Sinners actress Jayme Lawson candidly shared her thoughts on last weekend’s incident at the BAFTA Awards while speaking with The Hollywood Reporter on the NAACP Image Awards red carpet last night.
“I’ll first say a big shout-out to Mike and Delroy; let’s continue to honor them for how they handled that in real time,” Lawson said about Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo having the N-word shouted at them by guest John Davidson, who hasTourette Syndrome, while they were onstage to present at the British awards ceremony. “The grace and the dignity that they exercised and the whole home team, everybody that was out there really carried themselves well.
“I think the events this weekend exposed a couple of things,” Lawson continued. “Institutionally, we still don’t understand what inclusion means. Just because you invite someone into a space, but you don’t provide the necessary resources to keep them and everyone else in that room safe by them being there, that’s not inclusivity. That’s exploitation.”
That man’s disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses,” she said of Davidson. “That’s the BAFTA‘s fault. And then the BBC to air what they aired is careless — and not like some haphazard accident — a real lack of care was exercised for those two Black men.”
She continued, “And we know the BBC knows how to take care of what they care about because they censored a bunch of other [words]. They went so far as to make sure certain things weren’t topics of conversation. They censored Akinola [Davies Jr. ]’s speech, the director of My Father’s Shadow, which is an amazing film, by the way. So you censored one Black man. You failed to protect two others, and our production designer, Hannah [Beachler]. You do not care for our dignity, our humanity. You want to celebrate our art, but you won’t protect [us]. And that’s why we celebrate Sinners. That’s why we celebrate Ryan [Coogler]. That’s why we show up to the NAACP because those are spaces where we felt safe, where we feel safe.”
During the NAACP Image Awards, One Battle After Another star Regina Hall asked the audience “to take a moment” to show love to Jordan and Lindo, who then received a loud round of applause from attendees.
Lindo also spoke out on the incident for the first time while taking the stage to present with Coogler, stating, “I’d just like to officially say, we appreciate all the support and love we have been shown in the aftermath of what happened last weekend. It means a lot to us,” adding that the moment was a “classic case of something that could be very negative becoming very positive.”