Fox News star anchor Bill O’Reilly is under fire from some media outlets for remarks he made this week about poverty-stricken black communities.
In an interview Monday with Donald Trump, who polls show is viewed negatively by most blacks nationally, O’Reilly asked the Republican presidential candidate how he planned to make inroads with those voters.
“My message is I’m going to bring back jobs, Bill,” said Trump, citing the high unemployment rate among young blacks.
“But how are you going to get jobs for them? Many of them are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads and I hate to be generalized about it but it’s true, if you look at all the educational statistics,” O’Reilly said. “How are you going to give jobs to people who aren’t qualified for jobs?”
A bitter write-up of the segment in Politico said, “Bill O’Reilly interrupted Donald Trump’s claims about how he would create jobs for African-Americans on Monday night to make a louder point: That many of them are ‘ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads.'”
The New York Daily News said O’Reilly “went beyond the pale” and called it a “bigoted remark.”
“Bill O’Reilly just out-racist’d Donald Trump,” blared a headline at Slate.
The full context of O’Reilly’s remarks, however, are largely in line with social justice advocates who say that many or most blacks in the U.S. are at a disadvantage economically and geographically in terms of opportunities for success.
“It’s more challenging for a poor child in Harlem without parental guidance, in a school that’s falling apart than it is for some white kid out in Garden City,” O’Reilly continued on his show. “And you say you can bring jobs back. But if the kid isn’t qualified to do the job and can’t do the work, I mean, you’ve got to get into the infrastructure of the African-American community. Do you have any plan to do that?”
Trump insisted that if elected president, he would focus on education for blacks but said, “It’s also about spirit. A lot of people don’t have spirit.”
