Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/4421071476/">USDAgov</a> (<a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a>).
Hoo boy. Conservatives apparently aren’t going to back down from ever more overt appeals to racial resentment this summer. BigGovernment.com “broke” a story yesterday about a speech given a few months ago by Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, at an NAACP Freedom Fund dinner. In it, Sherrod tells a story from 24 years ago about not helping a white farmer as much as she could have because she was “struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farm land.”
The point of this story, told in a public venue, was that she quickly realized that she had done wrong. “That’s when it was revealed to me that it’s about poor versus those who have. It’s not so much about white…it is about white and black but it’s not, you know…it opened my eyes.” This could easily be a heartwarming, three-hankie movie on Lifetime, but no matter:
Sherrod told CNN on Tuesday that she was told repeatedly to resign Monday afternoon after the clip surfaced. “They harassed me,” she said. “I got three calls from the White House. At one point they asked me to pull over to the side of the road and do it because you are going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”
Sherrod said the calls came from Cheryl Cook, USDA deputy undersecretary for rural development. “The administration was not interested in hearing the truth. They didn’t want to hear the truth,” she said.
Sherrod said she and the white farmer she referred to in the video, Roger Spooner, became friends. Spooner’s wife, Eloise, confirmed to CNN that she and her husband considered Sherrod friends. “She helped us save our farm by getting in there and doing everything she could do,” Eloise Spooner said. “They haven’t treated her right.”
Sherrod said she told the story to make the point that at the time she thought that white farmers had the advantages because of their race but she learned that was not the case. “The point was to get them to understand that we need to look beyond race,” Sherrod said.
In a second video, BigGovernment.com says “Ms. Sherrod confirms every Tea Partier’s worst nightmare.” Although this is ostensibly a reference to a joke she made about no one ever getting fired from a government job, that’s not really every tea partier’s worst nightmare, is it? On the other hand, a vindictive black government bureaucrat deciding to screw you over because you’re white? Yeah, I’d say that qualifies.
This is just appallingly ugly, and the White House’s cowardly response is pretty ugly too. This is shaping up to be a long, gruesome summer, boys and girls.
UPDATE: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who quickly fired Sherrod after the video was posted, stands by his firing. The White House says they had nothing to do with it. The NAACP condemned Sherrod but then mysteriously deleted their statement from their website and announced they were “conducting an investigation.” Andrew Breitbart says he doesn’t have the entire video, just the edited version he put up. The guy who shot the video says he’s sent the whole thing to the NAACP and hopes to post it when he gets permission.
That’s the latest for now.
UPDATE 2: The NAACP backtracks: “With regard to the initial media coverage of the resignation of USDA Official Shirley Sherrod, we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias. Having reviewed the full tape, spoken to Ms. Sherrod, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans.”
Jeez. Fox News and Breitbart ginning up a phony outrage over some alleged liberal atrocity? Helluva hard thing to believe, isn’t it?
UPDATE 3: The full video is here. The segment in question starts at 16:30 and goes for about five minutes. “You know,” she starts, “God will show you things, and can put things in your path, so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people.” Then, after telling the story of Roger Spooner, she ends with this: “Working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t. And they could be black, they could be white, they could be Hispanic.”
UPDATE 4: I’ve already tweeted a bit about this, but it’s worth a blog mention, too. The full video of Shirley Sherrod doesn’t show that she’s a racist. What it shows is her telling a story about how, 24 years ago, she had to overcome her own underlying racial resentments in order to do her job properly. It shows her telling a story about how, with God’s help, she learned that her job was about helping the poor, not about whether you’re white or black or Hispanic. In other words, it’s the exact opposite of what Andrew Breitbart tried to paint it as.
This should go without saying, but Tom Vilsack needs to apologize and rehire Sherrod, and he needs to do it with the same dispatch that he fired her with in the first place. If stories like Sherrod’s are out of bounds, we’ve truly reached a new low in conservative mau mauing and racial cowardice.
