Some Incredibly Racist John Wayne Comments Are Doing The Rounds And… Hoo Boy

John Wayne was not a particularly good actor — although he appeared in some genuinely great films across his many decades as a star of the silver screen, he basically played one character (reluctant grumpy white saviour), and not very well at that.

Nor was Wayne a good person. A proud supporter of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both Presidents well-known for their anti-racial minority and anti-LGBTIQ views, Wayne’s misguided and exclusionary brand of “patriotism” was founded on a fear of outsiders.

None of that’s news, exactly — Wayne has been dead for almost four decades, and many of his most controversial comments were uttered a long time before that.

But a long-overdue reminder of Wayne’s status as a walking, wheezing bag of politically incorrect scorpions has recently resurfaced on Twitter in the form of an interview the actor conducted with Playboy in 1971.

Jesus fuck, John Wayne was a straight up piece of shit

(Playboy interview, May 1971) pic.twitter.com/okfG1iZb0U

— Matt Williams (@pixelpreaching) February 18, 2019

The interview is a grab-bag of deeply evil stereotypes. For starters, Wayne uses a slur to describe Midnight Cowboy, a touching story of kinship between two down-and-outs.

Then, Wayne claims he is a believer in “white supremacy”, arguing that African-Americans should not be granted autonomy over their own communities until they pass certain “tests that determine” whether or not they are “sufficiently equipped scholastically”.

Arguing that he cast “a correct number of” African-American actors in his famously terrible passion project The Green Berets, the man goes on to rail against racial diversity in filmmaking, incorrectly stating that most minorities hadn’t “trained themselves” properly to get into the movies.

Then, finally, in probably the interview’s most famous pull quote, the actor claims that Indigenous Americans were selfish for trying to hold onto their own land following the invasion of Caucasian settlers.

if you guys are mad about John Wayne wait until you hear what this other actor from his era did. [stares significantly] his name was Ronald Reagan

— Daniel D'Addario (@DPD_) February 19, 2019

Since the interview resurfaced, some have argued that Wayne was simply a product of his time — that being born in 1907 naturally bred those views.

But that’s not true, nor fair. The actor was a grown man, with many years available to him to shrug off his cultural conditioning. Instead, he doubled down on it.

It’s like Public Enemy once sang, some 30 years ago — “Mother fuck [Elvis] and John Wayne.“