WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Thursday called former federal official Shirley Sherrod to express "regret" over her ouster in the midst of a racially tinged firestorm that ensnared the White House, Agriculture Department, NAACP and a blogger.
Her Georgia Dad was Hosie Miller!
There was a “To Kill a Mockingbird” aspect to this story, where you had—and in that—of course, that great story by Harper Lee, an historic woman blaming a black man for a crime that didn‘t even exist. There was no crime in that case. In this case, you have a right-wing blogger who decided to smear a public official, and that got on Fox—the Fox Web site. No surprise there.
And that chain reaction led to the Department of Agriculture, up the chain of command to Tom Vilsack, who now admits that he told this woman to resign. Based on that fact alone, what does that tell you about American life, where a right-wing blogger with no editorial control, no editorial judgment or ethics, is able to smear somebody, have a major television network put that on their Web site within minutes, throw it out there without any editorial judgment or ethics at all, perhaps even a motive, a negative motive, smear this black woman, and then have an administration led by an African-American, somewhere down the chain of command, apparently now at the cabinet level, sack her because of what was decided by a right-wing blogger? What do you make of that state of affairs?
WADE HENDERSON, LEADERSHIP CONF. ON CIVIL & HUMAN RIGHTS : Chris, I have to say, first, your historic analogy between this incident and “To Kill a Mockingbird” is directly on point. Again, I think Harper Lee exposed a deep fissure in American society, the willingness to assume the worst of a black defendant, or in this instance, an African-American employee who was accused of racial bigotry, when in truth, the story that she told was precisely the opposite.
It was a story of personal redemption. It was a story of racial reconciliation. It was a story that should make us all proud to be Americans, having overcome a deep problem in American life regarding race and having moved beyond that in a way that reflects the kind of democracy we hope to achieve in the 21st century.
I think it‘s especially tragic that in this instance, a right-wing blogger in the case of Andrew Breitbart, choosing to establish a moral equivalency, if you will, between the NAACP because of its criticism of the Tea Party movement and trying to establish that the NAACP should be hoisted on its own petard because it was willing to tolerate racism within its own ranks.
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