Actor Samuel L. Jackson said that he “really wanted” the San Bernardino attack to be “just another, you know, crazy white dude, and not really some Muslims” in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast released on Sunday.
Jackson said, “I can’t even tell you how much that day the thing was happening in San Bernardino, I was in Hawaii, how much I really wanted that to just be another, you know, crazy white dude, and not really some Muslims, you know, because it’s like, oh, sh*t. It’s here. And it’s here in another kind of way. Now, okay, it happened on an Army base, and it happened somewhere else. But now? It’s like they have a legitimate reason now to look at your Muslim neighbor, friend, whatever in another way now. And they become the new young black men.”
Earlier, while discussing police, Jackson stated, “guys went to Vietnam, and they came home, and people hated them, they were baby killers or whatever, and a lot of them became cops because that was the job, that was, oh, you have ex-military service? You can become one of the boys in blue. And because they were so vilified by everybody outside, they formed this blue wall, that’s now still a part of what that is, but now it’s kids coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and whatever, and now they’ve identified PTSD, but that’s not one of the tests they give for people who put on uniforms. So, consequently, you’ve got people out there who are used to looking at people as the enemy, because that’s what it was people were trying to kill them every day. … And young black men are threatening, you know, and it just happens. So, all these things snowball and snowball. Now, not every cop in the world is guilty of that. There’s good cops and there’s bad cops, there’s guys who, you know, misuse their authority, and there are guys who watch them do it, who want to do something, but they can’t, because they’ve gotta be part of that blue wall or that blue. And until we get somebody policing from the inside out, those things that happen from outside to us, are gonna continue to happen, because here’s nothing we can do about it, even if they’re wearing body-cams, and we can see them. That’s why every day you can look online and see somebody else getting shot, you can see somebody else getting killed, not just black people.”
(h/t Mediaite)
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