Actor Samuel L. Jackson says in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting, he found himself hoping the attacker was a white male.
“I can’t even tell you how much that day the thing that happened 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,” Jackson said in a Sunday podcast with The Hollywood Reporter.
Jackson, famed for his roles in “Pulp Fiction,” “Snakes on a Plane,” and dozens of other films, said the shooting was distressing because it helped focus public suspicion on Muslim Americans, in a way that earlier attacks on Paris and Fort Hood did not.
“It’s like: ‘Oh, shit. It’s here. And it’s here in another kind of way,'” he said. “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.”
Jackson said the experience of Muslims made them “the new young black men.”
He also weighed in on the hot-button topic of police violence, saying it goes back to the hostility heaped on soldiers returning from Vietnam.
“In the sixties or whatever, 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 ’cause that was the job — ‘Oh, you have ex-military service? You can become one of the boys in blue,'” said Jackson. “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 … So, consequently, you’ve got people out there who are used to looking at people as ‘the enemy’ ’cause that’s what it was — people were trying to kill them every day.”
Jackson, a lifelong liberal (who once took Martin Luther King Sr. hostage during a 60s protest), said he plans to back Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, on the grounds that Sanders “can’t win.”
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