WHY LIAM WANTED TO KILL A BLACK PERSON
Actor Liam Neeson said in an interview with The Independent that he once spent a week walking the streets with a club looking for a black man to kill, after a woman close to him was raped by someone she said was black.
“She handled the situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way,” Neeson said of the episode, which he said happened years ago. “But my immediate reaction was, did she know who it was? No. What colour were they? She said it was a black person,” the actor said.
“I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody,” Neeson,66, said, using a British word that describes a club-like weapon.
“I’m ashamed to say that, and I did it for maybe a week — hoping some black bast*rd would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So, that I could kill him,” he added.
I went up and down areas with a cosh... hoping some black bastard would have a go at me about something. So, that I could kill him. It was horrible... that I did that.
ACTOR
Neeson made the comments, which were published on Monday with an audio recording of the interview, during a press event to promote his new film, Cold Pursuit.
The remarks were immediately met with public outrage.
“It’s unfortunate and sick that Liam Neeson would in response to a tragedy simply seek out any black person to murder,” Malik Russell, a spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (a civil rights organisation in the US) said in an email.
“Pain suffered is not an excuse for racism. If black people responded this way regarding all the times our ancestors were lynched, raped, mutilated, tortured or shot down by police brutality, there would be too many bodies to count,” Russell added.
In the interview, the Academy Awardnominated actor said he had never publicly talked about the episode before.
“It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that. And I’ve never admitted that, and I’m saying it to a journalist.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES