MediaMatters reports on some comments made by Bill O’Reilly on his show on Fox News yesterday. Here’s the transcript of the clip.
BILL O’REILLY (host): Now I have to say, Hawaii is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s beautiful.
JESSE WATTERS (Fox News producer): Yeah, it’s beautiful.
O’REILLY: But when I’m there I’m under water. I’m not talking to pinheads. But the state is in enormous debt.
WATTERS: They are.
O’REILLY: Alright. They’ve got a lot of social problems. When you says it’s the biggest homeless thing, it’s because of the addiction.
WATTERS: Right.
O’REILLY: The addiction is rampant, all over the place, because they don’t enforce the drug laws.
WATTERS: No.
O’REILLY: And, you know, I think the one person who said, Look, this is a place where people come to to escape. This is, you know, generally speaking. But you know what’s shocking? 35 percent of the Hawaiian population is Asian, and Asian people are not liberal, you know, by nature. They’re usually more industrious and hard-working.
WATTERS: But they did vote for President Obama —
O’REILLY: Big time.
WATTERS: — and if you add the indigenous native Hawaiian population —
O’REILLY: About 20 percent.
WATTERS: — to the Hispanic population, they outnumber whites by more than two to one.
So, let’s get this straight. First of all, O’Reilly makes a racial generalization about all Asian people as “hard-working” and “industrious”, which is, y’know, just the model minority myth repackaged for the twenty-first century. He then uses the model minority myth to bash liberals of all other colours and creeds by suggesting a false paradox — “how could Asian Americans be both “hard-working and industrious” and liberal?!?” The implication, of course, being that other liberals of colour (re: African American and Latino) are understandably liberal because they’re not “hard-working” and “industrious”.
O’Reilly ends on the further manufactured paradox that Hawaii is surprisingly rife with drug addiction and unemployment, despite the high Asian American population. He implies that this is because the Asian population of Hawaii actually includes indigenous Hawaiians, whom, O’Reilly implies are actually unemployed lazy druggies, unlike their mainland “hard-working and industrious” counterparts. Which falls just short of explicitly calling indigenous Hawaiians unemployed lazy druggies.
Great going, O’Reilly. You manage to, once again, take our collective breath away with your mind-blowing racism.
