Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Shirley Sherrod
Sherrod to Vilsack: Take This Job and Shelve It
01 year ago
Shirley Sherrod told the Obama administration this morning she’s not interested in coming back to work for the Department of Agriculture, at least not right now. Sherrod said she needs “a little break” after all of the hubbub surrounding her ousting, but that she may work with the administration in some capacity later.
Sherrod spoke to reporters after a morning meeting with Secretary Tom Vilsack, who canned her after Andrew Breitbart published of a heavily edited video purporting to show Sherrod admitting to bias against white farmers. The full video revealed exactly the opposite. Both Vilsack and President Obama have apologized to Sherrod and had offered her a job working on civil rights issues in the department. NPR reports on how Sherrod described this morning’s meeting:
“The secretary did push really, really hard for me to stay and work from the inside,” she told reporters. “I think I can be helpful to him and the department if I just take a little break and look at how I can be more helpful in the future.”
Sherrod said she’s received “many, many thousands” of letters supporting her and added:
I need a little time to be able to deal with that, to sort of take a break from some of all that I’ve had to deal with over the last few weeks. And I look forward to some type of relationship with the Department in the future. We do need to work on the issues of discrimination and racism in this country, and I certainly would like to play my role in trying to help deal with it.
Vilsack was at the press conference as well and, according to NPR, confessed, “I disappointed this administration. I disappointed the country. And I disappointed Shirley. And I have to live with that.” Vilsack has continually insisted he alone was responsible for the administration’s wild overreaction to Breitbart’s smear and Obama has placed the blame on “this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” Sherrod, meanwhile, maintained as the story broke that it was clear to her that her ousting was driven by the White House.
Sherrod has also said she has every intention of suing Breitbart for pushing the deceptive video. Asked about that this morning, she said, “I do think a suit will be forthcoming.”
Sherrod Shakes Her Fist at Breitbart–and Hugs the NAACP
01 year ago
Shirley Sherrod stepped back into the spotlight today. The former USDA state director from Georgia, whose ousting sparked a massive media controversy last month, has some fighting words for the right–and a big make-up kiss for the NAACP.
In an NAACP email, sent under Sherrod’s name this afternoon, she calls out conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart directly, saying that she’s “surely not going to yield because some Tea Party agitator sat at his computer and turned everything I said upside down and inside out.” Which, it’s clear, is exactly what Brietbart did.
Last month, the Obama administration abruptly axed Sherrod after Breitbart published a heavily edited video of an NAACP speech in which she appeared to say she discriminated against white farmers. The full video revealed the opposite: That Sherrod had been telling a story about overcoming personal prejudice in order to confront economic injustice. Both Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Visack have since apologized to Sherrod.
In her email today, Sherrod doesn’t discuss the Obama administration, but she does make nice with the NAACP. The organization helped fuel the uproar by initially denouncing her, before reviewing and releasing the full video of her faux-controversial speech. The email urges folks to put all that “behind us” and support the NAACP’s work:
Not long ago, I sat here in my living room in Albany, Georgia for an afternoon of deep conversation with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. As he has done in public, Ben movingly apologized for the fact that the NAACP was initially hoodwinked by Breitbart and Fox into supporting my removal. I told him what I want to tell you.
That’s behind us, and the last thing I want to see happen is for my situation to weaken support for the NAACP. Too many people confronted by racism and poverty count on the NAACP to be there for them, especially those in rural areas who often have nowhere else to turn.
People ask me, “Shirley, how are you getting through all of this?” I tell them that, if they knew what I have lived through, they’d understand that these current challenges aren’t about to throw me off course.
When I was 17 years old, my father was murdered by a white man in Baker County, Georgia. There were three witnesses, but the grand jury refused to indict the person responsible. I knew I had to do something in answer to my father’s death.
While it’s still unclear if Sherrod will press charges against Brietbart, she’s already making a pretty good case in the court of public opinion. Today’s words are the strongest public statement Sherrod’s made so far. But most importantly, it’s a laudable effort to recast the whole mess for what it really is: a sloppy attempt by the right to put poor black folks on the defensive.
Here’s the full text of Sherrod’s letter:
Back in March, I delivered a speech to an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet in my home state of Georgia. I drew on my personal life story to urge poor people, white and black, to pull together and overcome racial divisions. We have to understand that our struggle is against poverty and against those who are blocking our path out of poverty.
Unless we figure this out, I warned, our communities won’t thrive and our children won’t prosper.
As you know, a Tea Party blogger named Andrew Breitbart released an intentionally deceptive, heavily edited clip from that speech to make it look as if I was delivering exactly the opposite message. Then Fox News blasted that false message across America’s airwaves, creating a firestorm that led to my ouster as the USDA State Director here in Georgia.
Not long ago, I sat here in my living room in Albany, Georgia for an afternoon of deep conversation with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. As he has done in public, Ben movingly apologized for the fact that the NAACP was initially hoodwinked by Breitbart and Fox into supporting my removal. I told him what I want to tell you.
That’s behind us, and the last thing I want to see happen is for my situation to weaken support for the NAACP. Too many people confronted by racism and poverty count on the NAACP to be there for them, especially those in rural areas who often have nowhere else to turn.
People ask me, “Shirley, how are you getting through all of this?” I tell them that, if they knew what I have lived through, they’d understand that these current challenges aren’t about to throw me off course.
When I was 17 years old, my father was murdered by a white man in Baker County, Georgia. There were three witnesses, but the grand jury refused to indict the person responsible. I knew I had to do something in answer to my father’s death.
That very night, I made a commitment that I would stay in the South and fight for change.
I have lived true to that commitment for 45 years. I didn’t yield when, just months after my father was killed, they came in the middle of the night to burn a cross in front of our house with my mother, four sisters, and the baby brother my father never got to see still inside.
And I’m surely not going to yield because some Tea Party agitator sat at his computer and turned everything I said upside down and inside out.
I learned a lot of lessons from my parents growing up, but one of the most important ones is what my mother taught her children after our father was killed. She told us we mustn’t try to live with hate in our hearts.
My mother led by example. Just 11 years after that cross-burning incident, she became the first black elected official in Baker County, and she’s still serving, still working to bring people together.
You and I have to keep working as well. Change has to start with us. I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support I have received over these last few weeks. It means so much to me and my family.
But you and I have to make sure that people all across the country who wage a daily struggle against poverty and racism have support networks as well. And that’s why your personal involvement in sustaining the NAACP is so critical.
The NAACP confronts the virulent racism that my family and so many other families have had to endure. But it is also leading the way in breaking down the structural barriers that block so many people’s paths out of poverty.
In our struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” they want to keep the poor divided – and we have to insist, by our words and our actions, that there is no difference between us.
As we move forward together, I urge you to remember this: Life is a grindstone. But whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.
Thank you for all you are doing to challenge poverty and racism. I look forward to working and struggling right by your side.
Sincerely,
Shirley Sherrod
White Conservatives Own the "Race Conversation" (Now With Stats!)
01 year ago
Nate Silver, everyone’s favorite election-polls wonk, unveils an interesting chunk of data this week over at his blog FiveThirtyEight.com. In it, he tries to pinpoint exactly which news outlets are talking about race, breaking it down by “new” vs. “old” media and by political lean. He talks at length about his methodology in the post; the short version is that he’s producing percentages of articles that contain the terms “racism,” “racial” or “racist” vs. articles that don’t.
The raw data is interesting, but we can presume that Silver intends this only as an exercise, not as a final statement. The method he uses is almost too shallow to be useful, and he admits that he doesn’t have much appetite for Our Great National Conversation On Race. Or, more accurately and understandably, the cynical pageview-bait that uses race as a cheap grab.
Nate’s face-value conclusion is that everyone’s doing it. Fortunately, we at ColorLines eat cynical, race-based pageview-bait for breakfast, and bring some lived experience to the data. So I can say with some authority that this:
should scare the pants off of all of us.
Since this data is from the last thirty days, what we’re seeing here is Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site pushing the doctored Shirley Sherrod video that got Sherrod fired, and dominated the news cycle for a week. It makes sense that he’s in first place for amount of race-focused coverage, regardless of his motives. That’s not the scary part.
The scary part is that second place in the “watchdog” category is Media Matters. Media Matters is an excellent and invaluable media watchdog group. The problem? They spend a lot of their digital column space responding to stories pushed, engineered, and sometimes out-and-out fabricated by the likes of Andrew Breitbart. (And in third place, we have NewsBusters, a sort of Flavor Flav to Breibart’s Chuck D, who exist mostly to call Media Matters racist.)
And the red-over-blue pattern continues up the chart. Granted, these numbers are from the last 30 Sherrod-heavy days. But we can imagine how they looked for 30 days after the Tea Party called the NAACP the ‘real racists,’ or after Glenn Beck called Van Jones a communist plant, or after Breitbart himself circulated doctored videos of ACORN employees. The New York Times issued a retraction for their initial endorsement of that last video — after Congress voted to cut off all of ACORN’s funding.
In other words? There is no left-of-center original reporting on race at this level, period. Breitbart, Beck, and their ilk have no compunctions about leading with race, for pageviews or for personal vendettas, because it’s a conversation they dominate — and they spoil the field so thoroughly that smart high-profile liberals with access to real data, like Nate Silver, would rather just stay out of it and call it a loss. Or, news orgs teach the controversy. Scrolling up the chart, I’ll bet most of both NPR’s and CNN’s few race-mentioning stories are hands-off discussions of the Sherrod scandal — a scandal that didn’t exist until Breitbart hit publish.
This has repercussions outside the media. We see Vice President Biden saying that the Tea Party isn’t racist. We see President Obama getting railroaded for saying the Cambridge police acted stupidly for arresting a black man for standing in his own home, and then trying to patch up all of law enforcement’s racially disparate history over carefully chosen beers. We have Mayor Bloomberg’s beautiful speech defending the Ground Zero mosque — made even more poignant by the silence of outspoken health care reform champions like Sen. Schumer, Rep. Weiner and the rest of New York’s Democrats. And we see organized labor being shut out of the conversation about income inequality. Meanwhile, racially disparate policies in health care, in law enforcement, in education, and in employment go unreformed. If everyone’s so afraid of being called a racist, why don’t they do something about racial inequity?
‘Calling it a loss’ on race misses the point; race isn’t separate from policy, because it’s not separate from the people policies affect. Jamelle Bouie, writing at the American Prospect, says:
Of course, you can’t treat race as a box to be checked off. Not only is race a crucial part of American identity; it’s impossible to talk about policy in this country without also, somewhere, mentioning race. Indeed, to talk about race as if it were some “thing” apart is to deny the central role it plays in nearly every aspect of American life.
In short, the problem with our “national conversation on race” is that we refuse to acknowledge race as a basic fact of American life. We bury our heads in the sand and pretend to live in a country where there isn’t systemic, institutionalized racism and where talking about race is somehow counterproductive to governing.
Until we reach an understanding that racial inequity does just fine when everyone ignores it — and yes, worrying about being called a racist is a form of ignoring racial inequity — the Breitbarts of the world will always win the morning. Maybe the best solution is to change the subject to the truth about our post-racial America — about, say, where BP is dumping its spill waste – and see if pundits and facts get along better than oil and water.
Sherrod Plans to Sue Breitbart
01 year ago
[UPDATE 1:36pm EST] In a speech this morning to the National Urban League, Obama addressed the Sherrod scandal directly:
Now, last week, I had the chance to talk to Shirley Sherrod — an exemplary woman whose experiences mark both the challenges we have faced and the progress that we’ve made. She deserves better than what happened last week — (applause) — when a bogus controversy based on selective and deceiving excerpts of a speech led her — led to her forced resignation.
Now, many are to blame for the reaction and overreaction that followed these comments — including my own administration. And what I said to Shirley was that the full story she was trying to tell — a story about overcoming our own biases and recognizing ourselves in folks who, on the surface, seem different — is exactly the kind of story we need to hear in America.
See a the full transcript of the President’s remarks.
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Doesn’t look like conservative blogger Andrew Brietbart’s getting off easy this time. Weeks after being ousted from her job at the Agriculture Department because of the conservative blogger’s antics, Sherrod told a gathering at the National Association of Black Journalists that while she doesn’t want an apology, she “definitely” plans to sue.
“I have many, many questions before I can make a decision,” Sherrod reportedly told the group about her broader work. “I don’t know what will happen from this day forward in terms of whether I’ll be back in the department or what I’ll do.”
In an interview with CNN last week, Sherrod also hinted at a defamation suit, saying, “I don’t know a lot about the legal profession but that’s one person I’d like to get back at, because he came at me.”
Check out all of ColorLines coverage of the Sherrod debacle here.
Why the "Conversation on Race" is Just Babble
01 year ago
Between the Shirley Sherrod scandal and the Tea Party’s madness, the country’s been talking a lot about race lately. And, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic, not saying a whole lot:
Expecting an American conversation on race in this country, is like expecting financial advice from someone who prefers to not check their bank balance. It’s not that the answers, themselves, are pre-ordained, it’s that we are more interested in answers than questions, in verdicts than evidence. Even now, there are people who insist–in spite of the actual video–that the NAACP audience is actually cheering for Sherrod to not help the white farmer.
Put bluntly, this is a country too ignorant of itself to grapple with race in any serious way. The very nomenclature–”conversation on race”–betrays the unseriousness of the thing by communicating the sense that race can be boxed from the broader American narrative, that you can somehow talk about Thomas Jefferson without Sally Hemmings; that you can discuss Andrew Jackson without discussing his betrayal of the black artillerymen who fought at the Battle of New Orleans; that you can discuss the suffrage without Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells or Frederick Douglass; that you can discuss temperance without understanding the support of the Klan; that you can discuss the path to statehood in Florida without discussing Fort Gadsen; that you can talk Texas without understanding cotton, and so on.
The piece is worth a full read. Check it out.
Meanwhile, Joel Anderson at The Prospect agrees, adding that it’s time to bury the very goal our “conversation” purports to achieve: Getting to a “post-racial” wonderland:
By even engaging with the term, we give it staying power and credibility with people — mostly racists, certain right-wingers, lazy pundits, or other denialists — who know that it’s a lie or hope to convince the clueless that it’s true. Tossing around the phrase gives more life to the lie, and for those interested in the truth about racism, it’s a self-imposed obstacle. We can’t move forward; we first have to debunk the idea of a post-racial America, and then we can have a conversation.
That conversation is necessary, and it takes only a brief swing through Google to see how institutional racism remains part of the American way. The U.S. imprisons a larger share of its black population than South Africa did at the pinnacle of apartheid; a recent study found that racial disparities in health care cost the country $229 billion from 2003-2006; and the income gap between blacks and whites has actually widened over the past three decades.
How Breitbart Won — and Why We Must Rethink "Racism"
01 year ago
We’ve trod a familiar path in the past week. It started with credulous acceptance of Andrew Breitbart’s latest round of lies, moved to the subsequent debate about who’s a racist and then on to the expected round of apologies. Now it culminates with calls for Obama to lead a national racial healing project. This is just the road the right wants us traveling along, because it leads nowhere.
Everybody from President Obama to Glenn Back has offered a lesson to be learned from the frenzy surrounding Shirley Sherrod. But just about all of them have reinforced the notion that racism is nothing more than personal prejudice, as plausibly found among blacks as it is among whites. In that, Breitbart has succeeded in shaping our conversation about race.
What the right wants us to forget is that race relations are rooted in systems, and that not all racism is individual, intentional and overt. Individual bias plays a role, to be sure, but it’s the institutional rules, written and unwritten, that enable such racism, not the other way around. You can’t “heal” a system; you have to rebuild it.
This is where the left often loses its way on race. I was surprised, for instance, to read the following in Joan Walsh’s Salon.com column on Wednesday: “People are spending a lot of energy to get folks like the Spooners and Sherrod to think they should be enemies, when the real issue is class.” Walsh, who has a solid history of responsible reporting on race issues, goes on to say that’s what the left should remember from this debacle, because the right wants us to forget it.
I take the opposite lesson: The intersection of race and class is a complicated thing, deserving of more attention, not less. Treating class as the “real issue” means treating race only as a function of it, which amounts to colorblindness for leftists. It’s a highly limited answer to working-class white resentment of working-class black people. Progressives’ over-reliance on the “same boat” argument doesn’t help keep multiracial alliances together. Rather, it stumps us when we need to explain exactly how racism works, not just in the economy, but also in education, prison, health and, yes, agriculture. Liberal silence on race is what allows Breitbart to distort the definition of racism, to strip it of all discussions of power, history, policy or collective responsibility such that the notion of reverse racism has enough merit to be taken seriously in the first place.
There was a lot of bad to this situation, and apologies are definitely appropriate. But setting up competing points of focus between personal prejudice and class indicates to me that leftists–and not just white leftists–think of classism as systemic but racism as individual. The depth and consistency of racial disparities in every arena, even when well-intentioned people make and implement the rules, suggests that individual intention is only a small part of this story. The left understands that about class, so why not about race? When was the last time we heard progressives call for projects that heal the class divide? No, on class we get it.
There’s much to gain from getting it. In my book The Accidental American, I wrote about the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY), which has expanded nationwide. In the aftermath of September 11, the group organized immigrant workers of color who occupy the low-wage, dangerous back-of-the-house jobs in high-end restaurants. Five years later, when white waiters asked for help because managers were stealing their tips, ROC-NY had its own Shirley Sherrod moment of hesitation.
Rather than turning the white workers away, however, organizers insisted that they reach out to the back-of-the-house. Together, they won ROC-NY’s biggest victory to date–millions of dollars in back wages and damages, and a whole lot of new rules, including some addressing racial discrimination explicitly. The organization successfully addresses the economic, racial and gender hierarchies embedded in the industry, even though everyone doesn’t occupy the same rung on the ladder. That’s what real solidarity looks like.
Both the Obama administration and news media should be looking for the same sort of systemic, rather than interpersonal, review–like, say, a thorough racial impact assessment of federal regulations, practices and proposals. When we focus on all the things that cause inequality, true reconciliation can begin. Otherwise, it’s just talk therapy.
*Creative Commons/The US Department of Agriculture*
Preach On It, Rachel Maddow
01 year ago
We’re trying to avoid the replay-last-night’s-cable genre of blogging here at ColorLines. But Rachel Maddow’s segment on how Fox News creates these race-fright moments can’t be missed. Watch all the way through–past the set up via her sparring with Bill O’Reilly. The good stuff comes as she winds into the big picture of Fox’s craven programming.
Obama: Sherrod Debacle is Media’s Fault, Not Mine
01 year ago
No question, the maddening spectacle of Andrew Breitbart managing to tar an innocent woman with demonstrable lies is an indictment of corporate news media. Competition for eyeballs and misguided “objectivity” conspire to give proven dissemblers like Breitbart opportunities to be heard when they ought to be ignored. That said, let’s keep one fact about Sherrod’s ordeal clear: Neither Breitbart nor the news media that credulously reported his antics fired Shirley Sherrod; Barack Obama’s administration did. And that’s what makes the president’s remarks on Good Morning America today so frustrating.
George Stephanopoulos blogged last night on the relevant excerpts from this morning’s Obama interview (which is primarily on the Wall Street reform bill). Of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s actions, Obama said, “He jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” Except in this case, of course, the “everybody” is your administration, Mr. President.
Sherrod has said plainly that she understood the White House, not Vilsack to have asked for her head. But even if we accept that this was all a matter of Vilsack wilding out and overreacting, he did so in the context of an administration that is plainly spooked by the far right’s effort to link it with anything that looks race conscious, or even truly progressive. Vilsack’s actions were in keeping with his boss’s political temperament: Avoid fights with the right and take no prisoners on the left.
But Obama nonetheless dressed it up as yet another teachable moment:
“If there’s a lesson to be drawn from this episode, it’s that rather than us jumping to conclusions and pointing fingers at each other, we should all look inward and try to examine what’s in our own hearts and, as a consequence, I think we will continue to make progress,” he said.
Whatever.
Shirley Sherrod Offers to School Obama on Race
01 year ago
Update @ 2:10p ET: CNN reports that President Obama spoke with Sherrod by phone this afternoon. CNN”s Julie O’Neill was with Sherrod at the time and reported Sherrod was “very, very pleased with the conversation.” According to CNN:
Obama compared some of the events this week surrounding Sherrod to things he has written about in his books, O’Neill said. Sherrod “invited him to South Georgia,” she added.
During the seven-minute conversation, “The president told Ms. Sherrod that this misfortune can present an opportunity for her to continue her hard work on behalf of those in need, and he hopes that she will do so,” the White House said in a statement about the phone conversation.
Obama “expressed to Ms. Sherrod his regret about the events of the last several days,” the statement said.
“She’s feeling pretty good after talking to him,” O’Neill said.
Sherrod said she didn’t discuss with Obama whether the White House demanded her firing. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has said he made the decision himself, but Sherrod has previously said she doesn’t buy that explanation.
No word on whether they discussed the administration’s timidity about facing down any attack from the right. Andrew Breitbart, who posted the heavily edited video that started the whole mess, has said he didn’t edit the video himself and that he wasn’t targeting Sherrod but rather the NAACP.
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Maybe everybody should have left Shirley Sherrod alone. Looks like she’s indeed got plenty to say about race and racism in the U.S. government–and about holding Andrew Breibart accountable for his serial lying. Sherrod told Good Morning America today that, while she’s not sure she wants another job in the administration, she does want to talk to President Obama about race. George Stephanopoulos quotes from the interview in his blog:
“I can’t say that the president is fully behind me, I would hope that he is…I would love to talk to him,” Sherrod said on “GMA.”
“He is not someone who has experienced what I have experienced through life, being a person of color. He might need to hear some of what I could say to him,” she told me. “I don’t know if that would guide him in a way that he deals with others like me, but I at least would like to have the opportunity to talk to him about it.”
No word yet from the White House on whether the President will call Sherrod.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has publicly apologized for the hasty firing of Sherrod, as has the White House, through spokesperson Robert Gibbs. Vilsack offered her a job but she’s not sure she wants it–nor is she clear the Agriculture Department has done as much as it thinks it has to fix decades of systemic bias against black farmers.
“I haven’t had a chance yet to look at just what that offer is. As I said earlier, I really, I know that he talked about discrimination in the agency and after all of these years that is still happening…And I would not want to be the one person in the agency that everyone is looking at to clear up discrimination in the Department of Agriculture,” Sherrod said.
Sherrod, the former Georgia director of rural development, said she needs reassurance from both Vilsack and Obama that they are fully committed to ending discrimination as well.
“Many of the same people who discriminated against black farmers continue to work there…There are some other things that would need to happen within the agency that have not happened to this date,” she told me.
Meanwhile, on CNN this morning she said she just may sue Breitbart for defamation. TPM reports:
“I don’t know a lot about the legal profession but that’s one person I’d like to get back at, because he came at me. He didn’t go after the NAACP; he came at me,” she went on.
She agreed with the hosts that it would be a “great thing” if Big Government was shut down. “I don’t see how that advances us in this country.”
“It’s hard for me to understand a person like him, and it’s hard for me to understand what is his purpose, what is he trying to do really,” she said. “He could easily make a decision to destroy me, but in destroying me, what else is he trying to do?”
TPM also suggests that Breitbart’s real target in this may have been the administration’s effort to pay the long overdue settlement the U.S. government owes black farmers for its decades of bias. Congress is poised to vote on funding for that payment. It seems pretty clear Breitbart hoped to influence the debate over the NAACP’s Tea Party resolution (call it the dumb and dumber news cycle). But TPM has a point: this case has long been anathema to the right.
Photo: Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla