"Bill O'Reilly's Racist Distortion of History"

On his October 4th radio show, Bill O’Reilly said the following:
O’REILLY: All right. But let me counter that, [caller], and you can comment on my comment. That’s the prevailing wisdom in a lot of the precincts, is that because Blacks were in slavery in the United States, they were never able to develop an infrastructure of education and culture to compete with the white majority. That is the prevailing wisdom in lots and lots of places. Let me submit this to you, and then you can comment on it.

My people came from County Cavan in Ireland. All right? And the British Crown marched in there with their henchman, Oliver Cromwell, and they seized all of my ancestors’ lands, everything. And they threw them into slavery, pretty much indentured servitude on the land. And then the land collapsed, all right? And everybody was starving in Ireland. They had to leave the country, just as Africans had to leave – African Americans had to leave Africa and come over on a boat and try to make in the New World with nothing. Nothing. And succeeded, succeeded. As did Italians, as did– and I’ll submit to you, African Americans are succeeding as well. So all of these things can be overcome I think, [caller]. Go ahead.

Unfortunately, O’Reilly’s weak grasp of history went unchallenged on the air to thousands of listeners. While O’Reilly comes to no direct conclusion in this babble, his basic implication is clear: Irish people made it in America, so why can’t Black people? The underlying code that remains unspoken: Black people are either biologically or culturally inferior to the Irish. Either the source of their "failure" lies within themselves and is attributed to the ill-defined concept of "race."

O’Reilly’s racist argument has deep roots in the ultra right. It is echoed daily by the likes of Bill Bennett who thought nothing of arguing that genocide against Black people would eliminate much crime. In his view, a view supported and praised by the right-wing magazine National Review, African Americans are predisposed to crime, a myth that they link to "race."

O’Reilly and Bennett’s assumption that African Americans are themselves responsible for the negative affects of racism – race-based slavery, Jim Crow segregation, continuing job and housing discrimination, "racial profiling" in the criminal justice system, negative racial stereotypes in the media, etc. – and institutions they do not control that perpetuate the system of racial injustice is commonly referred to as "blaming the victim."

Blaming the victim is the natural instinct of the ultra right, for by shifting the source of social problems onto a group or individual, the real perpetrators and the system they control go unnoticed. Take the Hurricane Katrina disaster, for example. Specifically, after the disaster in New Orleans, which no one doubts was tied to racism, Bush administration officials openly blamed New Orleans residents for the catastrophe that befell them. This opinion, echoed by the right-wing media, suggested that funding cuts that moved funds away from rebuilding and bolstering New Orleans’ levee system, a problem widely recognized by disaster experts and engineers, to pay for tax cuts for the rich, the war in Iraq, and pork barrel spending in rich, mostly white districts of Republican congressional leaders was not to blame for the tragedy.
Many Irish Americans fought alongside Blacks and other non-whites for social justice throughout US history. Terrence V. Powderly headed the country’s first racially integrated national union, the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, a nationwide union that fought to organize workers across ethnic and racial lines. Foster and Flynn also went on to be leaders of the Communist Party. Mother Jones and Tom Mooney also count among the great Irish American labor leaders.

The "blame the victim" tactic ignores history and reality. It ignores decades of racial segregation that forced Black working-class families into New Orleans’ 9th Ward. It ignores economic hardship and unemployment that disproportionately affect African Americans which kept them there in the conditions that prevailed in late August 2005. It ignores racial biases that motivated emergency teams to ignore them in the 9th Ward for days after the city flooded. O’Reilly’s argument implies that people up to their neck in disease infested water, with no transportation, hemmed in by armed vigilantes and unsympathetic law enforcement officers, and lacking food and water should be able to save themselves. After all those folks with SUVs, who didn’t live near the worst flooding, and who were lucky enough to be prioritized by rescue teams made it.
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