After attacking Bill O’Reilly’s history last week, I’ll defend his sociology this week. On Monday, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell ridiculed Fox News’ O’Reilly for saying that single motherhood is responsible for the the high black crime rate.
O’Reilly said, quite correctly: “The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family. Right now, about 73 percent of all black babies are born out of wedlock. That drives poverty. And the lack of involved fathers leads to young boys growing up resentful and unsupervised. And it has nothing to do with slavery. It has everything to do with you Hollywood people and you derelict parents.”
O’Donnell mocked O’Reilly, saying that “the struggles of black America have nothing to do with slavery in Bill O’Reilly’s very narrow and uneducated mind.” He then droned on about some paper Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about slavery.
Take that, Bill O’Reilly!
While I’m sure that was a fascinating little monograph Moynihan wrote about slavery, O’Donnell cited nothing in it that contradicted O’Reilly. Apparently, Moynihan found that American slavery was “the most awful the world has ever known.” True, but unfortunately that has nothing to do with what O’Reilly said