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Liam Neeson denies racism after admitting hunt for black men
WASHINGTON, Feb 6, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Hollywood star Liam Neeson insisted on
Tuesday he was “not racist” after confessing that he once set out to attack a
random black man after a friend of his told him she had been raped.
“I’m not a racist,” Neeson said on ABC News, while admitting he had felt a
“primal urge to lash out” about 40 years ago after hearing from his close
friend that she had been attacked by a black man.
The 66-year-old star of “Schindler’s List” triggered an international
backlash by sharing his story in an interview with British newspaper The
Independent this week.
In damage limitation mode on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the Northern
Irish actor expanded on the incident, which he said left him shocked at
himself.
“I went out deliberately into black areas in the city, looking to be set
upon so that I could unleash physical violence,” Neeson recalled. “I did it
four, maybe four or five, times until I caught myself and it really shocked
me, this primal urge.”
While he says no violence ultimately occurred, Neeson said he sought help
from a Catholic priest, spoke to friends, and walked for hours to rid himself
of the episode.
But he also insisted race was not the driving factor behind his actions.
“If she had said an Irish or a Scot or a Brit or a Lithuanian, I know it
would have had the same effect,” he told ABC. “I was trying to show honor and
stand up for my dear friend in this terrible medieval fashion.”
By way of explanation, he pointed to his experience growing up in Northern
Ireland, at the time locked in a deadly cycle of sectarian violence pitting
Catholics against Protestants.
Neeson first revealed the incident to The Independent in an interview to
promote his new thriller “Cold Pursuit,” about a father seeking revenge after
his son is murdered by a drug gang.
In the bombshell interview, he spoke of “hoping some black bastard would
come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I
could… kill him.”
Neeson’s acting career has spanned five decades, and included a star turn
in the 2008 hit “Taken” — about a former CIA agent trying to track down his
kidnapped daughter.
With his own revelations now threatening to derail his career, Neeson
pleaded for his story to be taken as part of a broader, honest debate on race
relations.
“We all pretend we’re all politically correct,” he said. “Sometimes you
scratch the surface and discover this racism and bigotry, and it’s there.”
– ‘Deserves a medal’ –
Many of the reactions were unequivocally damning.
Charles Blow, an African American columnist for The New York Times, asked
on Twitter if a black actor could have got away with the same thing: “Could
Will Smith confess to stalking the streets of Los Angeles for a whole week
searching for random white men to kill and get a pass?”
Kovie Biakolo, an African American editor at the BuzzFeed news site, noted
a similarity between Neeson’s desire for violent confrontation with a black
man and George Zimmerman’s killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon
Martin, in Florida in 2012.
“Today is Trayvon’s birthday and I had a thought: What’s the distance
between Liam Neeson and George Zimmerman? It gave me pause,” she wrote on
Twitter.
Some voices praised Neeson for his candor, however.
Former England footballer John Barnes, who suffered racist abuse during his
career, said the actor “deserves a medal” for speaking honestly.
Barnes, who is black, told Sky News that Neeson responded in the way he did
because “this is what society has shown him, that black people do, Muslims do
— this is what society has wrongly shown him. This is what the media have
wrongly portrayed to him.”
BSS/AFP/GMR/0840 hrs