NORMAN — First, a right-winger named Andrew Breitbart took a clip of a Shirley Sherrod speech and put it on his blog, which was later picked up by Fox News.
Then President Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, fired Sherrod from her rural development job in Georgia. It was because Sherrod, in a speech to the NAACP in March, told of a time when she didn’t help a white farmer as much as she could.
Sherrod’s speech was a lot more than that sound bite — in fact, it was an illustration of the learning process for tolerance — but it was enough to get the racist right salivating for some revenge after the NAACP passed a resolution saying there were racist elements in the tea party movement.
Tea party activists may or may not be racist. What matters is the ideologues leading the tea party members around on a leash — people like Breitbart, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh — the ones who give marching orders.
They actively pursue a racial agenda to keep race in the forefront so that white people who voted for Obama in 2008 will not go near a Democrat this fall.
The white farmer, by the way, came to Sherrod’s defense.
But the NAACP is absolutely right on this point. Obama had barely got the chair warm in the Oval Office when Beck called him a racist. Limbaugh played repeatedly a song called “Barack the Magic Negro.” In fact, there is a whole website devoted to Limbaugh’s racist rants. O’Reilly called for Sherrod’s immediate ouster on Monday without knowing her full speech, and he later apologized.
These are the people tea partiers listen to. But the tea partiers themselves have had their moments.
Stephanie Mencimer, writing in Mother Jones, describes a tea party meeting in March in Virginia where the featured speaker was from the National Center for Constitutional Studies. According to Mencimer, the NCCS has a prophet named W. Cleon Skousen who once approved the sale of a textbook, “Making of America,” as a fundraiser.
In the book, an essay looks at slavery through rose-colored glasses, said Mencimer, quoting this passage: “If the pickaninnies ran naked, it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school, they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates.”
I wonder if Fox News has reported on this?
Sherrod made public the fact that she was fired because the Obama administration feared Glenn Beck would make an issue of it on Tuesday. If that’s really the case, then it shows the fear the administration has of white conservatives, which is spineless. To give up Sherrod based on a sound bite is beyond despicable.
If the administration is running this scared, it’s likely to keep on running until the White House is back in the hands of GOP extremists bent on sabotaging government.
We’re still a long ways from the post-racial society every dreamer envisioned with the election of Obama. The right has no intention of letting the racial fire die down. It’s politically advantageous for conservatives to keep reminding whites about black racism by any sleazy way possible.
Tea party members may not like being labeled racist, but they’re known by the company they keep.
Stephen Dick writes for The Herald Bulletin of Anderson, Ind. CNHI News Service distributes his column. He can be reached at steve.dick@heraldbulletin.com.
