Since President Obama reportedly very nearly apologized to Shirley Sherrod yesterday, some of the dust has settled around this ongoing kerfuffle, and we can now talk about the elements of the case, and the backstory of Sherrod and of the purveyors of Negrophobia (Fear of Blacks) who attacked her.
There is an amazing amount of story already to this remarkably fast-moving story. There is, of course, vastly more backstory. However, it appears that many would be surprised to learn that it goes back to the sixteenth century, when slavery of Native Americans and then Africans took hold in Latin America and the Caribbean. Fear of Blacks arose and took over whole societies whenever they recognized the possibility of Black slave revolts.
But this was not, at its foundation, racism. It didn't matter who the slaves were. As Shirley Sherrod realized 24 years ago, and was explaining to an NAACP audience in the presentation that this current nonsense started from, it's poverty and powerlessness, not race, that lie at the heart of the problem. Race is just a convenient excuse.
Summary of Events
Months ago persons unnamed edited a video of a speech by Civil Rights worker and anti-racist extraordinaire Shirley Sherrod to include only her description of her mild pre-conversion racism, and not the conversion that was the point of the tale. Last week, the NAACP asked the Tea Parties to reject the racism of some members and supporters. Mark Harris of Tea Party Express responded with almost the most racist rant from a public figure to make the mainstream news. (Mel Gibson is still in the lead.) The National Tea Party Federation expelled the Tea Party Express the next day, which starts to fulfill the NAACP request.
The rightwing media turned their full fury on the still-uppity-after-all-these-years NAACP, and former Matt Drudge apprentice Andrew Breitbart remembered the offer of the edited version of Sherrod's speech. He put it out on his Web site. Fox News gave Sherrod the full character assassination treatment, exactly as with Van Jones, ACORN, the SEIU, and the pitiful New Black Panther Party. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, and unidentified White House staffers, evidently panicked and demanded Sherrod's instantaneous resignation. The NAACP panicked and condemned Sherrod. Then the rest of the tape came out, and every pundit, plus the NAACP and the Administration, began furiously backpedaling, and in many cases actually apologizing.
Fox blamed them for swallowing the story without checking, as though Fox had had nothing to do with pushing it. Glenn Beck "defended" Sherrod in order to attack the NAACP and the Obama Administration for overreacting. The leftwing media counterattacked, and were roundly ignored by the Lamestream Media.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced a rather generalized apology. Secretary Vilsack apologized to Sherrod on the phone. Gibbs announced that. Secretary Vilsack later offered Sherrod a better job, working on the racism that still pollutes the Agriculture Dept. staff. (In the Pigford case, which Sherrod took part in before joining USDA, the Department was ordered to pay a billion dollars in court judgments for pervasive institutional racism, and has to some extent failed to do so, resulting in further lawsuits.) Sherrod is considering the USDA job offer. Gibbs announced all of that, too.
President Obama called Sherrod and reportedly sort of, almost, apologized. The White House denies that it had anything to do with her firing, in spite of earlier quite definite reports that Sherrod said that Ag Dept. Undersecretary Cheryl Cook said that the White House wanted her gone ASAP.
Have I left anything vital out? Naturally, there is far more to come from Left, Right, and Center.
My Opinions
- Andrew Breitbart, "eager lackey to Matt Drudge", is a scoundrel. A bounder and a cad. A pure political opportunist. There are not strong enough words to describe his infamy. No change there.
- Fox/Murdoch/Ailes/their minions are scoundrels, etc. No change here.
- Likewise Republican elected officials and party officials. The usual suspects. No change there.
- The Right claims that Democrats and Liberals are even worse. Yeah, have fun with that.
- They aren't the only ones. Here are three items that ranked high in Google searches on the question.
Democrats Should Focus On Jobs, Not Shirley Sherrod
Shirley Sherrod: Out of context, but still racist
Limbaugh, Beck Ask: Did White House Entrap Breitbart?
And there's plenty more where that came from. There is a phenomenal amount of this dreck out in the Echo Chamber. No change there.
- The Lamestream corporate media still "don't get it", and continue to give aid and comfort to the enemy. MSNBC is the honorable exception. Partly.
- Shirley Sherrod has gone through Hell, and kept going, not for the first time. Some good may come of this, because it has forced the Administration to think about reality, not just politics, and because it has shown much of the public (the part that cares even a little about facts) just how much the characters above are scoundrels, etc.
- The NAACP has learned a valuable lesson the hard way. One that had been learned in the 1960s and several times before. The Administration, likewise. As the British Navy puts it, always keep the enemy in front.
- Obama will survive, with some damage, now that he has personally almost apologized to Sherrod.
- The Republic has taken damage, again, and will survive. That's why the Ship of State has the quintuple hull of Congress, the Administration, the Courts, the Press, and Civil Society.
- Some Dems might wake up now, and some swing voters, also.
- Some Dems will go on wringing their hands no matter what.
Backstory
Let us begin with the most recent, and work backwards.
Why the White House Really Rushed to Judgment on Sherrod
The term for that is racial overcompensation...If Obama talked candidly about race and tried to spark a dialogue on race as some clamor for him to do it would turn his administration into a referendum on race. This would turn the GOP and tea party counterinsurgency into a red hot fire.
What She Really Said
ACORN and Sherrod: Do the traditional media have integrity and honor?
by Laurence Lewis
Quotes Joe Conason,
It was a "scandal" that became a national story only after wildly biased coverage on Fox News Channel, followed by sloppy, scared reporting in mainstream outlets, notably the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the national TV networks (some of whom flagellated themselves for failing to publicize this canard sooner!).
Shirley Sherrod shaped by father's slaying
Shirley Sherrod’s 17th year probably did more to mold her personality and set her on a path that traveled through the dangerous, volatile world of race. That year, 1965, her father was shot and killed by a white man in a dispute over cows, the family says.
The Backstory of Negrophobia
The Rachel Maddow Show had a long segment last night on the backstory of this incident.
Sherrod story demonstrates ‘scare white people’ tactic
Long Division:
White
-----
Black
Be afraid, White people. They're coming for you. They're coming for your jobs.
Gov. George Wallace, Alabama, 1960s: "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
Campaign comic book for Wallace. "He'll protect Alabama from Federal takeover. He'll head back North every Freedom Rider, sit-in, and every other troublemaker backed by the NAACP that meddles in our affairs."
Sen. Jesse Helms, South Carolina, TV ad, 1990: "Harvey Gantt favors Ted Kennedy's law making the color of your skin more important than your qualifications. For racial quotas, Harvey Gantt; against racial quotas, Jesse Helms."
Gov. Lester Maddox, Georgia, made a political symbol of the pickax handle he brandished to defend his segregated restaurant from Black people.
Republican Southern Strategy, the political strategy of terrifying White people, at and after the Civil Rights period: Kevin Phillips, Republican political strategist, May 17, 1970, in New York Times. Nixon's Southern strategy 'It's All In the Charts' (Subscription or fee required) "From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 or 20% of the Negro vote, and they don't need any more than that. But Republicans would be short-sighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe Whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are."
Rush Limbaugh:
How do you get promoted in the Obama Administration? By hating White people!
(rant continues)
Glenn Beck:
This President has exposed himself as a guy who--over and over and over again--who has a deep-seated hatred for White people, or the White culture...I'm saying he has a problem...He has...This guy is, I believe, a racist!
Stories unique to Fox News, pushed heavily over and over:
- Van Jones "Communist", "anarchist", "felon", "violent ex-con"
- O'Keefe ACORN "sex" tapes
- SEIU "thugocracy"
- New Black Panthers (all both of them ^_^ 48 times on one show, week after week)
What do these stories have in common? It isn't about racism. It's about political strategy, targeting White voters to fear Blacks. They are pros at this.
But Maddow necessarily left out a huge amount. This is nothing new.
- Fear of Blacks caused Trent Lott to lose his position as Majority Leader of the Senate, for praising arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond in insufficiently impenetrable, insufficiently deniable code: "When Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had a' followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
- Fear of Blacks and loathing of Democrats was the dominant theme of the 1964 Republican Convention, where Jackie Robinson said that he had begun to understand how Jews in Hitler's Germany must have felt.
- Fear of Blacks, and of the Federal government, was the essence of Strom Thurmond's segregationist Dixiecrat campaign in 1948 against the Federal "tyranny" of the 13th and 14th amendments, and Truman's desegregation of the military, even before Brown v. Board of Education raised the battle cry, "Impeach Earl Warren".
- Fear of Blacks has been the dominant concern in Southern society for a century and a half since the Civil War. "The purity of Southern Womanhood" "Cocainized N*****s", and much, much more.
- Fear of Blacks together with the Federal government was dominant in the Reconstruction period, when Blacks took over several Southern legislatures, and scalawags ransacked their treasuries, until the South could buy off Northern politicians in the "Rutherfraud" B. Hays election of 1877 to remove Federal troops from the South, and allow construction of Jim Crow.
- Fear of Blacks was dominant almost from the beginning of slavery in the US and other American colonies, in the form of slave rebellions. (Haiti is still being punished for being the only one to succeed.)
- Fear of slaves is, of course, a much older story than that. Think Spartacus, under the Roman Empire. He was actually the third major slave leader to challenge Rome.
I haven't even mentioned the share of religious bigotry in the problem, but Southern Baptist complicity in all of the above is well known, as is the far more mixed record of the Catholic church in Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies, or the leading role of the "verkrampte" Dutch Reformed Church in South African Apartheid.
But on Southern Baptists, who have theoretically and sometimes actually repented their ancestors' support of slavery, see The Incredible Shrinking Church, by Frank Page (former President of the Southern Baptist Convention) and John Perry. Racism will cease to be a dominant force in national politics in the next decade, but it is growing louder and nastier as the end approaches. Researchers call this Cognitive Dissonance. You might have heard about that here on Daily Kos.