No Sign Says It

“No sign says it is: but we know where we belong.”

Tatamkhulu Afrika wrote those words about District Six in Cape Town. I remember reading this when I was 15 and being fascinated by somewhere that hadinvisible lines that persist even after the formal ones are taken down. It’s about how exclusion doesn’t need a sign to exists, it lives in the body. In the way the room shifts when you walk in. In the way people don’t quite meet your eye, or meet it too carefully so as to pretend they are incredibly inclusive and wonderful. Afrika was writing about apartheid and the lie that things had changed. But the concept of that line has stayed with me for years, because it speaks to something I know in a different way entirely. I (for the most part) have not had to suffer from the indignity, the rage, and the pressure on your chest, from racism but I have from discrimination due to disability.

I have Tourette’s syndrome, and when I was first diagnosed, I thought to myself: that’s it, then. I’ll never go travelling again. Those that know me, know this is not the case - I have been working on the alphabet game and have been to 30 countries in between Andorra and Zambia.

I worried that I wouldn’t be able to navigate an aiport. My tics get worse in crowded environments, when I am excited, when I am happy, when I am in unfamilair spaces. I might be able to get physically on a plane, but I knew I would tic through an airport with various insults, shouts and claims about where bombs might be on my body. It felt that world had suddenly become a series of rooms I wasn’t sure I was allowed to be in. The restaurants, the cinemas and the conferences. Anywhere that demanded a version of stillness or control I couldn’t guarantee. I stopped going to the theatre, something that I loved. No sign said I wasn’t welcome and indeed there are lots of casual understanding that I’m welcome in those spaces, but it’s not always true. I have sat down at neurology appointments and people have chosen to stand rather than be next to me. My body told me I didn’t belong, the same way Afrika’s feet knew where he was, the same way his hands and skin and lungs knew where he belonged and where he didn’t. The world is full of unwritten rules about who gets to take up space, and how.

On Sunday night, John Davidson sat in the audience at the BAFTAs. He was there because a film about his life, I Swear, had been nominated for six awards. He was there because he’d spent three years working on it as executive producer, because the actor playing him, Robert Aramayo, was up for Best Actor, and because his decades of advocacy for people with Tourette’s had been turned into something the film industry recognised as worthy of telling. He had every right to be there. He had more right to be there than most.

Then his tics came. As they always do, particularly in environments that are heightened, pressurised, emotional. When Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo took to the stage, Davidson’s coprolalia produced the N-word. Not because he meant it. Not because it reflected anything he believes. But because that is how coprolalia works. It reaches for the word that will cause the most damage in any given moment. It is exquisitely, devastatingly context-sensitive. The brain locks onto whatever is most taboo, most forbidden, most socially catastrophic, and fires it out like a reflex. The worse the consequence, the more likely the tic. It’s why I shout ‘I have a bomb in my….” when I go through airports, it’s why I claim to be a paedophile at kid’s parties. I have shouted that I have AIDS when giving blood. Tourette’s can be a clever beast, it picks the thing that you would be mortified saying and shouts it into the room. It’s not the elephant in the room you are ignoring, its the great big elephant rampaging in a rage all around the spaces. You might want to shrink away and just enjoy the experiences, Tourette’s says no to that. It poisons that space so that every breath you take feels like an uncomfortable, burning breath each time a tic comes out in the open.

If you’ve never experienced this, let me try to explain. Imagine standing at the edge of a cliff and your brain screaming jump. You don’t want to jump. You’re not suicidal. Instead your brain has identified the single worst thing you could do in that moment and it won’t stop shouting it at you. Now imagine that thought isn’t just in your head. Imagine it comes out of your mouth. Every time. In the worst possible moment. In front of the people it would hurt most.

That is coprolalia. It affects roughly 10 to 15 per cent of people with Tourette’s. It is not a personality trait. It is not a window into someone’s soul. It is a neurological event and its a shitty one at that.

What happened next was a failure, but not Davidson’s failure. BAFTA knew he was coming. The BBC had a two-hour tape delay. Floor managers had warned the guests sitting near Davidson. And yet the slur made it to air. Unedited. Unbleeped. Broadcast to millions. Davidson himself chose to leave the auditorium. He watched the rest of the ceremony from a private room. The film about his life won three BAFTAs, and he wasn’t in the room for any of them.

In his own words, he said his stomach dropped. That he felt a wave of shame and embarrassment. That he wanted the floor to swallow him up. That he was saying, in his head: please don’t judge me. Please understand this isn’t who I am.

I read those words and I felt every single one of them in my chest. Here is the tension, and I want to hold it carefully rather than collapse it.

The N-word is not just a word. It carries centuries of enslavement, dehumanisation and violence. For Black viewers, for Jordan and Lindo standing on that stage, the impact of hearing that word, involuntary or not, was real. Pain doesn’t require intent. Delroy Lindo said afterwards that he wished someone from BAFTA had spoken to him. That is a completely reasonable thing to want. The harm was real. The lack of care was institutional. Davidson’s distress was also real. The Tourette’s community woke up on Monday morning to a familiar dread: the knowledge that, once again, their condition would be debated by people who don’t understand it, reduced to a punchline or a provocation, and that the person at the centre of it would be asked to apologise for something their neurology did without their permission. No sign says it, all the platitudes in the world, but Tourette’s is messy, dirty and deeply personal.

Both of these things can be true at the same time. The harm to Black people watching. The harm to disabled people watching. The institutional failure that made both worse.

What I refuse to accept is the framing that asks us to choose between them.

When I was diagnosed, the grief wasn’t just about the tics themselves. It was about the shrinking, I felt like the world getting smaller. The mental arithmetic I started doing before every social situation: how quiet does this need to be? How long will I be there? Who will be around me? What’s the worst thing my brain could say in this room?

I stopped going to certain places. I turned down invitations. I sat in my car outside buildings and couldn’t go in. Not because anyone told me I wasn’t welcome, but because I’d internalised a message that my body was too disruptive, too unpredictable, too much for polite company. No sign said it. But I knew where I belonged. Except I didn’t. I was wrong.

I did travel again. I went to Uganda. I went to Croatia, to Kosovo, to Kazakhstan. From Andorra to Zambia and lots of places in between. I stood in classrooms, in assemblies and conferences and once gave my views at 10 Downing Street. I’ve given an after dinner speech at the House of Lords. My body still does what it does, my mouth and twists words out into the open. But I learned, slowly and imperfectly, that belonging isn’t something you earn by being quiet enough.

The conversation we need to have after the BAFTAs isn’t about whether Davidson should have attended. He should have. It isn’t about whether his tics were really involuntary. They were. It isn’t about whether the N-word is harmful. It is.

The conversation we need to have is about what inclusion actually looks like when it costs something. When it’s complicated. When it requires preparation, communication, and a willingness to hold discomfort.

BAFTA could have briefed every presenter. They could have spoken to Jordan and Lindo directly, not just the people sitting nearby. The BBC could have used the tape delay to do what tape delays exist for. Producers could have made a real-time decision that prioritised reducing harm for everyone in that room: Black presenters, disabled guests, the audience at home. Instead, the slur went out and everyone was left to absorb the fallout. Those in the Tourette’s community, feel they need to apologise, stand with Johnny, to do mental maths to explain what is going on.

Inclusion isn’t a statement on a website. It’s not a line in an apology. It is the boring, detailed, operational work of thinking through what might happen when you genuinely welcome people who experience the world differently, and planning for it with care.

Despite reading this poem over twenty years ago, I think about Afrika’s poem often. About how the signs come down but the invisible architecture remains. About how the body knows things the policy doesn’t say.

John Davidson spent forty years fighting so that people with Tourette’s could be understood, could be included, could take up space without apology. On Sunday night, the institutions that invited him in failed to build the room around him properly. And in doing so, they failed everyone else in it too.

No sign says it. But we know where we belong.

We know when we’re welcome and when we’re tolerated. We know when inclusion means we want you here and we’ve thought about what that means versus we’ve ticked a box and if it goes wrong, that’s on you. We know the difference. We need to stop pretending that good intentions are not enough.