Who better to tell America how to deal with racism than a white, highly paid, Hollywood actor?
Matt Damon is ready to take that position. In an interview with the Associated Press at an L.A. screening of his new movie Suburbicon, the actor stated that “there needs to be a reckoning, a true one,” when it comes to racism in the United States.
He told the reporter, “We’ve never really reckoned with the issue of race in this country. We just haven’t. It’s almost like the Civil War ended and kind of like the child in a divorce. Like, you know, a conflict-averse child. ‘Okay, okay, it’s over, let’s not talk about that ever again.’ And that’s obviously not what needed to happen.”
What did need to happen? Apparently something of biblical proportions. “There needs to be a reckoning, a true one. And that’s how we’ll make progress, and move forward.”
Matt Damon is white, with a net worth of $160 million. He is the very definition of white privilege. But he stars in a film about white privilege, and that’s all that matters. In other matters, however, Damon can be found lacking. The actor admitted that while he knew of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein’s behavior towards actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow, he didn’t speak up because Weinstein “didn’t do it out in the open.”
USA Today’s Andrea Mandell summed up critics’ problems with George Clooney’s film, Suburbicon, about racism, violence, and white privilege that takes place in a 1950s neighborhood: “Some accused the director of tokenism, using the [African American] Meyerses as underdeveloped symbols of race in his story about white privilege.”
In the same USA Today article, George Clooney didn’t address these criticisms, choosing to instead levy heavy judgment upon the president of the United States: “I would be horrified if 10 years from now, (people) didn’t know where I stood on Breitbart or Trump. I would be horrified if they didn’t say I stood up against these people.”
