Bill O’Reilly defends a ‘Watters’ World’ segment widely denounced as racist on the October 9, 2016 episode of Fox News Sunday. (Photo Credit: Fox News via video posted by Media Matters)
On October 9, 2016’s episode of Fox News Sunday, Bill O’Reilly was asked about a ‘Watters’World’ segment aired on O’Reilly Factor on October 3, 2016 that has been widely denounced as racist towards the Asian American community. Unsurprisingly, O’Reilly defended the segment and its creator, Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters, saying that the segment “wasn’t over the line.”
After airing a brief excerpt from the ‘Watters’ World’ segment, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked O’Reilly for his comment on criticisms of racism. What follows is Media Matters’ video and transcript of the exchange.
Last week, actor Mark Wahlberg said in an interview at the Toronto Film Festival that he “regrets” filing a request in late 2014 to be pardoned for an assault conviction after he beat an elderly Vietnamese American man in 1988. I first reported about Wahlberg’s request in 2014, and that post quickly became one of the most shared posts in the blog’s history (crashing my server and necessitating a host migration; thanks Marky Mark!).
In 1988, Wahlberg was arrested and charged with attempted murder for attacking Vietnamese American Thanh Lam on April 8th of that year. According to the criminal complaint, Lam was unloading his car when Wahlberg approached him with a wooden club, called him a “Vietnam fucking shit”. He then smashed the middle-aged man in the head so severely he broke the stick in two. Wahlberg then fled with two friends when police appeared. A few blocks away from where Lam was assaulted, Walberg encountered Hoah Trinh, also Vietnamese American. Wahlberg approached Trinh and, after waiting for a police cruiser to pass, punched Trinh in the eye, permanently blinding him.
Police were able to detain Wahlberg later that night, at which point Wahlberg confessed to assaulting Lam saying, “you don’t have to let him identify me, I’ll tell you now that’s the mother-fucker who’s head I split open.” When Trinh identified Wahlberg as also having punched him in the eye, Wahlberg was arrested, at which point he reportedly let loose a string of racist anti-Asian slurs, including “gook” and “slant-eyed gooks”.
Initially charged with attempted murder, Wahlberg later plead guilty to assault and served forty-five days in jail stemming from the 1988 assault.
The My Oppression Card Project, by Sarah Doherty and Lauren Simkin Berke
This is easily one of my favourite crowd-funded projects I’ve ever had the privilege of being able to support.
Have you ever been accused of playing your [race/gender/other form of oppression] card? Now, the next time someone treats you to some unrelentingly microaggressive behaviour, you can whip out your real life, actual oppression card and use it to help communicate your feelings about your most aggravating -isms!
However, most agreed — then and now — that even if Harrell might have committed vandalism, she was right to point out that the restaurant name is indeed offensive and racist. The story of Harrell’s arrest prompted a social media backlash against “Chop Chop Chinaman”, including numerous 1-star reviews of the restaurant on Yelp, leaving the restaurant with an overall 1.5 star average rating.
Duke University political science professor Jerry F. Hough — alumnus of Harvard University whose specialty is domestic identity formation at the intersection of American and Soviet politics — is in hot water. Over the weekend, Hough posted a racist 6-paragraph tirade on the New York Times website comparing supposedly self-defeating behaviours of the Black community (“they feel sorry for themselves”) to the model minority stereotype of Asian Americans, whom Hough praised for “work[ing] doubly hard” and our “desire for integration”.
The comment was posted in response to a Times editorial on how racism in Baltimore has featured in the New Racial Justice Movement.
