What does Liam Neeson’s ‘primal urge’ really tell us about racism?

It’s been one hell of a week in the wide, wide world of racism. On Monday, the Egyptian international Mohamed Salah was subjected to alleged racist abuse during Liverpool’s match with West Ham. On Wednesday, memories of the Windrush scandal were awoken when 29 people were forcibly expelled from the UK on a charter flight to Jamaica. Then, on Thursday, Gucci released a polo neck jumper that covers the mouth and the chin of the wearer, making them resemble a blackface minstrel. You know, like you do.

Anyone hoping to cut through the background hum of structural inequality and racial insensitivity was really going to have to pull something special out of the bag. Cue Liam Neeson, who revealed that 40 years ago he had entertained a racist lynching fantasy and actually gone out looking for a black man to murder. The response of Neeson’s co-star, Tom Bateman, who was sitting beside him, set the tone for what was to follow: “Holy shit.”

The scale of the press and online reaction has been arguably unprecedented, a reflection of both Neeson’s Hollywood status and the magnitude of his admission. But this is not a simple affair and Neeson’s words and his presumed motivations have divided opinion in a way that the normal, run-of-the-mill “famous person says something horrible” story rarely does. And he was not caught in a sting operation. His words were not recorded covertly like those of Trump on the “Access Hollywood” tape. This was a public statement freely made.

What I imagine Neeson thought was that by being frank, open and self-critical, people would take his words in that spirit. He did, after all, tell a series of difficult truths. He acknowledged that both the way he had felt and the way he had acted had been “horrible” and “awful”. He saw the danger of the hatred he had harboured in his soul, and expressed regret. There was no lack of honesty. The problem was not a deficit of honesty but a paucity of honest self-analysis.

What shocked many black people was having someone step through the line of thinking that can and does lead to racial violence and racialist murder. On hearing that a close friend had been raped, Neeson’s second question to the victim was to ask her the race of her attacker. Why go from the individual to the entire race, from the singular to the group, from the guilty to the innocent? We know why. That is how racism works. That is racism in action. What appalled many was that, when recounting that critical leap of illogic, Neeson did so, seemingly, without analysis or acknowledgement.

His admission was so shocking, in part, because this thought process is so rarely admitted to. And therein lies the problem. As many commentators have asked: by being so candid, could Neeson’s admission, despite its lack of analysis, in the long term be constructive?

What makes it difficult to see things that way is that Neeson made this staggering confession at the Manhattan press junket he was attending to promote his latest Hollywood thriller. That its title is Cold Pursuit adds a note of surrealism to this whole tragic farce. I’ve been on one US media junket and it really didn’t strike me as the ideal situation in which to unburden oneself of a dark, murderous fantasy.

Neeson’s belief that he could admit to having once gone hunting innocent black men, and then slip seamlessly back into talking about his character or the film’s special effects, appears to reveal a profound lack of empathy. Did he not get what he was saying? Did he not understand the significance of those words in the age of Black Lives Matter?

And it is important to be clear about exactly what Neeson admitted to. “I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody,” he said, “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.” Earlier in the interview, Neeson had said that when loved ones are hurt the urge for revenge is “something primal”. Yet Neeson did not just go looking for an opportunity to kill an innocent black man – he hoped to lure his potential victim into a fight.

Consciously or subconsciously, we do not know which, it seems Neeson calculated that he would be able to kill and, by deploying the legal cover of self-defence, get away with it. Hence his hope that his victim would throw the first blow. If Neeson was, as he claimed, a man overwhelmed by some primal thrust for vengeance, why the carefully thought-through legal defence strategy? This is where the lack of self-analysis is most disturbing. Which is it, the surrender to primal forces or premeditation?

The characterisation of racism as “primal” goes to the heart of what racism is and what it is not. Racism is not primal or instinctive. That second question Neeson asked his friend of her attacker was: “What colour were they?” This is not an innate reaction, it is learned, imbibed from society. Because racism is not like jealousy or selfishness, it is not a primal urge or a basic instinct, it is a 400-year-old political and economic system that has infected our institutions, our culture and even our thinking. It is a system that has been and is today being held in place by violence and through collective punishment.

That mental leap, from the individual to an entire race of people, is the reason why Trayvon Martin never got to celebrate his 18th birthday. It behind the horrific fact that 75% of the 8,000 people killed by the Brazilian police in the past 10 years have been black men. To imply it is a primal and instinctive urge is naive at best, disingenuous at worst.

• David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster