This Tourette's Controversy is What You Get When Disability Stops Being a Medical Reality and Becomes a Social Culture

people who deny that Tourette's can provoke racist outbursts are wrong, but when we've turned disability into a social prop, what do you expect?

Sometimes, it feels like the world unveils a controversy just for me to write about it. This BAFTA Tourette’s thing has it all! This weekend, at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts ceremony, a guest with Tourette’s syndrome involuntarily shouted a racial slur (you know which one), an outburst that went out unedited onto the broadcast before being removed and apologized for by the BBC. Almost immediately, thousands of people on social media insisted that Tourette’s can’t possibly provoke racist outbursts, that no neurological condition could generate such language absent underlying bigotry, and that to suggest otherwise is not just racist but defamatory to disabled people.¹ Look around Twitter and see for yourself.

I’m afraid Tourette’s can, in fact, produce precisely that kind of involuntary and offensive speech. This phenomenon, known as coprolalia, is perhaps the most famous expression of Tourette’s, a condition with very diverse symptoms. Tourette’s also produces a number of other involuntary and uncontrollable behaviors, such as facial tics, jerking head movements, repetitive actions like jumping, or compulsively repeating the words of others. The guest at the center of the incident, Tourette’s awareness activist John Davidson, was the subject of the film I Swear, which is why he was present at the BAFTAs. During the ceremony, as actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting, he experienced a series of vocal tics, including the racial epithet. He later expressed regret and distress, broadcasters apologized, and the clip was removed. The facts of the matter are not in dispute. The situation is certainly uncomfortable, but what happened is widely understood. Why it happened, that’s the debate.

Tourette’s syndrome has long captured the imagination of writers of fiction - TV shows in particular have regularly mined this territory - because of the inherent salaciousness of uncontrollable offensive language. But the prurience and sensationalism that have attended discussion of Tourette’s doesn’t undermine how real the condition is and how difficult it can be. Clinical authorities have documented the phenomenon of coprolalia for decades. Not everyone with Tourette’s experiences coprolalia; most don’t. But some do, and when they have a verbal outburst, they can’t control what they say. (If they could, it wouldn’t be a disability at all.) Part of what’s mysterious and difficult about coprolalia is that there appears to be a connection between the offensiveness of a given utterance and the compulsion to say it. Under this theory, it’s precisely the fact that some words are taboo that can make them neurologically “sticky” for the disordered system that produces them. Fascinating! But troublesome.

Why, then, did so many people react as if this basic medical reality were impossible? The first point to make is that it’s of course entirely understandable why Black people would be hurt and dismayed by what happened; that word is, obviously, as hurtful as it gets. The unhappiness over the event is eminently justified. But the way that unhappiness has been expressed in relentless claims that Tourette’s “can’t do that” is unhelpful and, frankly, ignorant. Neurological disorders don’t conform to human social etiquette. More broadly, I would personally chalk this up to a kind of scenario that contemporary liberals seem entirely unable to deal with: something bad happened, the condition that caused it can’t be fixed, and it’s nobody’s fault.² Simmering anger over how the BAFTA organization and host Alan Cumming addressed the incident (off the cuff, at least in Cumming’s case) seems to me to be a simple matter of displacement; people are mad that the slurs were said, they can’t get mad at the guy who said it because doing so would violate norms about “ableism,” and they’re looking for somewhere to put their anger. Again, the dismay is emotionally understandable, but there’s little to be done about it. This too is something contemporary liberalism struggles to deal with, when members of different marginalized groups are seen as being in conflict with one another.³

(Amusingly, many people on BlueSky, the social media network where it’s always 2019, responded by saying that what we all really need is to hear from Black people with Tourette’s on the issue. But… how would that change the basic reality that Tourette’s often prompts involuntary and uncontrollable offensive speech?)