I wasn't going to blog about this. It seems like schadenfreude. But Fox News' Bill O'Reilly is in the news right now for a gaffe, and as I looked into it more and more, I found all of this fascinating.
Bill went to dinner the other night with Rev. Al Sharpton at a famous restaurant in Harlem. The next day, Bill-O went on his radio show and gushed about how nice it was at the restaurant, that even though it was run by blacks with primarily black patrons, "it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun," he said. "And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all." He opined that white America doesn't know this, that white Americans who don't have a lot of interactions with black Americans "think the [black] culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris and Snoop Dogg." He went on to explain that "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, `M.F.-er, I want more iced tea.'" (AP article)
So, many in the black community are calling this "velvet glove" racism, a backhanded compliment saying, "look how well behaved those black people are!" But as I'm reading it, I'm offended that he thinks white Americans are so ignorant! Did you imagine that Al Sharpton was going around demanding more M.F. iced tea?
So I started surfing YouTube a little, to see if I could get his remarks. I got distracted. I landed on this video (added to YouTube June 2006), which is unrelated, but riveting. On YouTube it's entitled "O'Reilly Gets His Ass Kicked by Donahue," which I had to see, because I just couldn't imagine it. Donahue always seemed so mild-mannered, Clark-Kent-ish:
Who was that Donahue mentioned? Jeremy Glick? Who's that? Then I ran across this (added to YouTube May 2007):
Anyhow, not trying to get into schadenfreude. That's just where the surf took me today. Back to work!
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4 comments:
Yeah but could any of them take on jiminy Glick?
choolie,
See, I didn't "see" the gaffe, but I just read your thing and I take it an entirely different way. Out of earshot of being ridiculed I see it as a person expressing their feelings and observations honestly. There ARE many white people who will see that restaurant scene the way O'Reilly saw it, but we've been so conditioned to be ashamed of saying our true feelings on certain subjects that we clamp up, with self humiliation. But, that does not get rid of the observation. It just puts it into a deep dark hole. Personally, I think Bill O'Reilly's comment may do MORE for the average white person to try to leave his safe comfortable neighborhood and experiment with how the other half lives BECAUSE of what Bill said. But, .... you get the knee jerkers jumping on him and everyone lifts their collars over their ears and scurries back to their safe little niches.
h
I get what you're saying, h. I tried to see it that way. I know he was trying to be a good guy and he's probably mystified by the whole thing. But I stand by the fact that I don't think "white America" would expect Al Sharpton to be frequenting restaurants where people were glowering in the corners demanding more MF iced tea. I know that there are country club people, urban yuppies, suburban yuppies, hipsters, sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies and dickheads of all races. I'm just a little surprised he didn't know that, considering his experience.
Choolie,
I think that that is Bill's appeal to the everyman (white, that is). He doesn't represent an urbane, well seasoned news figure. He represents the average man on the streets. If he pulled a profound understanding of the complexity of the social/economic world, he would have been as booring as, well, you name it and he would have been off the air years ago. See, television has enough of those types of White urbane, sophisticated, "see the many shades of grey" types. He's not one of them. That's probably why Al Sharpton likes him, actually. What you see is what you get. Like some blacks who I used to work with at Children's used to say that they preferred racist white Southerners to racist white Northerners because you knew exactly where you stood.
h
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