Demonising of Neeson just knee-jerk hysteria
IT shouldn’t really be much of a surprise that Liam Neeson is not as ‘woke’ as most of Hollywood. The 66-year-old actor is practically a dinosaur in a town that idealises youth while his growing up a Catholic in the Loyalist stronghold of Ballymena during the Troubles era wasn’t exactly a recipe for inculcating Hollywood’s liberal belief system. In fact it would have been a greater surprise if as a result of his formative years spent in a failed sectarian society, the star of the brutally violent Taken franchise hadn’t internalised not just a strong urge for self-preservation but a slate of prejudices that are now rightly condemned as morally reprehensible.
When he admitted to wanting to murder a ‘black bastard’ in reprisal for the rape of his friend, Neeson quickly realised he was touching dangerously onto race relations, a taboo subject in Hollywood where the virtue of tolerance is never quite as evident as one might expect in a liberal idyll. But he probably figured that his shame and horror at his racist and violent bigotry would exculpate him. Not so.
He was judged to have committed career suicide. The red carpet curtain raiser to his film premiere was scrapped as were several interviews.
An appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America made things arguably worse when he said that if his friend’s rapist had been Irish, a Scot, British or Lithuanian, ‘it would have the same effect. I was trying to show honour and stand up for my dear friend in this terrible medieval fashion’.
In other words he would suffer an entire ethnic group or nationality to take responsibility for the sins of an individual. This is the essence of racist thinking, although in fairness he might not realise it.
In some ways Neeson is the reverse of Ben Affleck who treasured his liberal credentials so much that he pressurised producers of the genealogical series Finding Your Roots to ignore his ancestors’ history as slave owners.
Affleck was pilloried for trying to disown his family’s racist past, while Neeson is being vilified for owning his. But these public convulsions of moral hysteria tell us more about the finger-wagging moralists who rush to judge than those who have fallen from grace.
Neeson’s regret for his hateful attitudes towards people of colour may or may not be genuine, but his transgression is a side-issue compared to the public appetite to scramble onto the moral high ground, armed with the usual quiver of impeccably inclusive and politically correct credentials.
Their blanket denial of the complexities of history and culture not just silences older generations who genuinely don’t believe they are superior to anyone but who struggle to know what is the ‘correct’ thing to say in a fast-changing world that leads us down a moral cul-de-sac.
The black footballer John Barnes argues as much when he says that condemning Neeson outright prevents us understanding how unconscious racial bias is felt by many of us, if not all of us, even today.
‘The fight against racial bias in society will not be won by hounding Liam Neeson or boycotting his films. It will be won by allowing honest discussions about why people hold those views and exposing the flawed logic behind them,’ he said.
Launching a defence of Neeson, Whoopi Goldberg – who has known the actor for years – said he is not a ‘bigot’. ‘I think I would have recognised. I’ve been around a lot of real bigots… So I can say this man is not one,’ she added. We must take her word on it. And look forward to a time when race can be discussed calmly, without a savage backlash, knee-jerk hysteria or demonising of an evidently well-intentioned person.