I don’t like to focus on what commenters say at blogs. A blog with an open commenting policy should be praised, not punished for the wacky things they allow to be published. So, I focus on these comments at Red State strictly on their own merits.
so why did the left let her go?
Doc Holliday Tuesday, July 20th at 11:18PM EDT (link)
and when have they been fair to us? Were they fair to George Allen? Have they been fair to the Tea Party? Brietbart can’t fire anyone in the Obama Regime.
BTW, what about the angry woman saying the white guy acted superior? Does he now agree he did that, that he was a racist? What about the NAACP crowd that cheered when she made light of her desire to help him less than “one of her own kind”?
Maybe this woman has had a change of heart, but she still did something very wrong and as a representative of the US government. But I think the main point we all should focus on is it is time the race baiters are “discouraged” from using those false attacks. If our side fights back, and get’s some scalps, they might start focusing on real issues.
The commenter was responding on Erick Erikson’s ambivalence about Andrew Breitbart’s conduct, and there’s a lot there that I could comment about, including some factual inaccuracies. But I want to focus on this commenter’s issue with Ms. Sherrod’s talking about sending the farmer to a white lawyer as sending him to one of “his kind.”
I don’t know if you have watched the full video of her speech, but a big part of it revolves around the killing of her father by white men when she was just seventeen years old, and how those men were not punished. You see, she wasn’t who started breaking people into ‘your kind’ and ‘my kind.’ Her father was killed because he was an agitator. He was killed because he was a black man sticking up for black people in the Jim Crow south. He wasn’t the first black man, or even the first relative of Ms. Sherrod’s, to be killed in her county. And no white men were ever held accountable in her experience.
Prior to the murder of her father, she had planned to go north to college and hoped to meet a nice northern man to marry so she would never have to return to the south and the hard work on the farm. But the death of her father made her reconsider and she decided to stay in the south and fight for ‘her kind.’
Her story is about the moment she realized that she had it wrong. She realized that poor white farmers were getting the shaft from more powerful interests, just like she knew was happening to poor black farmers. Her worldview expanded and she began to look at things in economic rather than racial terms. Of course, for this next commenter, that’s not much better.
edintexas Wednesday, July 21st at 8:53AM EDT (link)…
…As for her “conversion” – so she is no longer a racist, but rather a Marxist. And a Marxist who NOW describes turning over a Caucasian farmer to someone of “his own kind”. Well, that certainly doesn’t seem to be too racist, does it?
For a lot of white conservatives today, any talk of ‘your kind’ or ‘my kind’ sounds racist. But they’ve erased the past. Ms. Sherrod can’t erase the past. How do you erase the murder of your father? How do you ignore that ‘your kind’ was killed for being ‘your kind’? It’s white people who treated her that way. They didn’t give her an alternative to seeing the world that way because they imposed that view upon her. And she unlearned it.
But these white conservatives unlearned history. For them, Jim Crow ended long ago and even those who lived through it and suffered mightily are not allowed to complain about it. They’re not allowed to even talk about it. If they do, they’re race-baiters. Of course, that’s only marginally worse than being a Marxist.
I am convinced that a significant number of those in today’s conservative movement have brains that are physiologically incapable of the biological functions necessary for understanding the nuance and complexity of racism in this country. It is also evident in much of the rest of their thinking, too. It is not simply a matter of the language or the attitudes or understanding the historic and cultural implications of our history. I think there is something fundamentally different in the wiring of their brains. That is why it so mind numbingly frustrating to try and have a discussion about this with them. Many are simply incapable of executing the thought processes in their brain that lead to logical, rational thought and processing of complex information. I am beginning to believe that for some of them, at least, their attitudes are simply unconscious responses that billow up from the deepest recesses of man’s earliest evolutionary phase of brain development.
Thanks for this, BooMan. I heard Ms. Sherrod going at it with Roland Martin on CNN yesterday during lunch about her experience growing up and could sense how much longstanding pain this whole episode has unearthed for her.
Fuck Andrew Breitbart who has the audacity to say that he feels sorry for Ms. Sherrod. And a pox on the White House for taking the most effective route toward demoralizing those of us who have supported him and forcing us to make the impossible choice between keeping our mouths shut like Good Democrats™ for fear that the real lunatics are given back the reins in November. Incidents like this are why so many people refuse to participate in voting at all. If I wasn’t so terrified of seeing Boehner & McConnell get the gavels, I’d sit it out, too. How is that a healthy system?
I am frustrated with the WH response to this. I’m not angry except on behalf of Ms. Sherrod. I’m just frustrated that they haven’t learned what they’re up against enough to instinctually protect their own. I mean, we all make mistakes, even big ones. But they should be making mistakes in the opposite direction. They should have seen the source and known to wait until they could understand the context better. They did the right thing today even though it was extremely painful. I knew they would. I even sent them a link to my story last night and said ‘Hey, you know I’ve had your back on a lot of things, but I don’t have it on this one. This can’t stand.’ And I asked them to pass my article around the press shop, which I am confident that they did. I knew they’d fix this, but I had to make the case personally because they really screwed up.
I am pretty sure that the president is very angry about this, as he should be.
You learn this at your mother’s knee. You learn this by seeing your father defend the family. And if you’re lucky, you have a family with values that include protecting the powerless just for honor. But even the Mafia defends its own. It’s the raison d’ettre (sic?) for the enterprise. Gangbangers defend their own. This White House does not have the integrity of a street gang. Perhaps it’s because Obama grew up fatherless. I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist.
I don’t quarrel with their right to fire someone for admitting to racism. I don’t even quarrel with their decision to fire someone for a racist remark made 24 years ago. I wouldn’t do it, but they set their own rules. It’s their right. But I certainly disdain throwing their employee, their vassal, under the bus without even investigating. If you think someone has committed a firing offense, you take them off line, with or without pay. Then you investigate.
Don’t let the double-talk fool you. These folks are coy; they haven’t forgotten. These are the same rhetorical arguments segregationist whites made in the 1960s.
Can Shirley Sherrod sue Breitbart for libel and slander? If not, why not?
I’m not a lawyer, but she was a public official, so that makes it hard, I think.
She was not a public “figure” or an elected official; I’d never heard of her before and I doubt you had either. She was a civil servant, doing her job until Breitbart swooped in and made her notorious. I believe she could adequately claim that his distortions of her character caused her distress and affected her career. There can also be no doubt that he did it with intentional malice. Hard case or not, I think she should file suit and make him spend money on lawyers to defend himself.
Forgotten? They know very well what they’re advocating. They know what state’s rights is code for, and they know what Lee Atwater admitted is true. Most of all, they know this:
I had a man regrade my driveway today and when he came to the door to get paid he asked if I would sign a petition that the local schools offer US history…& of course something on the Constitution.
Now I’m perplexed. My schooling included quite a bit of US history including a substantial amount of information and pop quizzes on the Constitution.
We chat on and on about history, civics & world history here & I’m pretty darn sure readers here didn’t play hookey in school during their civics lessons.
So are we dealing with a group of people on the right who just skipped class? Are schools no longer offering basic US History? Are these people obtuse? And if they are any of the forementioned, how can one ever persuade them to think? never mind.