Courtesy of Mother Jones:
On his show Tuesday, O'Reilly lauded Obama for "referring to the evolution of America in a positive way." But he then proceeded to fact-check her statement in a way that appeared to excuse the US government's use of slave labor.
"Slaves that worked there were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802," he said. "However, the feds did not forbid subcontractors from using slave labor. So Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well. Got it?"
And there you have it—the worst response to Michelle Obama's 2016 Democratic National Convention address.
Well I might quibble with that definition as the "worst response" since O'Reilly was not alone.
Courtesy of Fusion:
While the veracity of Obama’s historical reference has been widely confirmed and backed up by a number of historians, that did not stop Fox News Radio host John Gibson from penning a tone-deaf blog post bemoaning the fact that the First Lady did not mention the white laborers who also participated in the construction of the White House.
“A couple relevant facts: it was 1792. The land for the District of Columbia was ceded to the federal government by two slave states. Slaves lived in the area and were employed in building much of the capitol,” Gibson wrote. “What, then, is the purpose of appropriating the construction of the White House to black slave workers, neglecting to mention other workers?”
What Gibson, like so many other racist revisionists, fails to understand is that slaves cannot be “workers” in the sense that they signed up for a job with the expectation of financial compensation and fair treatment. To compare slave labor to the work done by free white laborers is to erase the fact that slaves were subjected to lives of disenfranchisement, horror, and systemic abuse.
Okay so Roger Ailes is out, so just when can we expect the hosts of Fox News to stop being such racist, misogynistic, assholes?
Never mind, I'm pretty sure I know the answer to that question.
Source http://ift.tt/2are9lY
On his show Tuesday, O'Reilly lauded Obama for "referring to the evolution of America in a positive way." But he then proceeded to fact-check her statement in a way that appeared to excuse the US government's use of slave labor.
"Slaves that worked there were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802," he said. "However, the feds did not forbid subcontractors from using slave labor. So Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well. Got it?"
And there you have it—the worst response to Michelle Obama's 2016 Democratic National Convention address.
Well I might quibble with that definition as the "worst response" since O'Reilly was not alone.
Courtesy of Fusion:
While the veracity of Obama’s historical reference has been widely confirmed and backed up by a number of historians, that did not stop Fox News Radio host John Gibson from penning a tone-deaf blog post bemoaning the fact that the First Lady did not mention the white laborers who also participated in the construction of the White House.
“A couple relevant facts: it was 1792. The land for the District of Columbia was ceded to the federal government by two slave states. Slaves lived in the area and were employed in building much of the capitol,” Gibson wrote. “What, then, is the purpose of appropriating the construction of the White House to black slave workers, neglecting to mention other workers?”
What Gibson, like so many other racist revisionists, fails to understand is that slaves cannot be “workers” in the sense that they signed up for a job with the expectation of financial compensation and fair treatment. To compare slave labor to the work done by free white laborers is to erase the fact that slaves were subjected to lives of disenfranchisement, horror, and systemic abuse.
Okay so Roger Ailes is out, so just when can we expect the hosts of Fox News to stop being such racist, misogynistic, assholes?
Never mind, I'm pretty sure I know the answer to that question.
Source http://ift.tt/2are9lY
