Currently at the top of the NYTimes’ “Most Popular” list is Frank Rich’s meditation on Shirley Sherrod, Andrew Breitbart, and America’s halting progress on civil rights since the days of Mad Men. It might be said that Rich overdoes the “all parties involved share the guilt” argument, but I think he’s done an excellent job of laying out a timeline and aggregating links in an easy-to-forward article for people who aren’t policy wonks:
… Even though the egregiously misleading excerpt from Shirley Sherrod’s 43-minute speech came from Andrew Breitbart, the dirty trickster notorious for hustling skewed partisan videos on Fox News, few questioned its validity… As the world knows now, her talk (flogged by Fox as “what racism looks like”) was an uplifting parable about how she had risen above her own trials in the Jim Crow South to aid poor people of every race during her long career in rural development… What’s important is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What matters is Sherrod’s own story. […] __
This year, [Congressman John Lewis] was pelted with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis with lying — never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses — and tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn’t push it. But he wasn’t deterred then, and he and others like him won’t be deterred by the Sherrod saga’s “happy ending” as long as the McConnells of the conservative establishment look the other way and Fox pumps racial rage into the media bloodstream 24/7.
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“You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards,” Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.
On the other hand, Maureen Dowd, PR expert, tries to repeat her ‘Al Gore earth tones’ coup:
The Obama White House is too white… The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one.
I say: Let Shirley Sherrod have the job for which her story truly qualifies her. Her speech to the NAACP concluded that “It’s not about black against white; it’s about haves against don’t-haves.” So… Let President Obama appoint her the first national Director of Class Outreach.