Tourette's and the right to blurt stuff out
When identity gets in the way of understanding
Okay, it wasn’t nice. But there was something grimly amusing about the BAFTA controversy over John Davidson .
Anybody with a ‘neurodiverse’ condition like Tourette’s syndrome, or with a child with the condition, will know how embarrassing it can be when they say stuff you’re really not supposed to say. They don’t say it intentionally, of course. They can’t help their outbursts. Those who live with it have to get used to the uncomprehending looks, or sometimes even the cruelty of those who refuse to understand or accommodate them. Equally, I wouldn’t want to dismiss the understandable discomfort many will feel about the use of the ‘n’ word. Not least Delroy Lindothe and Michael B. Jordan who unwittingly triggered the offending tics as much as Davidson unwittingly vocalised them.
But the impact of the unbleeped word in our increasingly tight-lipped and anxious not to offend culture, is quite something to observe when the supposed offence comes out of the mouth of somebody we should obviously sympathise with. Some were sympathetic, including the host Alan Cummings. He couldn’t have handled it better, acknowledging the offence that some would no doubt feel, while explaining Davidson’s condition and how he had no control over such slurs. Others - Dawn Butler MP and actor Jamie Foxx among them - were less keen to defend the man with a disability, than they were to stress the gravity of the offence caused by what he said. Foxx even claimed, wrongly, that Davidson ‘meant it’.
For those who express any doubt about the validity of certain identities, the reception can be frosty. Even if they happen to have a strong claim to an admitteldy less culturally valorised identity themselves. As Davidson experienced, not for the first time, at the BAFTAs. Some put compassion above affirmation. But others clung to their right not to be offended as if it overid every other consideration. Both at the show and long after the bongs were handed out. As Tom Slater writes in The Spectator, the reaction to Davidson’s singular word pointed to the limits of the inclusion ethos.
It also revealed, he says, the existence of an identity league table in which: ‘the briefly hurt feelings of black millionaires counts for more than the daily anguish of a disabled Scot’. Stella O’Malley in a piece for UnHerd echoed Slater in describing Davidson’s treatment as evidence of a ‘hierarchy of harm’. A psychotherapist and a critic of therapy culture, O’Malley observed how the ‘trauma’ of one group can trump the other. What it confirmed for me is that, for the identity obsessed, intent means nothing. Context is irrelevant. The utterance is all.
What was meant by it? Who said it? Why? These details don’t matter. I found myself to be unusually sympathetic with the BBC’s predicament. It could do no right. If it cut the comments from its coverage, as Butler and others urged it to do, then people like me would be outraged. If it didn’t, it stood accused of not taking racism seriously. But why should Davidson, or anybody else with a disability like his, be edited out as if their ‘lived experience’ is any less important than anyone else’s?
If we regard Davidson as our equal, then surely he has as much right as anybody else to be heard - even if he’s not in control of these outbursts? Isn’t that what living in a civilised society is all about? Isn’t that what inclusion is supposedly all about too? Tolerance for the differences between us, and compassion for those who struggle with conditions like Tourette’s? The Davidson incident should remind us of something else that, like Tourette’s, is little understood. To defend somebody’s right to speak, or to involuntarily blurt out unpleasant words, isn’t to defend the words they use.
We should defend our collective right to hear each other and even to be offended. It might not be nice to hear words like that uttered by Davidson, but might it not do us some good, and perhaps encourage a robustness of character, to hear them? Isn’t this the genuinely kinder way too? By escaping the boxes we put ourselves in, wouldn’t we be more likely to have compassion for those we may not ordinarily identify with or otherwise understand? One thing is for sure. If we can’t hear that which we find uncomfortable, we will be less able to have the difficult conversations we badly need to have.
Image: Kaworu1992