In the end, the episode seemed to say as much about the age of YouTube and the 24-hour news cycle as it said about race relations.
The whole thing started when a guy named Andrew Breitbart posted on his blog, BigGovernment.com, a portion of speech by a state-level U.S. Department of Agriculture official named Shirley Sherrod. Breitbart was responding to claims by the NAACP that there was racism in the tea party movement, and he cited the speech as evidence that there is racism in the NAACP.
Sherrod, a veteran of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, quickly found herself in the center of a firestorm. Even the NAACP condemned her remarks, and Sherrod began getting pressure from her superiors at USDA to resign.
She protested her innocence, but no one wanted to listen.
Finally, some folks took a look at the full 43-minute speech and realized that the remarks really had been taken out of context. First the NAACP and then the Agriculture Department apologized for jumping to conclusions. Sherrod, who had flown to New York by then to do the circuit of network talk shows, fielded apologies from U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and even from President Barack Obama.
Obama asked Sherrod to come back to work and to transform “this misfortune” into a chance to use her life experiences to help people.
Sherrod, who had been Georgia’s director of rural development since last July, was talking about that experience in the speech that started the controversy.
It’s a compelling story. Sherrod was only a teenager when her father was killed by a white man in what she described as a racially motivated crime. His death was made even more tragic, she said, by the fact that her father had always wanted a son, and he was killed while that long-awaited son was still in the womb.
The case was never solved, she said, noting that in the South of that era, white people weren’t prosecuted for killing blacks.
But the injustice she felt led her to pledge her life to the fight for civil rights, to making sure that future generations didn’t experience the sort of discrimination she had witnessed as a youth.
It was against that backdrop, she said, that she met a poor white farmer who was in danger of losing his farm. The encounter came 24 years ago when Sherrod was working for a farmers aid group.
She had taken the job to help poor black farmers get the help they needed, she said, and she acknowledged that she was not at first eager to help a white man who came to her office making clear that he considered himself superior to her.
She admitted that she didn’t put her full heart into helping the man, basically giving him the minimum amount of help that she could.
That was the part of the story Breitbart posted on his blog.
What he didn’t post was the part where she said she finally realized that if she didn’t help the man, no one else would. What he didn’t post was the actual point of her story, the part where she said she suddenly realized that her job wasn’t about helping black people or white people. It was about helping poor people.
The farmer and his wife, by the way, did speak out on Sherrod’s behalf, saying that she had indeed helped them to save their farm.
There are some lessons here.
First is that all of us need to be careful about jumping to conclusions based on what we see on the Internet. Videos can be edited, and if we don’t see the whole thing, we might get the wrong idea about what someone is really saying.
Second is that it’s a bad idea to shoot first and ask questions later. Vilsack eventually admitted that he had acted in haste, and Obama later called on his administration to make sure it has a complete
picture before it reacts to a crisis. Of course, that’s sometimes easier said than done. With the speed that a video can go viral on YouTube, it’s not difficult to get swept along by the momentum.
Finally, the episode offers one more lesson.
Even as she calls for racial conciliation, Sherrod acknowledges something we should all recognize as true.
There is racial misunderstanding. Both blacks and whites do tend to judge one another not by the content of our character, but by the color of our skin.
In the end, Sherrod said, we’re all in this together. Racial jealousies and hatred don’t serve any of us.
That’s a message we would all do well to embrace.
• Kelly Hawes is managing editor of the Pharos-Tribune. He can be reached at 574-732-5155 or
kelly.hawes@pharostribune.com.
On the Web
To see the full video posted by NAACP, visit http://tinyurl.com/23jqz95
