Is Bill O’Reilly Serious? Cause and Effect in “Black…
Article #7: Race Relations
Before we continue with Part 2, here’s a quick review of Fox “News” host Bill O’Reilly’s discussing “Race & Crime in America” with. We want you to watch, hear, and refresh yourself with his still unbelievably-narrow-visioned crime statistics assessment:
**VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE**
(Continued from Is Bill O’Reilly Serious? Cause and Effect in “Black America”, Part 1):
For centuries, young black men, just like all other individuals of their culture, simply wanted to be able to make a decent living, learn more, have a family, and be left alone. Unfortunately, many “light-skinned” people (with a superiority complex) could not leave young black men alone because, at the time, they were easily bullied and too good a cheap labor force.
So, what did these much, much lighter-skinned people do?
They kept poking at these young black men through open, underhanded, and behind-closed-door segregationist policies; stopping them from making a decent living in the work force and stifling their educational opportunities, thereby making it more difficult to raise the families those men wanted and/or already had. And then something happened.
Enough became enough.
See, you can’t treat people like crap and then talk about the effects of that treatment, but not talk about the causes that led to those effects. You can’t steal from them educationally, jail them unjustly, beat them senselessly, and then, when they roar like lions, maul like bears, and beat their chest like gorillas, you, with an onset of selective amnesia, ask, “Why are you so violent?” The question is, why were you so violent toward them?
Think about how a battered woman becomes like actress Jennifer Lopez in the movie “Enough” or like actress Jodie Foster in the movie “The Brave One.” Were they violent women initially? No. However, didn’t they become violent and kill people after being repeatedly taken advantage of and abused? Yes.
But why?
O’Reilly, a white man, calls the defendant “a light-skinned Hispanic“, but a black man, who is sitting right across the table from him, eludes to the defendant being white. Same defendant, yet two men of two different ethnicities see him as two different ethnicities. Can O’Reilly even grasp the significance of why that is?
It’s simple. The “why” matters.
O’Reilly’s premise totally dismisses “cause.” He seems to dodgingly speak of young black males as though they are uncaged, untrained animals. Well you know what? Let’s use that premise of ignorance for a second in a little purposely-repetitive session we like to call “Metaphors“:
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See, when you put table scraps in front of two “animals,” which you turned into animals by letting table scraps be the only thing that can be found, and then one of them kills the other for the table scraps in order to survive one more day, do you think it’s fair to then say, “Look how violent they are. See, most of these types of deaths are caused by these ‘animals’!“?
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It’s like the movie “Elysium” where the one planet has no sickness and no poverty, but the other planet is where the government of Elysium keeps the sick and impoverished. Meanwhile, the news on Elysium says, “All the crime happens on the other planet. Those people are savages!” What do you expect them to be when you have them scavenging for scraps?
You set the stage for death and destruction, train the actors to be violent through them having to scavenge for the most worthless parts, then blame them for causing death and destruction by fighting over those worthless parts. It reeks of the scene in the Oscar®-winning film called “DJango Unchained,” which ingeniously depicted the depravity and insanity of racism and slavery.
In this scene, two slave masters had two slaves fighting simply for their enjoyment and bragging rights, inevitably ending with one of the slaves being killed and the winning slave being rewarded for the killing of his fellow slave with a beer.
A beer.
In a documentary called “Hidden Colors,” Tariq Nasheed, an actor and filmmaker, said that the lack of education and poverty are “the mother and father of aggression.” Yet, here you are, Bill O’Reilly, berating the less educated and impoverished, but willfully ignoring the fact that there is something wrong educationally in the geographical areas that have lower educational ratings, higher poverty rates, and “coincidentally” higher rates of violence?
So Bill, just to make sure I’ve got this correct:
The conditions for the stereotypical statistics can be prejudicially created, thereby allowing the manifestation of skewed statistics and subsequent condescending recitation of those skewed statistics by individuals such as yourself in order to bolster your argument(s), but without informing your listeners why those skewed statistics, that you are using to bolster your argument(s), even exist.
Got it.