Posted on July 27th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro
Bill O’Reilly, that meatloaf-faced patron nudnik of nonstop yelling, wants us to know that the slaves who built the White House were actually paid, well-fed, and humanely housed.
Do we honestly need to do this in 2016? It seems that we need to do this in 2016.
I would like you to posit two slave owners, one “good” and one “bad.” If you can’t picture this for yourself, then maybe you can recall or rent the Steve McQueen movie, 12 YRS A SLAVE, based on the memoirs of Samuel Northrup. That movie, whatever you think of it, did indeed have two slave owners, one relatively humane played in the film by Benedict Cumberbatch, one glowering sadistic monster played by Michael Fassbender.
Now, as slave-owners go, the Benedict Cumberbatch guy is close to being a peach of a guy. Or at least, that is how it is possible for you to interpret the facts, if you don’t look closely. He feeds his slaves well, houses them well, praises them when he thinks they’ve excelled, preaches to them on Sunday. He also has a sadistic thug of an overseer, is too much of a weakling to stand up for Northrup when that overseer dedicates himself to Northrup’s death, and eventually sells Northrup down the river to Fassbender’s monster – all while feeling bad. He also felt goddamned bad about the likelihood that Northrup was a free man stolen away from his family, genuinely tortured himself with it, but, you know, money’s tight, he’s still paying for Samuel, what are you gonna do. So off Samuel goes, to be tortured by the more overt monster for over a decade.
It is possible, I suppose, to feel some sympathy for Cumberbatch’s character, a guy who feels the things a good man does, but will not sacrifice his own resources to act on them.
But, really, screw him. He was still evil, as much as his instincts counseled otherwise. He still owned people. He still held command over their lives. He still thought he could be a kind of father to them, by preaching to them on Sunday. He still belonged to a system that enabled him to sell Samuel Northrup to a brutal monster, when it suited him, and it matters not a whit that he felt badly about it.
Thomas Jefferson is responsible for one splendid gift to the human race, the sentence that begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The sentence is an absolute good. The life of the slave-owner who wrote it is not. We no longer give Thomas Jefferson a pass on that. Why then would any of us assume, as Bill O’Reilly does, that “they were well-housed,” even if true in some isolated cases, minimizes the damage that was done to these people just by being owned?
Let us assume that the slaves who helped build the White House had humane working conditions.
No. Let us be ridiculous about this. Let us assume that the slaves who built the White House lived in sybaritic luxury. Let us assume that they had luxuriously upholstered condos with Lazyboy sofas and let us assume that we could go back in time and give them Netflix, Jacuzzis, vibrating beds and Keuric coffee machines. Let us say that they had servants of their own who would perform any task for them, no matter how intimate; let us say that they were fed peeled grapes while serenaded by orchestras.
They still lived their lives knowing that AT ANY TIME they could be hauled off in chains, delivered into the power of absolute psychopaths, and sent to hard labor clearing tree stumps from mosquito-ridden swamps. Or whatever else the free market wanted them to do.
They knew this. WE KNOW THIS.
You are not well-treated when you know that you may be plunged into Hell at a whim, every goddamned day of your life.
You are not well-treated when, even being “well-treated,” this remains the central fact of your existence.
And because we know this, people like Bill O’Reilly who think they can slice the living damnation of enslaved people finer and harrumph that, actually, some of them were actually quite well treated…need to be recognized as racist pigs who need to shut up and not open their mouths again for a long, long time.
Tags: 12 Yrs A Slave, Assholes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Fassbender, Race, Republicans, Thomas Jefferson | Category Commentary, Life Wisdom, Movies, Politics
