Ezekiel Edwards

O’Reilly: If Your Bread is White, Your Head is on Right

Last week, Bill O'Reilly seemed stunned that Edwin Roy Hall, a "whitebread" guy, married with two kids, could have possibly murdered Kelsey Smith. Specifically, O'Reilly stated the following on his show, the O'Reilly Factor:

"This guy who is charged has a child and a wife. You know, he's like white-bread guy. And we're all going, 'What is that?'"

Uh, that's a white guy with a wife and child charged with committing a crime. I wish every question had such an easy answer.

This "if you're white, you're alright" mantra of O'Reilly's is hardly surprising, given that last month, while interviewing John McCain, O'Reilly said: "But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I ..."

Oh, no, not the endangered white, Christian, male power structure?!? Someone needs to call Habitat for Inhumanity! If the white, Christian, male power structure, responsible in large part for such heroic acts in American history as genocide against Native Americans, slavery, and numerous unnecessary acts of military aggression, is broken down, we might be without the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, not to mention shows like the O'Reilly Factor! Oh, the horror!

But back to "whitebread" married guys (also known as "heavenly angels who can do no wrong") of which O'Reilly is part. I'm anxiously awaiting DNA tests that will show, I am confident, that Timothy McVeigh, Robert Chambers (an Upper East Side preppie), Theodore Kaczynski (the Harvard graduate), Jeffrey Dahmer, Dylan Harris and Eric Klebold (privileged high school students), to name a few, all of whom committed murder, much of it random, were in fact people of color. Those tests should be coming in any day now.

Even if the tests are inconclusive, though, O'Reilly can breathe easy knowing that none of the aforementioned "allegedly" white guys were married with children. And as for wealthy, married guys like Kenneth Lay and Scooter Libby, who are probably white, their crimes weren't violent.

See, it's a simple formula: "whitebread", married, with children = shocking if violent; conversely, not "whitebread", unmarried, without children = not surprising if violent. Maybe O'Reilly is on to something.

Or maybe not.

The reality is, most people do not commit crimes like that committed against Kelsey Smith, period. Race and class and marital and parental status do not make anyone more or less predisposed to abduct and murder a 17-year-old girl.

The clear implication of O'Reilly's disbelief that white middle class guys could commit such crimes is that such random acts of violence are only committed by poor people, and especially poor people of color who are not part of the white power structure (and if they're unmarried, there's no telling what they'lll do!).

O'Reilly would barely blink an eye at the arrest of married men and women with children in the Bronx since they are poor African-Americans and Latinos and he would expect them to commit crimes.

I'd write more, but I just got interrupted by breaking news: it turns out that Ted Bundy was Black!

Ezekiel Edwards: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 5:53 AM, Jun 13, 2007 in Media
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