Sammy Sky 🦋

The Kanye West comparison remains the best description to show this imbalance. He is a black man with a severe documented mental health condition and when he made antisemitic statements, the world collectively decided that his illness did not grant him a pass to spread hate. World leaders made statements, he was ostracised from a lot of his business deals, he lost millions of dollars. The "nuance" of his severe bipolar disorder was set aside in favour of the outrage from the Jewish community. Yet, when the roles are shifted and the perpetrator is a white man with a neurological condition, the "nuance" suddenly becomes the entire story. If an institution's first reflex is to explain away a slur rather than address the harm it caused, they aren't being inclusive, they are choosing to prioritize the social comfort of the person who spoke over the fundamental dignity of the people who were targeted. Look at how quickly people(mostly white) online rushed in to explain that he has Tourette's. Before anyone had even finished processing what happened, the conversation had already shifted to defending the speaker. It’s not that the condition isn't real or relevant. It's that the instinct to protect the speaker seemed to arrive faster than the instinct to acknowledge the harm. Once it comes to black people, the emotional burden is by default, expected to flip. So that the people who heard the slur are now expected to demonstrate empathy before their own reaction is even treated as legitimate. None of this requires denying the reality of Tourette's or pretending the outburst was intentional. A neurological condition can explain why something happened without erasing what it felt like to hear it. Both truths can sit together. A fair response has to acknowledge that even with a lack of intent, the reality of the harm is still there. Aggressively writing a 10 page thesis on Tourette's to shut down conversations doesn't do anyone any favours.