Earlier this week, while promoting his new movie, the Irish actor Liam Neeson shared a personal anecdote about revenge. During an interview with The Independent, in a surprisingly candid moment that is rare in the ‘gotcha’ culture of modern celebrity – Neeson recalled a period, nearly 40 years ago, when racist hatred took hold of him after a close friend had been raped. With nothing else to go on except the attacker’s race, he prowled black neighbourhoods with a cosh in hand, waiting to be ‘approached by somebody’ in the hope that an altercation with a random stranger might satisfy his need for vengeance. “I’m ashamed to say that — and I did it for maybe a week,” said Neeson, “hoping some ‘black bastard’ – [making air quotes] would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could … kill him.” Neeson compared this senseless but overwhelming hatred to the religious and political passions which consumed Northern Ireland during “The Troubles” in his youth.
The fallout was predictable. Neeson was branded as a racist and the future of his career seems in jeopardy. An appearance on Good Morning America was used to contextualize the remarks – which he managed to do with exemplary calm. During that appearance Neeson emphasized that what had surprised him wasn’t the racism per se – he believed that he would have felt the same visceral anger if the attacker had been identified as an “Irishman, Scot or Lithuanian”– but the intensity of the hatred. Without shying away from his remarks, Neeson said that he’d spoken out about such a mortifying memory because we need “to talk about these things … we all pretend that we’re politically correct … [but] violence breeds violence.”
Ava DuVernay, director of the outstanding documentary “13th” – which chronicles the legacy Jim Crow attitudes in US criminal justice and, increasingly, its political life – made a telling point about Neeson’s remarks. Imagine, she said, if a black film star like Will Smith had said something similar. Or what would have happened to Michelle Obama if she had posed for the racy photographs that GQ magazine took 18 years ago of Melania Trump. In both cases, “white privilege” shielded these public figures from consequences their black counterparts would face. Additionally, especially during Black History Month, one should note the deeply troubling resonances of Neeson’s language in the wider context of American history. Out of hundreds of possible examples one need only consider the case of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Floridian who was fatally shot in 2012 after he was racially profiled by a neighbourhood watch volunteer. If Trayvon had not been seen through the lens that Neeson describes, he would likely have turned 24 on Tuesday.
DuVernay is right about America’s deeply entrenched racial attitudes but that does not diminish the significance of Neeson’s confession. Racial and religious hatreds are, almost by definition, irrational: more susceptible to emotional provocations than reasoned argument. Neeson’s point, surely, is that an honest “conversation on race” – one that is often promised, but rarely delivered in American life – must begin somewhere, even if that entails the recollection of shameful experiences like his own. Sadly, we are now primed to react to these moments with anger and reflexive condemnation rather use them as a way into painful but necessary exchanges about the nightmares of recent history and our belated attempts to acknowledge and correct the legacies of racial, religious and gender-based violence which they have bequeathed to us.
