Bigotry, Denial and the Distortion of American History: Bill O'Reilly's Racist Dreams of 'Well-Fed' and Happy Black Slaves

On Monday at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, First Lady Michelle Obama delivered an eloquent speech about the long arc of progress in American history and the dangers posed by the proto-fascism, cynicism, and bigotry channeled by Donald Trump. As part of that narrative, Michelle Obama decided to offer some teaching about a little-known aspect of American history. She shared how:

"That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves."

This was a profound moment of vulnerability and strength. Michelle Obama, as a black American woman, and descendant of black human property, is also the wife of the most powerful black man on the planet. But, she lives in a building that was built with the blood, labor, sweat — and deaths — of black people. As a black woman, her reminding the public that it was slaves who looked like her that built the White House is a signal to the centrality of black women to the black freedom struggle and American history. Michelle Obama’s allusion to the complicated intersections of freedom and slavery in America also highlights the unique and especially perilous and tenuous space that the black female body occupied both during slavery, and then later on in Jim and Jane Crow, where black women were subjected to arbitrary sexual violence and assault by white men because they were denied the exclusive protections of “white femininity.”...
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bill-oreillys-racist-dreams-happy-slaves