He never calls it racism, at all... so.. yeah.. like.. what?
"No he totally addresed the racism, I got a 'vibe' bro... I mean.. he doesn't say it was racist, not once.. nor does he say it was wrong to be racist, but.. vibes bro"
Not going to entertain your other terrible analogy.
I'm not a psychologist, and I'm not going to cold read the inner workings of a mans mind from interview excerpts, but he is talking about a dark revenge fantasy, and the details which it entailed.
I mean, yeah, you
could look at what he says:
I’ll tell you a story. This is true.”
It was some time ago. Neeson had just come back from overseas to find out about the rape. “She handled the situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way,” Neeson says. “But my immediate reaction was…” There’s a pause. “I asked, did she know who it was? No. What colour were they? She said it was a black person.
“I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody – I’m ashamed to say that – and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some [Neeson gestures air quotes with his fingers] ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could,” another pause, “kill him.”
Neeson clearly knows what he’s saying, and how shocking it is, how appalling. “It took me a week, maybe a week and a half, to go through that. She would say, ‘Where are you going?’ and I would say, ‘I’m just going out for a walk.’ You know? ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘No no, nothing’s wrong.’”
He deliberately withholds details to protect the identity of the victim. “It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that,” he says. “And I’ve never admitted that, and I’m saying it to a journalist. God forbid.”
“Holy shit,” says Tom Bateman, his co-star, who is sitting beside him.
“It’s awful,” Neeson continues, a tremble in his breath. “But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing,’ you know?”
All three of us know – Neeson, Bateman and I – that this is a distressing admission. “I come from a society – I grew up in Northern Ireland in the Troubles – and, you know, I knew a couple of guys that died on hunger strike, and I had acquaintances who were very caught up in the Troubles, and I understand that need for revenge, but it just leads to more revenge, to more killing and more killing, and Northern Ireland’s proof of that. All this stuff that’s happening in the world, the violence, is proof of that, you know. But that primal need, I understand.”
that when he says it was awful, that he looked at himself and said what the fuck are you doing, that he is
only talking about the violence aspect, and the racist aspect is
wholly separate from that... but thats an interpretation no more valid than saying he was looking at his thoughts and actions as a whole, and is no more supported by what he said.
If he's racist on the downlow, he could have left that aspect of the story out completely. It doesn't make it any less shocking a revelation.
It says more about the people going "Yeah, yeah, violence is bad, okay, whatever, but what do you have to say about the
racism?" as though that is a seperate aspect to what he was feeling than it it does about him laying things out and saying that that was awful of him.
