John Wayne’s son defended his dad on CNN after a 1971 racist interview resurface

[Bald & Beautiful]

are you gonna make this same post again or was 5 times enough

[coin pimp]

Making fun of dead people for their narrow outdated opinions really seems like next level boredom to me. What is it going to achieve, are you going to change their minds?

Junior really couldn't have done any worse though.

[zukriuchen]

The petition to rename the airport is more interesting than Wayne's son defending him. No big surprise that the guy is biased towards his dad, though "he was a product of his time" would've been a better defense than "it was taken out of context", primarily because it wasn't, lol.

The question here isn't, at least to me, about condemning John Wayne as a person (though I do think people overestimate his contributions, his career was built on contacts and his acting had little range). The question is recognizing how the views he held permeated culture, how they might've seeped into movies he worked in, as a director, producer, or even as an actor (because massive cultural icons tend to have a lot of say). This quote, for example

“I’ve directed two pictures and I gave the blacks their proper position. I had a black slave in ‘The Alamo,’ and I had a correct number of blacks in ‘The Green Berets.’”

Shows that yeah, he worked those beliefs into his films, consciously or not.

No one's asking people to give up their John Wayne hero fantasy, and his fame isn't gonna be erased from history books, but while he'll remain a cultural icon of his era, he, like the 'macho cowboy' he played, might not make it as an icon for this one.