Bill O"Reilly: Slaves Who Built White House Were "Well Fed" With "Decent Lodgings"
I thought about this encounter again this week after Bill O"Reilly"s commentary on Michelle Obama"s seemingly uncontroversial reference to the White House having been built by slaves. After confirming the truth of the first lady"s statement, he then digressed into a weird description of slavery that seemed to undermine the larger point the first lady was making. His remarks are a reminder of the wisdom deficit disorder that we are facing in this country.
On top of the inaccurate details that O"Reilly felt the need to peddle, his comments reveal a failure to realize that the test of the strength of a democracy is how we deal with uncomfortable facts. In the U.S. Constitution, our Founders sought to form a "more perfect union" which, by definition, means that it was not yet perfect to begin with. It"s OK to admit that our country is a work in progress. Slavery, the shackles of the past, need not shackle us now. Telling us that slavery wasn"t all bad, even by implication, distracts from Michelle Obama"s point that only in a country of immense promise and self-confidence could the descendants of those people who were forced to cut and drag the granite of the Early Republic now inhabit their handiwork as the first family. That defines a great country, doesn"t it?
O"Reilly is a writer who believes in narrative history. Although historians (and in the case of his Reagan book, veterans of that administration) quibble with his books on Lincoln, Kennedy and Reagan, the fact is that he and his co-author, Martin Dugard, understand how to write a good yarn and a good line. It"s not surprising, necessarily, that he offered the historically indefensible counternarrative of the well-treated slave to make some noise. But shouldn"t some subjects, like the awfulness of slavery, be too serious for literary gamesmanship?The issue is not political correctness. It is wisdom at a fragile moment in our history. For months, we have seen race, religion and ethnic origin used to defend violence, weaken civil liberties and to challenge existing institutions. Why try to make a cheap point off the first lady, of all people, by diminishing the collective experience of suffering by so many Americans of the same race?If this was a misinterpreted throwaway line by O"Reilly, he has a chance to correct his history Wednesday night. If he was somehow suggesting a larger argument about the reality of slavery, then he is guilty of the same obfuscating as those who are responding to the Russian hack on the DNC by suggesting maybe the Russians should be hacking Hillary Clinton"s server to find her missing emails. Talk about missing the point!To put it in terms O"Reilly should especially appreciate: Imagine someone saying after Dallas in 1963, "Too bad about Kennedy but wasn"t the weather beautiful and didn"t he look happy at the end." C"mon, Bill. [Full disclosure: About a decade ago I appeared on O"Reilly"s show and enjoyed the discussion.] This is a time when the country desperately needs smart people of the left and the right to act like adults, to highlight the profound over the superficial, the real over the spin.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/27/opinions/bill-oreilly-slavery-opinion-tim-naftali/index.html
