Samuel L. Jackson says he sees in former President Trump the “same rednecks” who hurled racist slurs at him as a kid.
“When I grew up in segregation, I knew which white people didn’t want to be bothered with me, and I knew how they felt about me,” the “Pulp Fiction” actor said in an interview with The Daily Beast published Tuesday.
“When I see Trump, I see the same rednecks I saw when I was growing up … [who] tried to keep me in my place,” Jackson said, adding that they would direct racist insults at him.
“That’s what the Republican Party is to me,” the 74-year-old performer, who was raised in Tennessee, said.
“They’re doing it to young people, gay people. They don’t care who you are,” Jackson said. “If you’re not them, you’re the enemy.”
Jackson’s Trump criticism came in response to a question about serving as an usher at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
“The world seems to be in as hard a place as it’s always been. As a child of the ’60s, watching what happened at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and seeing the police beating those demonstrators — and those were young white kids — I learned there’s a certain kind of thing that the powers that be don’t want us doing,” Jackson said.
“One of them is protesting what they think they want us to do,” he continued.
“So when George Floyd happened, it was great to see all the different faces of kids out there fighting the injustice and what the power was doing once again to keep you from having an open mind or keep you from creating change that is not the change they want made,” Jackson said, referring to the nationwide demonstrations over the 2020 killing.
“That part has not changed. In my opinion, it’s kind of worse. They used to hide it. Now, they don’t hide it anymore!”
Jackson, who stars in the forthcoming Disney+ series “Secret Invasion” has been a vocal critic of Trump, blasting the then-president in 2019 for “ruining the planet.”
“If you’re not saying anything,” Jackson said at the time, “then you’re complicit.”