Bill O’Reilly: Racist Regardless

Not to get on a soapbox, but this has a lot to do with music, and it annoys me:

In What Bill O’Reilly Really Told Me, FOX News analyst Juan Williams sat down to clarify that Mr. O’Reilly wasn’t actually being racist when he recently expressed surprise about the lack of blacks profanely demanding food at a Harlem restaurant.

Williams gets right to the meat of the issue:

[Today's rappers] make their name by bragging about how many people they’ve killed, how many times they’ve been shot and how many “bitches” they’ve abused. And those rappers, along with no-talent black comedians who use the N-word and profanity constantly, are creating a very negative image of black people in music, in music videos and in the movies.

At least we now have a definition of “today’s rappers,” each and every one of them, from the aspiring indie musician to the multi-million dollar-earning video star.

Williams’ clarification almost seems like something that the FOX network higher-ups had ordered him to write: “Listen, Williams, O’Reilly’s fragile. He’s an old man. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. You gotta tell the media that he wasn’t being racist. We know it seemed racist, but it’s really important that Bill accuses other people of villany, not vice versa!!”

Regardless, while Williams goes on to explain how O’Reilly was only trying to express joy in the fact that blacks aren’t savages like rap music would have you believe, he still misses the point.

I have yet to understand in the first place why we’re judging a race based on music. In this case, rap is described as “crass, hateful and pornographic.” Nevermind that Led Zeppelin sang “Squeeze my lemon, juice run down my leg,” or that another multi-million dollar group of whiteboys called Buckcherry sang “I love the cocaine” again and again, or that Justin Timberlake sang “Dirty babe/You see the shackles/Baby I’m your slave/I’ll let you whip me if I misbehave.” Nevermind that Williams has also now somehow discounted every black comedian as no-talent if he or she has ever used the “n-word” (nigger).

I have no doubt in my mind that O’Reilly hates Buckchery (I know I do) and Led Zeppelin, and of course Robert Johnson, who inspired Zeppelin’s “Lemon Song,” but I have yet to hear him say something like this:

“Just the other day, I walked into an upscale restaurant in Warren, Michigan, and I was tremendously relieved to not see a bunch of tattooed, long-haired, eyelined, devil-worshipping fellow whites snorting coke off the bar and stalking around with numerous scantily-clad women. Likewise, I am glad that white comedians have never said anything offensive. Has anyone ever seen George Carlin? I love the bit where he smashes the watermelon with the sledgehammer.”

It all boils down to this: nevermind that Bill O’Reilly is using circumstantial evidence (pop music) to judge an entire race of people, anyone from age 1 to 100 (textbook racism). Based on today’s pop music, if O’Reilly isn’t equally surprised that most whites can behave in public, then he’s still being racist. And if he is thinking the same thing, it becomes obvious that O’Reilly has a pervading fear of “today’s” society–the antithesis of his TV persona.

If nothing else, O’Reilly’s comments reveal that his toughness extends only the length of his TV studio. In reality, he’s a frightened creature with a lot of rage but a minimal value to the whole.