Questlove Rips Bill O’Reilly’s Slavery Comments

During the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, First Lady Michelle Obama delivered a rousing speech that included the line, "I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.” Compelled to challenge Obama on the comment, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News said on his program that those slaves were “well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government.”

Those comments drew plenty of backlash, including the above Instagram post from Questlove who calls O'Reilly out for his unnecessary addendum to Obama's otherwise powerful point. "Slavery was inhumane. Slavery was sadistic. Slavery was uncomfortable. Slavery was unjust. Slavery was a nightmare. Slavery was a despicable act. Slavery is the pebble whose ripple in the river still resonates on and on and on and on," he writes. "I'd like to think most of you have common sense. But there is nothing more dangerous than a man in a suit pretending to be a journalist giving revisionist history on the ugliness that was slavery."

Reilly's attempt to place some sort of silver lining or consolation on the atrocities of slavery for the enslaved rightfully has Quest and others worked up. The Roots drummer closes his post with, "Human Trafficking in any form from today's underage prostitution, to the private Prison System we exercise here in the US, to the Holocaust to 500 years of Slavery...is INHUMANE & Evil. ---watch where you get your information from and the company you keep people."

Read Quest's comments in full up above.

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