In an interview with the UK’s Independent newspaper, the action star Liam Neeson, who was on a press junket to promote his new action movie, Cold Pursuit, admitted to wanting racist revenge. Decades ago, he said, a friend of his had confided that she had been raped. Neeson asked if she knew the man who had raped her, and when she said no, he asked the man’s race. She told him that the attacker had been black. Neeson said that after this, he was intent on murdering a black man. He said he walked the streets carrying “a cosh” – British slang for a bludgeon – going into black neighborhoods and hoping to find himself in a fight, so that he would have an excuse to beat a black man to death. All of this came from a feeling of defensiveness toward his friend, he said. Thus, he would murder a black man on her behalf.

The comment sparked controversy and anger; black people rightly pointed out that this attitude seeks to impose collective punishment, putting their communities in grave and pointless danger. Many were angry at Neeson for not condemning his own past racism, instead saying that the episode had taught him a lesson about the danger and futility of revenge. In response, Neeson went on Good Morning America. “I am not a racist,” he said, and added, unhelpfully, that he had overcome his urges by “power walking”. While he was there, he also promoted his new movie.

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Neeson’s story describes an element of racism that begins in white imaginations, but can have dangerous impacts on black lives: the fantasy of violence. In Neeson’s mind, all black men were of a piece with one another, an undifferentiated group that was uniformly menacing and collectively responsible for what happened to his friend. This is the same fantasy of a black threat that was in the mind of George Zimmerman when he stalked and then killed the teenage Trayvon Martin, for example; its persistence in the minds of white people puts black people in a state of constant risk, always in danger of provoking this violent paranoia by their mere presence.

After Martin’s murder in 2013, then president Barack Obama gave a statement speaking about his own experiences of provoking white people’s racist fear, and of enduring the danger and humiliation that comes with being the object of it. “There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars,” he said. “That happens to me, at least before I was a senator.” He was talking about people who think like Neeson did, white people who indulge the fiction that proximity to black people means vulnerability to violence – and that their own violence in response to that imagined threat is justified. It must be stated plainly: this kind of thinking kills people. Black people die because white people feel uncomfortable.

That Neeson was intent on indulging this racist revenge act in response to his friend’s rape forces us to confront another, more fraught theme: the fact that in many instances, when white men enact racist violence on black men, they imagine – or pretend – that they are committing this violence on white women’s behalf.

Play Video 2:21 Liam Neeson reveals he wanted to kill a black person following rape of friend – audio

Neeson’s intention of killing a random black man to avenge the rape of his friend recalls the history of American lynching, the mob murders of black people by white people that were often committed under the pretence that the black victim had committed sexual violence against a white woman. Rape accusations against lynching victims were often frivolous and trumped up, made by the white male lynching perpetrators themselves or by white women with a racist agenda. The accusations tended to be fantastical and lurid, adorned with what the anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B Wells called “psychological and physical impossibilities”.

These accusations were usually fictional, and Wells argued that the lynch mobs knew that they were fictional. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she wrote in 1892. But these fantasies of black male sexual violence against white women were used as excuses for murderous racist violence in communities where white men raped, beat, and abused white women with impunity.

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The white supremacist logic of the lynch mob, like the racist logic of Neeson’s vengeful intentions, does not actually value the dignity and safety of the white women it purports to defend. It only begins to consider those women’s safety from sexual violence when that consideration can become a pretext for inflicting racist terror. In his interview with the Independent, Neeson depicted his racist rage as an outpouring of indignation on behalf of his friend, but it has the markings of a long-held and poorly suppressed desire, the kind of impulse that he would have found an excuse to indulge in sooner or later. We can be grateful, if “gratitude” is the right word, that the form his racism took did not end in anyone getting hurt or killed.

Neeson said that the impulse to hurt a random black stranger came from his desire to “show honor” in the aftermath of his friend’s rape. The phrase seems to imply a distorted understanding of the rape, with Neeson wanting to use the occasion of this woman’s suffering as an opportunity to further his own story, in this case by fantasizing about a pointless, racist virility display. At any rate, the incident has not brought much honor to Neeson himself. In the wake of his remarks, red carpet events for his new film were cancelled.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist