Wale Goes at Terry Crews for Remarks on Liam Neeson’s “Black Bastard” Comments
Wale was not feeling actor Terry Crews’ explanation for controversial remarks actor Liam Neeson made during an interview about his attempt to seek revenge for his friend he says told him she was brutally raped by a Black person. Wale addressed Crews' comments on Twitter on Tuesday (Feb. 5).
Refuting Crews' suggestion that Neeson's quote was him remembering his "fork in the road"—a turning point where someone discovers something about themselves or the world and chooses to live differently as a result—Wale jumped onto Twitter and made his feelings known.
“Na. No. Nope. Liam is trash," Wale wrote in response to Crews' tweet. "We losin Brothers all the time because of this proverbial “fork” . Na fam.”
As we mentioned above, Crews' comments came in response to an interview where Neeson recalled his own subconscious racist instincts. Crews apparently saw the comments as Neeson's personal moment of reflection.
"I believe that every person on earth is capable of the greatest good, or unspeakable evil," Crews said of his fellow actor. "Liam is just describing his fork in the road."
After Wale issued his initial reply to Crews' tweet, Crews offered up a response. “So what are we gonna do, @wale?” Crews wrote to Wale, who retorted with, “I know what we not gon do, Terry.”
“So what are we NOT going to do, @wale?” Terry tweeted back.
Crews went on to respond to another commenter who insisted that Crews was literally defending Neeson's comments. "This is why reading comprehension is so necessary in school," Crews began. "I never defended Liam Neeson. Still don’t."
As we mentioned up top, this entire back-and-forth stems from an interview in the U.K. newspaper The Independent, which is one that finds him promoting his upcoming film Cold Pursuit, which is a movie that deals with revenge. For the interview, 66-year-old actor decided to share a bleak story about a time he was a young man roaming the streets of London hoping to find some "Black bastard" to confront so he could avenge the rape of his friend who told him that she was attacked by a Black man.
“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...kill him.”
Earlier today, Nesson used an appearance on Good Morning America to explain what he was thinking about in that instance 40 years ago. "It was horrible, horrible when I think back, that I did that...It’s awful," he said. "But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing?"
"We all pretend we're kind of politically correct," he continued. "I mean, in this country, it's the same in my own country too, you sometimes just scratch the surface and you discover this racism and bigotry, and it's there."
Neeson also insisted that he's not racist but he hopes that his story will help people talk more about racism in America as well as abroad in his own native country.
Check out Wale and Terry Crews's back-and-forth Twitter spat below.
See Wale and Terry Crews' Twitter Argument