Bill O'Reilly Doubles Down on Racism, Says Black People "Are Ill-Educated and Have Tattoos on Their Foreheads"

Just when you think humans are making some progress, some nonsense like this goes down.

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Complex Original

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When Bill O'Reilly and Donald Trump find themselves hanging out on national television together, some racist pull quotes are almost guaranteed to materialize. As if to prove this assessment, O'Reilly wallowed in his own filth on Monday during a discussion about Trump's alleged ability to boost employment rates.

"I'm telling you it's an economic message," Trump told the official Fox News mascot. "If you look at President Obama, he's been a president for almost 8 years and with African American youth, you have a 59 percent unemployment. With people of prime age, it's much higher." O'Reilly pushed back against Trump's already problematic assessment, offering the following words by actually saying them out loud on television:

"But how are you going to get jobs for them? Many of them are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads."

Though he swiftly attempted to balance the obviously racist remark with some nonsense about how he hated "to be generalized about it," the words had already fallen out of his mouth and tumbled into the living rooms of Fox News viewers across the nation. On his official Twitter account, where he often signs his tweets with his initials like some kind of amateur, O'Reilly praised Trump's appearance without mentioning the aforementioned exchange at all. "Trump handled difficult questions tonight in a straightforward way," O'Reilly wrote. "The elitists don't like him but I don’t think they can stop him."

Two old (and generally regarded as racism-provoking) white guys discussing race? Can't imagine how that possibly went off the rails. Perhaps everyone should finally start paying way more attention to the seemingly prescient words of this MIT professor.

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