In this context, time as we understand it no longer exists, and has shifted into a permanent state of the ever-present; social media has served to flatten out time. There is no “was” in this scenario, only an “is.” We suffer from a permanent state of is-ness, engorged with anger.
Here is the story about Liam Neeson as it’s being told everywhere: Sometime during the week of February 4, a friend told him that she had been raped. He asked her what race her attacker was, and when she responded, “black,” he immediately set out with a cosh in hand looking for black men to punish and kill. Liam Neeson, aged 66, is a racist white man.
Here is the story about Liam Neeson with more complicated facts about what actually happened, culled from an interview with Good Morning America, where he explained his recent remarks and from reports like this one. On a press junket during the week of February 4, during promotionals for his latest film Cold Pursuit, Neeson sat for an interview with a reporter for the British newspaper, The Independent. A reporter asked him how he tapped into feelings of wanting revenge, a theme of most of the films, like the Taken franchise, that have made him a successful career. In response, he recounted a story from forty years ago, when a woman close to him told him she had been raped. Wanting to avenge her in what he later described as a “medieval” fashion, he asked for details, including the man’s race. She told him the rapist had been black, and Neeson set out for a week, a cosh in hand, “hoping some black bastard (miming quotation marks around the phrase) would come out of a pub and have a go at me or something, so that I could kill him.”
After nearly a fortnight, Neeson himself realised the dark space he had entered, and sought help with his priest and friends to get out. As he put it to the reporter,
It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that. And I’ve never admitted that. It’s awful, but I did learn a lesson from it. When I eventually thought, What the fuck am I doing, you know? And I come from a society—I grew up in Northern Ireland, in The Troubles, and you know… I understand that need for revenge but it just leads to more revenge and more killing and more killing. Northern Ireland’s proof of that. All the stuff that’s happening in the world, the violence, is proof of that. So, primal need. I understand.
For many, Neeson’s comments were a stark reminder of the history of lynching, of a time when white men, with claims about wanting to avenge the rapes of white women by set out looking for black men to kill and hang in public. For many, his story showed that this kind of violence could be replicated across space (Neeson is from Ireland) and time.
The central facts of the two stories presented above are not dramatically different, but the second one provides more context for Neeson’s story. Well, actually, the second is a story while the first is a rough quilt of claims spread out over social media and weaponised to ensure that “Liam Neeson is a racist” is the only fact that emerges. Today, even seemingly reputable newspapers use Tweets to reconstruct events, as if the febrile responses of people whose existence can barely be verified are the same as on-the-ground reporting.
In this context, time as we understand it no longer exists, and has shifted into a permanent state of the ever-present; social media has served to flatten out time. There is no “was” in this scenario, only an “is.” We suffer from a permanent state of is-ness, engorged with anger.
What Liam Neeson (and his handlers) failed to understand was that the idea of temporality—that life exists as past, present, and future—has disappeared from social media and, consequently, given the unduly large influence it has, from public discourse itself. Neeson’s point, one that he strove to convey, was that he had been in the past a racist, had come to the shocking realisation of the nature of his thoughts and actions, and the knowledge that anyone could harbour such intense feelings of revenge became a fund of emotions from which he could draw to represent a now trademark character he has played in numerous films: a vengeful white man who seeks revenge for the harms done to his family (daughters, ex-wives, sons). In the Good Morning America interview with Robin Roberts, Neeson said, “I’m not a racist.” Here, Neeson is again attempting to locate his remarks within a history of his life and stating that he is not, in the present, a racist.
But there is no past in a news cycle dominated by the writhing, florid rage of social media. There are entire careers made off the constant anger that pervades social media, and Liam Neeson’s admission to a past of racism was a goldmine for a host of trolls, many of whom are disguised as cultural critics for often respectable publications. Neeson was an easy target, and provided an easy way for white and brown “anti-racist allies” to beat their chests in supposed solidarity with black people everywhere—and rack up new followers. if you were a brown or white person looking to shore up your anti-racist cred, you struck gold in Liam Neeson. The voices of black defenders, like John Barnes, a former footballer and current commentator, Whoopi Goldberg, or Trevor Noah have been drowned out or sidelined.
On The View, an often strange and yet sometimes unintentionally illuminating daytime talk show, Joy Behar’s responses offer a cross-sectional representation of how warped the conversation had and has become at large and how temporarily gets warped. Behar, who is white, said,
People have prejudices and bigotries in themselves; that doesn’t mean they have to express them constantly. You know, there’s this whole movement that every thought that you have has to come out. It’s such an ugly thing to be racist or bigoted or to have these type of feelings in yourself. Keep them to yourself…I was walking to work here and there was a dead rat in the street…and I thought, “The reason that dead rat is there is because they’re doing excavation.” Usually rats are under the building and you don’t see them. That’s where these things belong, in my opinion. Something has been ignited in this country and around the world that people just feel free to say these horrible things to each other and I think it’s better to keep your big mouth shut. I’m not against conversations on race; I will go there.
But I think [there’s] a difference between two Harvard professors or people who are intelligent people having a conversation about the subject, that is instructive. But to just vent your venom and your hatred. And I will give him this: the guy was stressed out and probably in a very strange state of mind because of what happened to him and you know, his wife was killed, died unexpectedly. I just don’t think people should spew, that’s my issue. There’s a reason why people don’t say those things in front of me because they know I do not like that, I will not go there. And so good, keep quiet, I don’t wanna hear it. That’s where I’m at.
In fact, Neeson had not “spewed” racist emotions, he had discussed his own racist response in the past. His wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, died a decade ago and thirty years after the incident he discussed; her death had nothing to do with this matter. Behar’s misrepresentation that he had “vented” his “venom” and “hatred” (she seemed to think that he had expressed racist thoughts directly to a reporter during an interview) and her peculiar sense of the timeline of Neeson’s life may well have been due to the fact that she had failed to do even the most basic research on the subject, but it’s also indicative of how a certain posturing of “anti-racism” needs to first establish the object of its derision, the “racist” as an uncomplicatedly hateful individual. Her emphasis that people should keep such thoughts to themselves (a psychoanalyst might ponder her rat metaphor for a while) is also indicative of an impulse among many: that repressing such ideas is preferable to even thinking out aloud about them, let alone admitting they exist. It’s also fitting that she should end with a declaration that “people don’t say those things in front” of her because “they know I do not like that” (again, she seems to have no idea what the “that” might have been): another trait of posturing anti-racism is the need to affirm how well-known one is for being profoundly and clearly anti-racist.
I focus on Behar’s response because its strange, convoluted, and warped sense of events and time is typical of the larger backlash against Neeson: few bothered to check on what he had actually said, even fewer considered the cultural and historical contexts in which he placed himself (The Troubles in Northern Ireland marked a period of deep violence amid constant warfare, a situation that creates psychological and cultural effects quite different from anything in areas that witness, say, gun violence but not actual war). In effect, the message was: Liam Neeson is a racist, and we need go no further because if we do so, we might release all those rats in the basement.
We don’t need to paint Liam Neeson as a prophet of anti-racism, but we might at least consider that this entire incident has served to flatten out a public understanding of racism in the most simplistic terms. The decontexualised and angry response to his revelation made it clear that there’s no place for a discussion of racism as something rooted in the lives and thoughts of nearly everyone, including people of colour. Instead, we insist that anyone who is against racism must be so in the purest of terms, with a history that clearly demonstrates that no hateful words or thoughts were ever expressed, that the rats were kept firmly below in the basement.
But race is complicated, and racism even more so. Later on The View, Cindy McCain, who attempted to be sympathetic to Neeson, points to an example of a former Ku Klux Klan member who now gives motivational speeches about how he turned away from his racist thoughts and ideology. The figure of a KKK member is the only way that most Americans understand “racist.” And “anti-racism” is only absorbed and proven through vehement denunciations of those considered racist, enabling little more than a mob mentality, and attempts to rhetorically distance members of the mob from any evidence of their own possible racism. But we might, as we consider the heated responses, wonder what lies at the heart of all the vigorous hand-wringing and wilful misrepresentations of Neeson’s words. Just as those who most often cry for fidelity and monogamy in marriage are the ones engaging in secret liaisons in seedy motels (not that there’s anything wrong with that), we might acknowledge that those decrying racism in such uncomplicated terms are more than likely people who have racist pasts they don’t want anyone to look at too closely.
Liam Neeson’s problem is that he confessed to a truth in his past, but without the proper cultural apparatus to make his confession legible as something fit for redemption. Trevor Noah points out that if Neeson had told his story to Oprah Winfrey, he would never have seen the current and angry response because her show is predicated on the idea of disclosure followed by acceptance and because of her long-established public persona as the Our Lady of All Confessions. He would have emerged purer and whiter, a white man who could now publicly shed a racist past and move towards near-sainthood.
Liam Neeson’s mistake was to forget that there is no past tense in today’s news and social media. In a world where the two are now massively conflated and where clickbait and eyeballs matter more than depth or nuance, there is nothing but an eternal, damning present of the now.
For more on time and social media, see also “Suey Park and the Afterlife of Twitter” and “A World of Shame: Time, Belonging, and Social Media.”
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