Yesterday the NAACP posted the full video of former USDA employee Shirley Sherrod’s statements at a NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet on March 27, 2010.
The NAACP said in a statement Tuesday that it was “snookered by Fox News” and conservative website publisher Andrew Breitbart, who edited the video to portray Sherrod in the worst possible light. The NAACP had previously criticized Sherrod’s statements as “shameful.”
Yesterday, the blog aggregate Global Grind floated a petition on the microblogging website Twitter.com asking users to help send a message to Obama and the White House to reinstate Sherrod.
In the video, Sherrod recounted working with a white farmer to help him save his rural Georgia farm in 1986.
Sherrod described how racism influenced her decisions. In describing candidly (and honestly) how racism affected her personally, Sherrod explained how she reacted to the farmer’s strong sense of pride by withholding the full resources available to the farmer.
On Tuesday, Sherrod told CNN that her remarks were taken out of context and that the 1986 incident, which occurred before she started work for the USDA, helped her learn to move beyond race. She said she only tells the story to audiences to make that point.
Sherrod told CNN that immediately after Fox News aired the edited version of the March 27 video on Tuesday, she was “harassed” by the White House and forced to resign. The last call “asked me to pull to the side of the road and [resign],” she said.
This case is typical of the way U.S. president Barack Obama treats black people whom he considers inconsequential and disposable if they are not radical activists or Muslims.
In a similar case, former White House green jobs Czar Van Jones, made inflammatory racist statements about white people. He referred to 9/11 as an “inside job” and even called for the government to be overthrown in rap recordings he had made.
Yet Obama vigorously defended Jones and protected him until the media exerted pressure on the White House to force Jones to resign. Notice the disparity in the way Obama and the White House handled both cases?
While running for president, Obama never campaigned in black communities and he excluded blacks from his campaign commercials. That should have sent up a red flag to all of us.
