Racism, bigotry of every stripe still exist
Jesse Jackson says Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert's umbrage at the departure of star forward LeBron James reflects a slave-master mentality.
Rush Limbaugh says the Justice Department's decision to drop a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party is evidence that President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are protecting extremists who advocate killing white babies.
The NAACP says the tea party movement is infused with racists. The National Council of La Raza says Arizona's immigration law is racist. Mel Gibson says — well, given the extent to which his words would have to be redacted, I can't meaningfully reproduce what Gibson says.
One year after Obama declared the arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. "a teachable moment" about racism, the racial charges and countercharges are coming so fast and furiously that you can almost set your watch by them. If it's 10 o'clock, someone must be claiming Republicans have a 50-state "Southern strategy" for 2010. If it's 11 o'clock, someone else must be blogging that "colored people ... don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing."
Yet even by these desultory standards, what happened to Shirley Sherrod is outrageous. The once and former — and perhaps once again — Agriculture Department official provided an actual teachable moment when she addressed an NAACP banquet in Georgia. She spoke about growing up in the South, about her own tragic and terrifying ordeal with racism, about paying her dues and about how she overcame the past and prejudice.
Sadly, even Sherrod wasn't above trying to make a partisan point about race in the course of her address. Ultimately, though, hers was a story of redemption. Watch the video. I should say watch the full video, which the NAACP has posted on its website. It's a lesson in life and a powerful refutation of the notion that racism — real, violent, degrading, stultifying racism — is an archaeological relic of a distant past.
Yet the creatively edited video of Sherrod's speech peddled to the media by conservative agitator Andrew Breitbart turned her lesson on its head. That video made Sherrod into a racist. And before the truth could put its boots on, that lie had made it to the White House and halfway around the digital world. There was in that another lesson.
The same week Sherrod was smeared, a different racially tinged scandal received far less attention. The Daily Caller published off-the-record exchanges from Journolist, a now-defunct discussion group for hundreds of liberal journalists, academics and activists. Much of the commentary is professionally unflattering, to say the least.
