Citing decades of scholastic research, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell rebuffed his Fox News counterpart Bill O'Reilly's attempts to play "amateur sociologist" regarding the circumstances that led to the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February 2012.
"Never mind that Trayvon Martin was the son of a very involved and loving father and never mind that [President] Barack Obama grew up without a father and went on to do rather well for himself and be a credit to his single mother," O'Donnell said on Monday.
In the wake of the July 13 acquittal of Martin's killer, George Zimmerman, O'Donnell explained, O'Reilly has used his network platform to sneer at "Hollywood people" and "derelict parents" within the African-American community while insisting that America's history of slavery and institutional prejudice did nothing to foster the country's current social climate.
"The struggles of Black America have nothing to do with slavery in Bill O'Reilly's very narrow and uneducated mind," O'Donnell said mockingly, before citing not only the 1965 Moynihan Report, but later studies by Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson and Harvard University professor William Julius Wilson.
"Professor Wilson and his friend, the former Harvard Professor [Daniel] Moynihan, would never consider discussing or analyzing family structure in the Black community if that discussion did not begin at slavery and include all the dynamic factors -- good and bad -- that have shaped the Black American experience since slavery," O'Donnell said.
Watch O'Donnell take O'Reilly to task, as aired Monday on MSNBC, below.
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