Obama Flunks as 'Post-Racial' LeaderPresident Barack Obama, help Shirley Sherrod. Get her job back, apologize and restore her reputation. Nothing speaks more poorly of your judgment than the way you've allowed your administration to throw her under a bus. Sherrod, Georgia director for rural development for the United States Department of Agriculture, became our gotcha-culture's villain-of-the-day Monday when a video appeared on the Internet and talk shows. It showed part of a speech she gave March 27 at an event of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Audio and video clips from the speech were routinely presented out of context to prove racism at the NAACP. The tactic was no different than those used to malign tea parties by characterizing them as racist with material shown in fraudulent context. Anyone who listens to Sherrod's speech, with honest interest in her words and the point she made, will understand that her message was as anti-racist as it gets. Sherrod selflessly shared an experience from the 1980s that improved her character. She told of a white farmer coming to her for help. The man was losing his farm, and Sherrod had never helped a white man. She confessed that she "did not give him the full force of what I could do." In the process of helping the white farmer, she learned something: "It was revealed to me that it's about poor versus those who have. It's not so much about white... it is about white and black...
This black woman discovered her own racist tendencies as a young professional and quickly changed course. A quarter-century later, she used the personal anecdote to encourage members of the NAACP to focus less on race and more on need. It was giving, truthful and the antithesis of racism. A variety of talk show hosts played for audiences nothing beyond the confession that a white man was treated differently than black farmers she had helped. We can expect doctrinaire and dishonest talk show hosts, in the business of ratings, to misrepresent a beautiful message. It's shocking that a government run by the country's first black president demanded Sherrod's head, so insistently that her immediate supervisor told her to pull to the side of a road and resign by phone. We kept hearing that Barack Obama would usher in a "post-racial era" — socio-babble designed to make progressive pundits sound smart with a new twist on "Kumbaya." "The post-racial era, as embodied by Obama, is the era where civil-rights veterans of the past century are consigned to history," NPR's Daniel Schorr said in 2008. The New Yorker's Peter Boyer wrote: "The wish for a post-racial politics is a powerful force, and it rewards those who seem to carry its promise." It rewarded Obama, but our country seems more obsessed with race than it has been in decades. Obama must reinstate the woman who said we should focus less on race. He should apologize and give her an award — if he wants to be "post-racial." REPRINTED FROM THE COLORADO SPRINGS GAZETTE DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
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