|
This Strikes Us …
A Sojourner’s Truth Editorial
Don’t get angry, just get it right.
Boy oh boy, this race stuff just doesn’t get
any easier, does it?
Take for example, oh … Shirley Sherrod, the
NAACP, the White House, the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Bill O’Reilly – better yet, take everybody who followed the
Sherrod incident last from Monday, when the story broke, to
Tuesday night, when it was clear that the poor woman had
been abused by all.
And we do mean everybody. Because
there isn’t a person in the world who happened to view that
edited portion of Sherrod’s speech when she admitted not
giving a white farmer the “full force” of her power who did
not believe that the woman had to go.
That was on Monday.
By Tuesday, the world had discovered that
Sherrod was referencing an incident that occurred in 1985,
when she was not working for the government; that she had
indeed helped the white farmer save his farm and that she
had learned from the incident that race was not the
overriding issue in the struggle she had been waging for so
long. An entire lifetime in fact.
It was a tale of revelation and redemption.
It was also an insight into the complexities
of the race discussion. Here we are in 2010, a black
president at the helm, and just when we thought things would
be getting just a wee bit better from the racial
perspective, we discover just how much more problematic the
issue has become.
The administration, overly sensitive to such
issues, jumped the gun and fired the woman without any
semblance of due process. The NAACP was just as eager to
condemn. And Bill O’Reilly? Well, we expect a certain
triteness from a man who says things such as the Black
Panther Party is planning to kill white babies.
Nevertheless, the administration, the NAACP
and even O’Reilly did the right thing and admitted they had
rushed to judgment and apologized to Sherrod.
But in the aftermath comes the finger
pointing, a futile exercise at best since everybody, and we
mean everybody, jumped to the same conclusion. It’s
particularly futile when those among us return to the
Sherrod speech in order to figure out how this woman managed
to cause such an uproar. And particularly futile when we try
to redirect our frustrations back onto Sherrod.
One national pundit has pointed to Sherrod’s
reference in her speech to her efforts to send the farmer to
someone of “his own kind” as an indication that she has
racist tendencies. That’s quite a stretch, especially when
you consider that she made that reference in the context of
explaining exactly how she was mistaken back then.
One of our readers calls Sherrod a
“race-obsessed far left wing bureaucrat who thought her job
included spreading the wealth.”
Well, in fact, that’s what her job did entail
because that was supposed to be the mission of the USDA farm
loan program – to spread the wealth. Every USDA official and
bureaucrat must have thought the same thing, as did such
presidents as Reagan, Bush I and Bush II who did nothing to
end the program of such loans to farmers.
But “race-obsessed?” Well, it was after all a
speech about race, wasn’t it? To an organization whose
mission it is to fight racial inequities. But, as if one
still does not get the point, it was a speech designed to
explain how important it is to move past race. How do you
make that point without talking about race?
It’s so easy to get angry about all of this
mess but such anger is sorely misplaced.
It’s easy to get angry at Agriculture
Secretary Vilsack, the White House, the NAACP or even Bill
O’Reilly, but what’s the point? Everybody, and we mean
everybody, over-reacted. But just about everybody did
the right thing and admitted his or her mistake.
We do live in a media culture, as President
Obama noted, that makes such rapid-fire decisions
inevitable, but there’s no turning back the clock now.
Ultimately such a media culture serves to minimize the real
mistakes. It was, after all, the USDA which spent decades
discriminating against farmers of color. That’s a fact of
life that Vilsack and his colleagues are trying to correct.
The USDA was able to carry on such racial discrimination at
least in part because there was no media spotlight on its
officials and their actions.
If there is any lingering doubt about the
point Sherrod was trying to make, one only needs to note
this line from that speech.
“We have to get to the point where as Toni
Morrison said: ‘Race exists but it does not matter.’” |
