tourette's sucks. Racism sucks. Don't minimize either one.

3. BBC has absolutely no excuse for not bleeping out the n-word even if they left in the other vulgarities, and for them to refuse to do so – to treat the n word as if it were no different than "fuck" – shows a profound insensitivity and colonialist mindset, and someone needs to get fired – especially because presumably the same person did bleep out "free Palestine!"