For anyone familiar with the history of lynching, racial injustice and contemporary racial profiling in the United States, this interview makes for deeply painful reading, particularly at the outset of Black History Month, a time for reflection on and commemoration of the struggle for racial justice in America and, indeed, around the world.

But Neeson’s fortitude in sharing this story should not be dismissed. In an era of what Robin DiAngelo and others have called “white fragility” over the thought of engaging in open and honest conversations about race, such candor is a welcome alternative to the longstanding politics of racial denial imbued in American culture. Racial denial, where whites avoid even the casual acknowledgement of the horrors or racial slavery — let alone the systemic nature of contemporary racism — suffocates necessary dialogue about racial injustice. Neeson’s admission that his thirst for revenge, as a native of Ireland raised in the times of “The Troubles,” the often-violent religious division that rocked Northern Ireland before the current peace, compelled him toward hateful behavior illustrates the truly global dimensions of anti-black racism.