A VIDEO of a racially themed speech that prompted the ousting this week of a US agriculture department official has opened a new front in the war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.
As the full context of the video became known, agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said he would review his decision to ask the official to step down.
Shirley Sherrod, a black woman appointed last July as the agency’s Georgia state director of rural development, was forced to resign after a video surfaced of her March 27th appearance at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) banquet.
In a speech, she described an episode in which, while working at a non-profit organisation 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have. Instead, she said, she sent him to one of “his own kind”.
The video on the website of conservative activist Andrew Breitbart as a counterattack on the NAACP, which passed a resolution last week accusing the Tea Party movement of having “racist elements”. But for some on the right, Ms Sherrod’s comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first African American to occupy the White House practises its own brand of racism.
The controversy comes on the heels of another surrounding the justice department’s decision to scale back its voter-intimidation lawsuit against a group known as the New Black Panther Party.
Suspicions on the right that Mr Obama has a hidden agenda – theories stoked in part by conservative media – have been a subplot of his rise, beginning almost as soon as he announced his campaign. Conservatives on the political fringes have raised questions about his motives, his legitimacy and even his citizenship.
On the other hand, some of the president’s allies on the left have at times reflexively seen racism as the real force behind the vehemence of the opposition to Mr Obama’s policies and decisions.
The White House has pointedly distanced itself from this line of defence. When Vice-President Joe Biden was asked on Sunday about the NAACP resolution regarding the Tea Party, for instance, he said that racist sentiment exists only at the periphery of the movement.
“The president doesn’t believe that the Tea Party is a racist organisation,” Mr Biden said. “I don’t believe that.”
The sensitivity to Ms Sherrod’s comments – particularly in an agency that has a history of discrimination against minority farmers – was evidenced by the dispatch with which Mr Vilsack ordered her to resign.
Both Mr Vilsack and an official at the White House denied Ms Sherrod’s assertion, in an interview on CNN, that her firing had come at the instigation of the White House. But in Ms Sherrod’s account, her firing was driven more by the exigencies of the news cycle – and the administration’s fear of conservative wrath.
Ms Sherrod added: “The administration was not interested in hearing the truth.”
A video of the full speech – which runs more than 45 minutes – shows that Ms Sherrod was trying to make a very different point from the one her critics saw in her account of the episode with farmer Roger Spooner. An examination of her own prejudice, she said, taught her that “there is no difference between us”.
“The only difference is the folks with money want to stay in power. It’s always about money, y’all,” she said. “God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people. It’s about poor people. I’ve come a long way.”
Ultimately, Ms Sherrod did help the farmer, and his family was among those who came to her defence.
“She’s a good friend. She helped us save our farm,” Mr Spooner’s wife, Eloise, told CNN. “She’s the one I give credit for helping us save our farm.”
On Tuesday, amid intense media coverage of the speech and a fuller accounting of its context, commentators began to question the government’s decision to get rid of Ms Sherrod.
Early yesterday, Mr Vilsack issued a short statement saying he would re-examine the matter.
Ms Sherrod called the possibility of a reversal “bittersweet”. She laid some of the blame for the controversial chain of events on the organisation that had sponsored her speech.
The NAACP, she told CNN, is “the reason this happened. They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and this all came out as a result of it.” – (Washington Post service)