This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.
While powerful Americans were flailing around in response to the Sherrod smear video, Frank Rich notes, it took an elderly white farmer who looks "like a Norman Rockwell archetype" to persuade the confused masses that the video was a crock.
Only his and his wife’s testimony to her good deeds on CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture who fired Sherrod without questioning the video’s patently spurious provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn’t a failure of due diligence — there was no diligence.
Shirley Sherrod's personal history puts all of the above to shame -- but not, of course, resulting in any real apology. We are further damaged as Americans, Rich reminds us, by our sentimental embrace of the anniversary of "To Kill a Mockingbird" even the Sherrod crucifixion and its aftermath played out on TV, in government offices, and in talk shows.
The final verdict on these events?
“You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards,” Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.
See you on the bridge at Selma? Or will we be too busy to make it this time?
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“I don’t want to be the fall guy, the fall girl, for discrimination in the Department of Agriculture,” the former official, Shirley Sherrod, said from her home in southern Georgia on Friday. “I need a little down time to reflect on what’s happened the last few days. Is there another place for me to help all of us take advantage of what has happened over the last few days? I don’t know yet. ...NYT
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Maureen Dowd's angle on the story is, if anything, even more troubling and to the point.
The first black president should expand beyond his campaign security blanket, the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him — a long political tradition underscored by Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 when she complained about the “smart-ass white boys” from Walter Mondale’s campaign who tried to boss her around.
Otherwise, this administration will keep tripping over race rather than inspiring on race. The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong.Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s.
And here's a good point: There's a little history of political cynicism and discrimination beginning with Obama' s campaign staff.
It’s the same impulse that caused Obama campaign workers to refuse to let Muslim women with head scarves sit in camera range during a rally. It’s the same impulse that has left the president light-years behind W. on development help for Africa. In their rush to counteract attempts to paint Obama as a radical/Muslim/socialist, Obama staffers can behave in insensitive ways themselves.
“I don’t think a single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired — I mean c’mon, “ said Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, a black lawmaker so temperate that he agreed with an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on Friday by Senator James Webb of Virginia, which urged that “government-directed diversity programs should end.”
Even without this damning incident, it has seemed clear for months that Obama's staff picks -- effective for the campaign and transition -- have been liabilities during his presidency. David Axelrod gave an interview a week or so ago that was so embarrassing I had to turn it off.
Dowd has a suggestion, and it's a damn good one. Bring Shirley Sherrod -- with all her experience and good judgment -- into the White House.
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Into the White House as black advisor on race relations? Hell no. Make her chief of staff or chief political advisor. The White House needs someone of her calibre to straighten things out, not to be patronized.
