The Shirley Sherrod Saga: Why the NAACP is No Longer Relevant

I’m sure you have all heard of Shirley Sher­rod, the USDA offi­cial who was forced to resign because of a story she told to the NAACP in March at a Geor­gia ban­quet.  Here is a link to the video in case you haven’t watched it.

The story Ms. Sher­rod was telling was one about her per­sonal strug­gle with racism and how she over­came it to do the right thing:  Help a farmer (who just hap­pened to be white) who was strug­gling and in need.  Accord­ing to Andrew Bre­it­bart, the whole pur­pose of post­ing the video online was not to out Ms. Sher­rod as racist, but to show the hypocrisy of the NAACP in its con­dem­na­tion of the Tea Party as “racist”.  The video shows the crowd cheer­ing as Ms. Sher­rod explains that she “didn’t give [the farmer] the full force of what I could do”.

Ms. Sherrod states she was called and told by the White House and to sub­mit her res­ig­na­tion by Black­berry imme­di­ately, because of the video.  The NAACP, who had full pos­ses­sion of the entire video, even jumped on the band­wagon con­demn­ing her:

We con­cur with US Agri­cul­ture Sec­re­tary Vil­sack in accept­ing the res­ig­na­tion of Shirley Sher­rod for her remarks at a local NAACP Free­dom Fund banquet.

Racism is about the abuse of power. Sher­rod had it in her posi­tion at USDA. Accord­ing to her remarks, she mis­treated a white farmer in need of assis­tance because of his race.

We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farm­ers of color and female farmers.

Now it appears the head of the USDA is recon­sid­er­ing her ouster.  Also, the NAACP is say­ing they were “snookered”:

With regard to the ini­tial media cov­er­age of the res­ig­na­tion of USDA offi­cial Shirley Sher­rod, we have come to the con­clu­sion we were snook­ered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Bre­it­bart into believ­ing she had harmed white farm­ers because of racial bias.

Hav­ing reviewed the full tape, spo­ken to Ms. Sher­rod, and most impor­tantly heard the tes­ti­mony of the white farm­ers men­tioned in this story, we now believe the orga­ni­za­tion that edited the doc­u­ments did so with the inten­tion of deceiv­ing mil­lions of Americans.

The fact is Ms. Sher­rod did help the white farm­ers men­tioned in her speech. They per­son­ally credit her with help­ing to save their fam­ily farm.

This goes beyond the pale.  The NAACP had full, unfet­tered access to the video from the begin­ning, yet they blame their knee-jerk reac­tion on the Tea Party and Bre­it­bart.  The NAACP has long out­lived its use­ful­ness and is no longer a non­profit, civil rights group.  They are, and have been for sev­eral years, a polit­i­cal entity and should have their tax-exempt sta­tus revoked.  The very racism they say lives within the Tea Party in fact per­me­ates the NAACP, and they should be called out on it.

Shirley Sher­rod should have not only her job back, but get a pro­mo­tion because of the reac­tion by the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion.  I com­mend her for rec­og­niz­ing what she did sev­eral years ago was wrong and over­com­ing it.

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