Shirley Sherrod, Fox News and the Race Card
Prior to the news of her forced resignation from the USDA breaking, I’d never heard of Shirley Sherrod. The cause of the controversy appeared to be a speech she’d given at an NAACP event, so I went to the NAACP’s website where the speech was posted and watched all 43 minutes and 15 seconds of it.
A very good speech, I thought. Inspirational, self-effacing, even hair-raising in parts. A message speech about refusing to live a life of hate, no matter the slings and arrows.
As NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous said in a recent television interview, it was a personal testimony delivered in the vein of what might be heard during an altar call: error, epiphany, redemption.
People like me, the children of mid-to-upper-crustacean Anglo parents, can’t hear a story like Sherrod’s without feeling humbled. A black father murdered by the white town sheriff, a man who liked to be called “Gator.” A cross burned on her widowed mother’s front lawn. Lynchings. The whole sordid megillah.
The fact that Sherrod went on to earn a college degree, then rose through the ranks to become USDA Director of Rural Development for the state of Georgia is astonishing.
I have absolutely no basis for comparison with such things in my own experience, despite the fact that I grew up in suburban South Carolina during the 1960s. My skin color and parochial school education insulated me from the Gators and Shirley Sherrods of my community, likewise the struggles between them.
The centerpiece of Sherrod’s speech was the story of her work with Roger Spooner, the white Iron City, Georgia farmer whose farm she helped save from bankruptcy 24 years ago.
Prior to meeting Spooner, Sherrod says she’d assumed that white farmers had all the advantages and that black farmers had all the disadvantages. Spooner was the first white farmer who’d ever come to her for help, she says, and the assistance she provided him initially was, by her own admission, not her deluxe edition.
As Spooner’s farm was about to be taken away from him, however, Sherrod says she realized that the black/white conflict was only a symptom of the greater conflict between rich and poor, and that realization led her to become what she says she is today: an advocate for the underserved, irrespective of race.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati