Slavery According to Bill O'Reilly

O'Reilly's Benevolent Slaveowners

July 27, 2016

by Kevin M. Levine

Slave House in Washington, D.C.

Bill O’Reilly “just can’t get rid of that history teacher thing.” Last night O’Reilly offered a brief response to Michelle Obama’s DNC Convention speech in which she cited the role of slaves in building the White House. The First Lady used the opportunity to remind her listeners of how far we’ve come as a nation and to impart some understanding of what it has meant for a black family to occupy this home for the past eight years. Not surprisingly, many listeners were surprised to hear this little tidbit of history and others, no doubt, refused to believe it.

For O’Reilly, however, the issue is not whether the claim is true. He admits that it is, but he still manages to reveal his own lack of comfort by employing one of the most deeply embedded tropes in our history and memory of slavery. First, O’Reilly references the fact that “free blacks, whites, and immigrants also worked on the massive building” which serves to collapse the salient economic, social, and political distinctions between the freed and enslaved.

But it is this comment that stands out.

Slaves that worked there were well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802.

I don’t know for sure, but I assume the date of 1802 is a reference to the completion of the White House, but this does not include the role that slaves continued to play in the construction of the rest of the capital. The more interesting question is why O’Reilly felt a need to claim that slaves were treated well. What does this even mean in this context beyond a vague reference to government housing – a reference that viewers likely filtered through their assumptions about a supposedly failed welfare state..

O’Reilly falls back into the standard argument – first offered by slaveowners themselves and later popularized in post-Civil War accounts, including popular Hollywood movies such asGone With the Wind – that slavery was not so bad. As far as O’Reilly is concerned, slaves were no different from free blacks and immigrants.

In doing so, O’Reilly undercuts the story of ‘slavery to freedom’ outlined by Michelle Obama as a means to minimize the problem of race relations throughout American history. He could have just as easily used the occasion to highlight the theme of American Exceptionalism outlined in her speech. No doubt, O’Reilly’s viewers are hardwired for such an interpretation, but to do so would have forced his audience to confront the tension between freedom and slavery that existed at the very moment of the nation’s founding.

Imagining slaves toiling on the grounds of the White House serves to remind Americans that the institution of slavery could and did continue to exist in a new nation pledged to the principle of “equality for all.” That is the intellectual and cultural space in which the stories of many black families struggle to find a voice. Unfortunately, it is much more comforting to imagine “well fed” slaves working diligently to construct a new nation alongside their free black and immigrant brothers.

And that’s Bill O’Reilly’s “history thing.