"I am and always have been deeply mortified if anyone considers my involuntary tics to be intentional or to carry any meaning... I have spent my life trying to support and empower the Tourette’s community and to teach empathy, kindness and understanding from others and I will continue to do so. I chose to leave the auditorium early into the ceremony as I was aware of the distress my tics were causing.”
This is the most common iteration of posted of John Davidson's initial statement on his outburst at the BAFTAs. There is a later one that we will get to. As the ellipses indicate it was longer, but I what I read did not add a lot, and that one is harder to find.
There are two things I notice in this statement, but they are part of the same issue.
The first is that it is focused on his mortification, not the mortification caused to others. Therefore, it makes sense that he talks about teaching "empathy, kindness and understanding FROM others" (emphasis mine) rather than teaching empathy for others.
He is centering himself. It's a common failing, and it's easy to do when you think of your problems as unique to yourself. There are other people who have their own issues. That is true on a general level -- everyone has things that are hard for them; everyone has bad days -- but also, there are other marginalized groups.
That's why it is so important to have an intersectional understanding of the world. There are things about you, but not everything is about you.
That leads us to one of the bits of humor I am going to go into.
Tourette's Action has condemned the Saturday Night Live sketch as misrepresenting tics and setting them back.
I watched the sketch; it was not making fun of Tourette Syndrome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkKb3K8cxss
It's making fun of celebrities and the excuses they make for their bad behavior. Previous excuses have been alcohol or depression or misunderstanding, but the sketch implies they have something new to try.
This is reasonable based on all of the white people who were just so happy to see a legitimate use for saying the N-word, but the humor is also predicated on the fact that none of those excuses fly. If racism comes out when you're drunk, it's there when you're sober too -- you are just able to pretend better.
Crucially, most of the issues the sketch portrayed celebrities trying to excuse were based on marginalization: racism, misogyny, antisemitism, transphobia. (There might be some misogyny in Arnie Hammer's cannibalism deal, but he just might be the outlier there.)
If you remember that your problems are not the only problems, you can react differently to that. You might even notice how your defenders are acting and take a moment to condemn both racism and the resurgence in use of the R-word.
But that takes thinking of other people.
It should be amazing and appalling how far so many people went to avoid thinking about and empathizing with the Black people who were verbally assaulted.
Instead it has been appallingly normal.
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