Two points of view
The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics…The mainstream media and the Obama administration alike must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its own propaganda to be accepted as news by persuading traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.”…
The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all. The first reaction of the Obama team was not to question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle. She could be sacrificed without a thought.
Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god. Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that “balance” demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.
Our politics increasingly resembles a cold civil war, and the Sherrod story was like the right’s first successful A-bomb test. Accusations of racism have long been the left’s, and only the left’s, most explosive weapon. No more. I don’t make this observation with admiration or pride. I understand that this could turn out badly. It’s not as if the right had unilaterally disarmed when it comes to political attacks. Far from it. But until now, charges of racism detonated only when dropped on the right.
George Allen’s “macaca” moment cost him re-election to the Senate. Trent Lott’s praise for Strom Thurmond cost him leadership of the Senate. Fabricated quotes, approving of slavery, pinned on Rush Limbaugh cost him a chance at partially owning the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. Joe Biden called Barack Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”; he became vice president. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid theorized that Americans accepted Obama because he was “light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”; he kept his job.
A real National Conversation about race would acknowledge that humans often say things that later make them wince, or worse, and that liberals like Biden and Reid aren’t the only ones who deserve the benefit of the doubt, of context, of grace. In fact, I suspect most of us already reached that conclusion
What you see sometimes depends on what you want to see. (This story has caused the media to lose its collective mind; Tom Maguire has a good discussion of that.)
July 27th, 2010 at 8:24 am
The real story, ignored by most, was the reaction of the NAACP to Sherrod’s speech.
There are always going to be bigots. I remember visiting my great aunt with my brand new wife long ago. The first words out of her mouth were “I don’t like orientals. Pretty girl though.” I hope my wife didn’t hear it. At any rate, we never saw her again.
I have my standards. Others can have their own. It helps to know who the bigots are, so you can avoid them. It’s a little tougher when it’s your government that is the bigot or recognizes the bigot.
Equality is evidently too much to ask for.