According to BAFTA, ‘Free Palestine’ is the slur. Not the N-word.

The Man, Not the Scandal

John Davidson has Tourette’s. He did not mean it. His tics are involuntary — the condition is neurological, not moral. The audience was warned before the ceremony began. Davidson left the room when he realised what was happening. He has spent his life teaching the public what Tourette’s actually is. None of what happened Sunday night was his fault.

Now the second thing. The BBC broadcast it anyway.

The Edit Suite Had Two Hours

The show aired on a two-hour tape delay. That is not live television. That is edited television; edited everywhere except, apparently, where it mattered. The N-word went out over BBC One, on E! in America, and sat on iPlayer until Monday morning. Kemi Badenoch said the obvious: it should have been bleeped. She was right. Two Black men, Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, there to celebrate one of the best films of the year, stood on that stage when the word landed. The camera found Lindo’s face. It did what cameras always do at these moments: it searched for composure. He provided it. He carried on. BAFTA thanked him afterwards for his “incredible dignity and professionalism.” Professionalism is what institutions praise when they have failed you and would like you to absorb the damage quietly.

Interestingly, the post-show commentary divided along the same lines. White voices reached instinctively for Davidson’s dignity. Black voices asked a simpler question: what about the men on stage?

Free Palestine Was Two Words Too Many

But here is where the story gets worse. In the same two-hour edit, the BBC made a different decision. Akinola Davies Jr., a Black British filmmaker whose debut My Father’s Shadow won Outstanding British Debut, ended his acceptance speech with solidarity for “the economic migrant, the conflict migrant, those under occupation, dictatorship, persecution, and those experiencing genocide.” He closed with: “For Nigeria, for London, Congo, Sudan, free Palestine.” The BBC cut it. Entirely. It cited time constraints — the ceremony runs three hours, the broadcast slot is two. That is plausible. It is also, in context, damning. The edit suite found time to make a political judgement. It did not find time to make an editorial one about the slur. “Free Palestine“, two words, was too dangerous to broadcast. The N-word, directed involuntarily at two Black presenters, was not. As one viewer put it: “According to BAFTA, ‘Free Palestine’ is the slur. Not the N-word.”

The Pattern Is Not Random

The BBC knew Davidson had Tourette’s. It knew the broadcast was delayed two hours. It knew the specific word in question carries a history on both sides of the Atlantic. It knew two Black men would be presenting. The failure was not unforeseeable. It was administrative. There was no automatic bleep protocol. In 2026. On a tape delay. At the BAFTAs. This is not a conflict between disability rights and racial dignity. It becomes one only when planning is replaced by sentiment. Inclusion without contingency is not progressive. It is negligent. The BBC has form here. It previously refused to air a documentary on Gaza medics it had itself commissioned, citing partiality concerns. More than a hundred of its own journalists petitioned against that decision. The pattern is not random.

The Bill Always Goes to the Same People

Every generation of progress seems to extract its cost from the same account. And at each step, the ask lands on Black people — to absorb, to understand, to be gracious, to carry on. Jordan and Lindo carried on. They were magnificent. It is Black History Month, as several American outlets noted with varying degrees of irony. Of course they were magnificent. The bar for Black excellence at these moments is always: do not make this harder for us than it already is. Modern institutions want the appearance of moral complexity without the discipline of institutional competence. They celebrate inclusion on the brochure. They censor geopolitics with surgical precision. And when the improvisation fails, someone else pays. On Sunday night, that cost was borne by the people least responsible for the situation. An apology followed. Apologies are cheap. The edit suite clearly was not. The slur was involuntary. The broadcast was not. The censorship of “Free Palestine” certainly was not. That distinction is everything.