Black people’s pain and humiliation have long been turned into entertainment, from minstrel shows to modern “gotcha” media moments that turn Black suffering into content. The BAFTA broadcast that aired a racial slur directed at Black actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo sits squarely in this history. As Van Lathan argued on Higher Learning Podcast, the real story is not Tourette’s, but institutional choices about whose dignity is expendable.
During the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards, Tourette’s advocate John Davidson involuntarily shouted the N‑word while Jordan and Lindo presented onstage. The show was on a two‑hour tape delay, and yet the BBC allowed that moment to air unedited, even as it muted other profanity from Davidson and trimmed other portions of the ceremony.
We now know, according to the NY Times, that editors even removed a later instance of the same slur when it was shouted as Wunmi Mosaku, a Black actress, accepted an award, and they cut “Free Palestine” from Akinola Davies Jr.’s acceptance speech.
Van Lathan highlighted this selective editing as proof that it was not about a technical oversight but about what producers felt was valuable television: Black shock and discomfort at the precise moment when two Black men were meant to be centered.
Black commentators have emphasized the immense harm of this decision. There is the wound of hearing a word historically used to terrorize Black communities, the humiliation of seeing Black artists ambushed in front of a global audience, and the added burden placed on Black viewers with Tourette syndrome, whose own condition is now debated through a scene of racial trauma.
Two realities can be true: Davidson’s tics are involuntary and must be understood through the lens of disability, and the BBC and BAFTA still had the power and responsibility not to broadcast racial violence against Black people for millions to watch. What happened was not an unavoidable clash of racism and ableism, but a failure of care in which Black people’s traumas were treated as an acceptable casualty of controversy and clicks.
The reality is that the broader media economy relies on the recurring spectacles of Black harm. From the BAFTA moment to viral police‑violence videos and “shocking” reality‑TV scenes, audiences are habituated to see Black pain as raw material for discourse, think pieces and jokes, rather than as a call to protect and repair.
To this day, I have never watched the 8-minute video of the murder of George Floyd. Why? Because while the video sparked some, but not enough, change, I know that many Americans watched and rewatched the video as a source of entertainment, even if it was vicarious pain.
That BAFTA allegedly assured Davidson his slurs would be edited out, only to keep this one in, becomes a case study in exploitation: everybody is promised safety, but Black people are the ones actually left exposed—and then asked to receive such disrespect with grace.
With the Oscars upcoming, the Academy has an opportunity to do what BAFTA refused to do. They can honor the nominees of color and demonstrate the nuance of their stories. They should build space into the show for artists to name harm and repair it onstage, rather than quietly moving on for the sake of the broadcast.
And the church has a role to play as well. The Gospels offer a radical contradiction to this logic.
Repeatedly, Jesus encounters people whose communities have turned a person’s shame into a story which other people tell about them—the bleeding woman, the woman caught in adultery, and especially the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.
She is a woman, a Samaritan, and someone whose marital and sexual history has made her a local spectacle. She comes to draw water at midday, likely to avoid the very eyes and whispers that treat her life as fodder for gossip.
Jesus does what BAFTA and the BBC refused to do for Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo. Jesus refuses to stage her humiliation for an audience. Instead, he speaks with her directly, names her truth without mocking it, and entrusts her with the good news so fully that she becomes a witness to her entire town.
Where our media systems keep writing Black people into roles of endless resilience in the face of public harm, Jesus writes a different script—one in which those most exposed and shamed are lifted above the stories their communities have imposed on them and given a future not built on their pain but on their belovedness.
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CEO of Sean Palmer Coaching, Homiletician in Residence at Bammel Church in Houston, and co-host of the “Sacred Frames” movie podcast.