O'Reilly Grants Michelle Obama a Pardon, Declares Moratorium on Lynching Party

This week, Fox News commentator and radio show host Bill O’Reilly came to Michelle Obama’s defense. . . sort of. When a caller chastised Obama over her comments regarding her pride in America, O’Reilly interjected that, without evidence, he is not willing to allow such character attacks on Obama on his station.

That’s commendable enough, but what O’Reilly said is more important than the reason he said it. Here is O’Reilly’s statement, as reprinted by Media Matters for America (the entire exchange with the caller can be read there, as well):

You know, I have a lot of sympathy for Michelle Obama, for Bill Clinton, for all of these people. Bill Clinton, I have sympathy for him, because they're thrown into a hopper where everybody is waiting for them to make a mistake, so that they can just go and bludgeon them. And, you know, Bill Clinton and I don't agree on a lot of things, and I think I've made that clear over the years, but he's trying to stick up for his wife, and every time the guy turns around, there's another demagogue or another ideologue in his face trying to humiliate him because they're rooting for Obama. That's wrong. And I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.

While the word “lynch” has broad denotative meaning, it is most often used in the American context to refer to vigilante mob murders of African Americans. O’Reilly has stood by his comments (through his producer) and has not claimed that he was unaware of this history. (Racism-deniers such as Brian Maloney at the “Radio Equalizer” ran to O’Reilly’s defense.)

Given the scattering of nooses around the country and last month’s fiasco with Golf Channel anchor Kelly Tilghman’s comments about lynching Tiger Woods (and the subsequent Golfweek magazine cover depicting a noose, at right), it would not be credible for O’Reilly to claim ignorance anyway.



But, as we repeatedly note here, we are much less interested in intent than we are in effect. The word “lynch” is highly offensive to millions of Americans, and O’Reilly’s insensitivity to that is striking. Whether his comment rises to the level of Don Imus’s racist reference to the Rutgers women’s basketball team is debatable, but Imus was fired (and later rehired) as a result of his comments, and O’Reilly has not been held accountable for his at all (so far as we can tell). His apology mentioned that he was mimicking Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s claim that he was subjected to a “high-tech lynching” by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee during his nomination hearings in 1991. In the end, however, O'Reilly gave the standard “I didn’t mean it THAT way” excuse.

Professor Boyce Watkins puts forth an excellent analysis of the situation. While we differ with Professor Watkins in the sense that we advocate for the term “racism” to refer to the (often-subconscious) beliefs in white supremacy that reside in all who were socialized in America (and, thus, while O’Reilly is certainly a racist, we wouldn’t use it as a term to distinguish him from the rest of us), we agree with his main point:

I am sure Bill doesn’t truly want to physically lynch Michelle Obama, but there are many ways he could have expressed his frustration. Mrs. Obama could have been challenged on her remarks, criticized for them, and even taken to task on O’Reilly’s show. But the fact that Bill O’Reilly, a man whose racism exceeds both Don Imus and David Duke, would choose the word “lynch” to describe Michelle Obama is not only disturbing, it’s downright revealing. What’s more revealing is the fact that Fox News has not felt the need to punish O’Reilly for his remarks, implying that it is ok to talk about lynching a woman who might be the First Lady of the United States. I am not sure he would have gotten away with offering to send a prominent Jewish woman to “the concentration camp”, no matter what she had to say.

It’s quite possible that Bill O’Reilly is a bigot. We do not venture to make such an accusation, but we are disturbed by how relatively invisible this has been over the past few days.

Our ultimate concern is that after period of heightened attention to bigoted remarks and activities around the country, we may be seeing the beginning of a sort of “racism fatigue” where offensive language such as this begins to melt back into the landscape, thus acquiring a sort of normalcy that provides cover for those who actively wish to avoid racial equality and an excuse for those of us who continue to be uncomfortable with our own racism to revert back to our ignorance-is-bliss state of “colorblindness” (e.g., “I have a black friend, so racism is someone else’s problem.”).

Week in and week out in this space, we bemoan the lost opportunities for this nation to engage in an honest, meaningful discussion about race. We will continue to do so, but we are concerned that our posts will become “news” as opposed to analysis. It is a huge difference: logging on to TWIR each week to get a scholarly perspective on the important happenings with respect to race and language in the past seven days is much different than logging on to find out what is happening.

At times, we see movement forward in our collective quest (which we neither invented, started nor claim to lead) to see more racial dialogue, such as the forum that took place at Columbia University this week. Our best hope is that O’Reilly got a pass for some reason other than racism fatigue. As loyal readers of TWIR, you should hope so, too.