N Is for Nuance
When I first saw the BAFTAs clip, I did not feel outrage. I felt fatigue. I was almost certain it would dominate the news cycle and social media for days, but not in the way it should. I assumed the predictable outrage would come from outside the community, amplified by a few fringe voices, while Black audiences would direct their focus toward the broadcasters themselves. Given that the individual in question has a neurological condition, I expected the conversation to centre on the BBC’s editorial decisions rather than his morality
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Instead, I watched the discourse unravel in real time. People questioned whether the tic was genuine, speculated about his private language habits, and treated neurological explanation as a convenient excuse. Within hours, the conversation had mutated into something else entirely: suspicion, identity politics, diaspora tension between Black Americans and Black Brits. The further it spiralled, the less it seemed connected to the actual issue.
What struck me most was how quickly complexity was abandoned in favour of absolutes. There is a psychological comfort in identifying a clear villain and a clear victim. Once those roles are assigned, the script writes itself. Outrage. Punishment. Moral clarity. No ambiguity. No self-examination. Online, taking an unambiguous stance does not just signal conviction. It buys allegiance. It offers people something clean to attach their identity to. A firm position becomes social currency. It tells your audience exactly where you stand and invites them to stand there with you.
Nuance, by contrast, feels destabilising. It introduces discomfort. It suggests that culpability may be layered, that harm and context can coexist, that institutions and individuals can be implicated differently. In that grey space, none of us are entirely innocent. Refusing to choose sides does not read as thoughtful in the current climate. It reads as evasive. Suspicious. Weak.
That discomfort helps explain why individuals so quickly become the focal point. Targeting a person is emotionally satisfying because punishment feels immediate. We can see it. We can measure it. Someone apologises, someone is dragged, someone is held accountable in real time. The narrative resolves cleanly. There is a villain, and there is a consequence.
Institutions, by contrast, are slower and harder to confront. They are procedural. Diffuse. Resistant. They do not collapse under the weight of a trending hashtag. And because of that, we often redirect our energy toward what feels tangible. The face is easier to condemn than the framework.
This dynamic is not accidental. Structural accountability is slow and often invisible. Outrage is immediate and highly visible. And in an era where visibility functions as currency, that difference matters.
Black pain has always been profitable. The right exploits it to reinforce stereotypes. The left invokes it to signal virtue. Institutions package it, debate it, and move on. That is not new. What feels different now is how expansive the economy of outrage has become. In intellectual and cultural spaces that claim to serve the community, moral certainty can function as branding. Engagement translates into visibility. Visibility can translate into influence, sometimes income. In that environment, sharp, definitive and emotionally charged takes are rewarded. Complexity rarely is.
Not everyone will compromise integrity for reach. But it would be naïve to pretend the incentive structure does not shape behaviour. When certainty attracts attention and attention confers status, the temptation to simplify is powerful. We are not outside that system. We are navigating it.
If moments like this are going to continue, and they will, then our intellectual habits have to evolve. Not every incident lends itself to a clean moral conclusion. Forcing one can distort more than it clarifies. When issues are layered, the first instinct should not be to declare a verdict but to seek understanding.
And when moral positioning diverges, the more productive question is not who is most righteous, but what accountability actually looks like. In this case, it would mean editorial processes examined and revised. It would mean a formal institutional apology. It would mean broadcast safeguards that signal Black communities are afforded the same protective reflex as others. Those are structural interventions.
We do not need unanimous agreement on interpretation to move forward. Consensus on solutions is enough. Power does not come from winning arguments against one another. It comes from identifying the structural lever and pulling it together.
If we continue to mistake outrage for organisation, we will keep winning arguments and losing ground.