A day after excerpts of Shirley Sherrod’s speech were released by Andrew Breitbart and she was denounced for racist comments by everyone from the NAACP to the Obama administration, the pendulum has now swung to the opposite extreme and most people are tripping over themselves in their eagerness to say that she isn’t a racist—she’s wonderful, in fact.
Is she? If you watch the entire 43 minutes and 14 seconds of her videotaped speech—and I did—you will see that Sherrod is not a gifted speaker, so it is sometimes difficult to understand the message that she is trying to convey. However, it was evident that as her racism softened, she shifted the basis of her bias from skin color to class warfare. Predictably, she sides with poor people, tacitly suggesting that people who are not poor are the real problem. This class warfare theme appeals to Obama, which explains why he rushed to offer her a new job. Is it really any better to dislike people based on the thickness of their wallet instead of the color of their skin?
Sherrod seems to think that anyone who opposes ObamaCare is vile. She said, “You know, I haven’t seen such a mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of healthcare. Some of the racism we thought was buried. Didn’t it surface?”
No, Mrs. Sherrod, it did not. Anyone with half a brain can read the Constitution and understand that the federal government does not have the power to mandate that we purchase anything, including healthcare. Even President Obama is now desperately searching for a way to justify his unconstitutional mandate. He initially swore up and down that it was not a tax increase. In a 2009 interview with ABC-TV’s George Stephanopoulos, Obama said, “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.”
Months later, after his legal team couldn’t think of how to justify the healthcare mandate, Obama now swears that it IS a tax, saying that since Congress has the power to tax, calling mandated healthcare a tax makes it legal. Obama hopes we’re dumb enough to overlook how his complete 180 on justifying the healthcare mandate proves that it is indeed unconstitutional, which justifiably riles people who care about retaining their personal freedoms. If you’re one of those folks, Mrs. Sherrod is eager to brand you as a racist because she isn’t smart enough to understand the true roots of our discontentment, which have everything to do with liberty and nothing to do with race.
Sherrod complained, “Now, we endured eight years of the Bush’s and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.” That’s classic Sherrod in terms of its lack of eloquence, but it may also be a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.
Sherrod said various appalling things in her speech. She seemed to suggest that people should consider working for the government not because of what they can offer the citizens they work for, but because government workers are paid handsomely and are effectively immune to the danger of layoffs. Is this really a wise or even ethical message to send?
Even more alarming is the joy she seemingly emanated when tutoring her listeners on how “very low income” people could get home loans covering 100% of the cost—no private mortgage insurance and evidently no down payment or risk to the borrower—just the taxpayer, once again. This is what led to the subprime mortgage crisis that triggered the economic crash in 2008. Our leaders swore they tightened up lending standards so that unqualified borrowers won’t saddle your children with even more debt they cannot repay, but they were lying through their teeth, once again. Sherrod said:
“Now, I need to tell you a little bit about Rural Development. There, there are at least 40 programs at Rural Development, but I’ll just talk to you briefly about a couple of them. The main one is the Housing Program. We have more money for single-family housing, direct loans—and that’s loans from the agency—than we’ve ever had in the history of the program. But we having trouble getting that money out the door and guess why: credit issues. They had to send me extra help from Washington to try to help—because of the stimulus money. See, we have more money, but direct loans for the low, very low income and moderate income individuals. And guess what? Those loans—it’s a 100% loan. You can buy the land and build a house—100% loans.”
“We have more money . . . than we’ve ever had in the history of the program.” Where is that money coming from? Me, you, your kids, and their kids. Who is it going to? Poor people—perhaps even ones with “credit issues” (Sherrod’s somewhat scatterbrained speech isn’t always easy to decipher). This is not responsible government; it is incontrovertible proof that the nitwits in Washington who are bankrupting our country haven’t learned from their many mistakes.
OK, we get it: Sherrod is a reformed racist who transferred the basis of her hatred from skin color to money and class. She seems to adore income redistribution. Like the pickpockets in Washington, she doesn’t seem to care if such plundering is justifiable. Like other good bureaucrats, she is more than happy to give your money to folks who can’t afford a home without government help—that is, help from you.
Sherrod won a small fortune in the Pigford case settlement in which the United States Department of Agriculture—the same USDA she worked for—paid over $1 billion tax-free to blacks who “farmed or attempted to farm” and tried but failed to get USDA help. What’s suspicious about this case is how it drew over 50 times the anticipated 2000 affected farmers: 22,505 Track A applications and about 70,000 petitions filed late, leading some to wonder if everyone who sought to obtain money was entitled to it. According to the USDA, the number of people who were paid and are still seeking payment exceeds the 26,785 black farmers who were considered to be operating in 1997. One analyst concluded that many of the claims were fraudulent. Another mystery is what Sherrod did to deserve such a large piece of the settlement pie, including $300,000 for “pain and suffering.” In her NAACP speech, she said, “I grew up on the farm and I didn’t want to have anything to do with agriculture . . . my dream was to get as far away from the farm and Baker County as I could get.”
The question that no one seems to be asking is this: As millions rushed to defend Sherrod because her racism waned as her hatred found another focus, why is there no similar backlash against the ones making unfounded allegations of racism against the Tea Party? Sherrod was transformed from scoundrel to hero by people who thought that it wasn’t fair to label her a racist even though she clearly was and may still be, to some extent. If she harbors no racism, why does she say things like “white lawyer” and “his own kind”? Or why would she say this?
“That’s when it was revealed to me that, ya’ll, it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white—it is about white and black, but it’s not . . .”
She loves me, she loves me not.
It is about white and black.
It’s not about white and black.
She is absolutely, unequivocally free of all vestiges of racism? Her statement seems to suggest that she is conflicted.
After she clears up that mystery, she should explain how a person acts “superior” to someone else. Here is Sherrod bragging about how she intentionally gave less help to a struggling white farmer than she could have, simply because of his race:
“He had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me [Sherrod smiles] was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. [Audience erupted in laughter] I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land, so I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. [Sherrod smiles]”
If Sherrod fully repudiated racism, why would she smile at the times she did? Her smug smiles indicated that she clearly enjoyed having the upper hand over a white man. That’s racism. Furthermore, the reaction of the audience manifested their pleasure at how Sherrod discriminated against the white farmer. If Sherrod were not a racist, the comments from the audience and applause would have prompted her to immediately address those reactions that clearly indicated support of racial discrimination.
Imagine if a white doctor gave a speech in which he smiled while recounting how he’d done less than he could to save the life of a black patient. Imagine if the all-white audience erupted in applause and the doctor didn’t say something such as, “Now hold on just a minute—discriminating against a black patient is something you should condemn, not applaud!” Would you think that doctor wasn’t racist?
I’ve worked as an ER doctor in areas that were poor, middle class, and rich. I’ve treated multimillionaire celebrities and famous athletes, and I’ve treated winos who hadn’t bathed in so long their socks were partially embedded in the skin of their feet. Not once in all those years did I differentiate patients based on skin color. Sherrod took the white farmer “to a white lawyer . . . I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him.”
“His own kind . . .”
Without Sherrod’s help, I could not imagine even thinking about taking a black patient to see a black doctor. After years of treating black patients, I continued to be amazed by how much they appreciated the way I treated them: the same as anyone else. I never expected that equal treatment was worthy of such appreciation, which led me to believe that others hadn’t treated them properly.
I had a grandfather who was brimming with racial animosity (I described him in a Facebook note), but I was immunized to his hatred because I discovered the perfect antidote to racism. Sherrod seems to have had no such epiphany. Her hatred didn’t dissipate; it found a new target. She said, “it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know.”
No, I don’t know, Mrs. Sherrod.
Those who criticized Sherrod for being a racist after hearing the initially released excerpts of her NAACP speech were told to reconsider that characterization after placing her comments in context of what she said later in that presentation. Such an “in context” analysis partially—but not totally—exonerates her of racism, but it also reveals that the enemy isn’t really white people, it’s people with money.
Like you.
Sherrod claimed that Breitbart “would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he would like to see all black people end up again.” The job offered to Sherrod by the Obama administration reportedly deals with fostering racial harmony. Sherrod said that she wants to “promote togetherness in this country.” Good start, Shirley.
Charles Sherrod, her husband, said, “We must stop the white man and his Uncle Toms from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black, and we must not be afraid to turn a black out who votes against our interests.” Charles Sherrod’s Facebook profile gave his employer as the “Civil Rights Movement.” One of his Facebook friends is Russia Sherrod, reportedly his daughter, who lists one of her Likes and Interests as REINSTATE SHIRLEY SHERROD. In 1985, Russia Sherrod graduated from Westover High School in Albany, Georgia, which suggests that she was born around 1967, when Russia—part of the USSR—was our archenemy and “better dead than Red” was a common phrase that expressed the prevalent animosity in the United States for the Communists during the Cold War. If Charles and Shirley are not Communist sympathizers, giving their daughter such an unusual name is simply inscrutable.
The supposedly complete NAACP videotape of her speech has a gap at the 21:00 minute mark. Was the tape edited to remove something offensive she said? What’s missing, and why? We will probably never know, but I do know this: if someone deserves to be put on a pedestal for overcoming racism, it isn’t Sherrod. However, let’s give Sherrod credit for teaching us a valuable lesson: bias comes in many forms.
