Story highlights Lewis Beale: Clint Eastwood's defense of Trump's racially charged remarks have led some to criticize. It's not so simple

Beale: Director Eastwood has strong track record celebrating black cultural figures, featuring black actors

Eastwood married to Latina; his current, baffling antics should be seen alongside his body of work

Lewis Beale writes about culture and film for the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and other publications. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

But human beings are complex creatures, which means that Eastwood is a set of contradictions. His defense of Trump's comments about Hispanics and Muslims is no doubt reprehensible, and has caused many people to label him as a hardcore racist. But in excoriating him, those same critics have forgotten that for years Eastwood has, in his own way, been one of the most racially sensitive people in Hollywood.

Years ago, a friend pointed out to me that Woody Allen, darling of film critics and urban intellectuals, never seemed to cast any minorities in his films, even in the background.

Yet Clint Eastwood, often reviled for his conservative/libertarian politics, has consistently cast, and acted with, black performers, many of them in key roles -- not just in the "Dirty Harry" films, where for example, Felton Perry played his partner in "Magnum Force," but also in pictures like "Bronco Billy" (Scatman Crothers) and "The Eiger Sanction" (Vonetta McGee). I wrote a piece about this for the Los Angeles Daily News, and to this date, no one has contradicted my findings.

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