It’s often said that a drunken face can reveal a sober mind.
Ben Douglas, a well known black television presenter in Britain, whose biological parents are from Barbados, has just written chapter and verse about such a painful experience in London when he was publicly insulted by a top white celebrity hairdresser who called the Bajan-Brit a “nigger” at least seven times to his face at an elegant television awards function.
And after Douglas, 31, took the unusual step of exposing the ugly incident in a first-person article he wrote the nationally circulated Sunday Mail, James Brown, who has his own television reality show in England, Great British Hairdresser, stepped from the shadows, publicly admitted he was the unidentified drunk who verbally abused Douglas at the recent British Academy Television Awards (BAFTA) at Grosvenor House and offered him a public apology.
“I’d like to make a public apology to Mr Douglas, to his friends and to BAFTA for my offensive and stupid comments,” Brown said a few days ago.
“The simple truth is that I had drunk far too much on the evening and my behaviour was totally unacceptable.
“Everyone who knows me knows I am not racist in any way whatsoever, but this incident has shown me that my drinking is way out of control and I need to take urgent measures to deal with it,” he added. “I have been in touch with Mr Douglas and will be writing to him and to the BAFTA organizers to apologize personally. I am very sorry and very embarrassed.”
But the matter didn’t end there. Douglas received a “death threat” after the incident was publicized across England, triggering a national debate about racism and the Metropolitan Police Department has launched an investigation into what it called “an allegation of racially motivated communication”.
The threat was contained in an email sent to the children’s theatre company Douglas runs. “Ben has signed his death warrant” was the way it was put.
“It’s not nice to wake up in the morning to a death threat,” Douglas said a few days ago. “This is what happens when you make a stand for what you think is right.”
The racial slur used by the hairdresser is considered so deeply offensive that many British and North American news organizations, including the Mail in London don’t normally spell it, a policy the Sunday Mail explained in an editor’s note to Douglas’ piece.
The paper stated that the full use of the “racist word” was done at Douglas’ insistence because he “is adamant that he wants readers to appreciate the full ugliness of the word and we have bowed to the author’s prerogative”.
In his article, Douglas, who was adopted by a white couple at the age of two years and was raised along with their children in a loving home in Surrey, said that the use of the N-word was not only shocking but it left him feeling angry with himself “for allowing him to get away with it – for making me feel inferior”.
Curiously, Douglas said: “I would rather he had used the C-word – it’s that bad.”
Looking back on it, Douglas, a trained ballet dancer, who founded and runs Fusion Entertainment and Fusion Academy, which train children for musical theatre in Britain, the Middle East and Asia, said that “in hindsight, I should probably have punched him in the nose”.
Why?
Although the N-word has been appropriated by rappers in the same manner as the word “queer” was reclaimed by the gay community, “in the mouth of a white man it remains deeply offensive”, he said.
Douglas explained that the N-word “originated as an insult, a throwback to the days of slavery, inherently placing one race above another”.
As he saw it, the word was “one of abject humiliation. Without wishing to appear overly emotional, I felt annihilated in an instant, reduced to a parody of my genetic inheritance”.
The TV presenter pointed out what he called the reality of his background: “I am not from the mean streets of Detroit, Harlem or LA [Los Angeles].
“I am from Teddington in Surrey, and while my genetic roots are Bajan, the parents who raised me are as white as the buffoon who stood there insulting me.”
To add insult to injury, Brown, whom Douglas didn’t name in the article, called the presenter’s companion, “an elegant executive at a glossy magazine” a “nigger b . . .”.
The British Academy is conducting its own inquiry into the incident, which occurred on May 22.
