USDA worker pressured to resign over race comments

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The Obama administration is standing by its quick decision to oust a black Agriculture Department employee over racially tinged remarks at an NAACP banquet in Georgia, despite evidence that her remarks were misconstrued and growing calls for USDA to reconsider.

Shirley Sherrod, who until Tuesday was the Agriculture Department's director of rural development in Georgia, says the administration caved to political pressure by pushing her to resign for saying that she didn't give a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago when she worked for a nonprofit group.

Sherrod says her remarks, delivered in March at a local NAACP banquet in Georgia, were part of a story about racial reconciliation, not racism. The white farming family that was the subject of the story stood by Sherrod and said she should keep her job.

"We probably wouldn't have (our farm) today if it hadn't been for her leading us in the right direction," said Eloise Spooner, the wife of farmer Roger Spooner of Iron City, Ga. "I wish she could get her job back because she was good to us, I tell you."

The NAACP, which initially condemned Sherrod's remarks and supported Sherrod's ouster, joined the calls for her to keep her job. The civil rights group said it and millions of others were duped by the conservative website that posted partial video of her speech on Monday.

More here.

"Post racial" my ass.

I don't know who I'm angrier with, Obama's White House or the racist conservatives who set this stunt up. As for Obama, this is all very Pontius Pilate, washing his hands and throwing an innocent under the bus for political expediency. The right wing has been going after him for all kinds of bullshit from the day he was elected: you don't get a bully to back off by cowering in front of him like a little girl; you get a bully to back off by punching him in the face. By caving in to artificially constructed "scandals" again and again, the President does nothing but embolden his enemies while giving spectators the perception that maybe there's actually something to the vomit the conservatives are always spewing. From ACORN to "death panels" to bogus deficit fears to New Black Panthers to this latest pack of lies, it's all going to get worse if the President doesn't pound these fuckers hard on each and every occasion.

But I guess that's just not his style.

As for the conservative serpents who doctored the tape and pushed it into the mainstream media, well, they're scum, but they've also revealed how the right wing has, apparently, managed to subvert the language of racism discourse to their own racist ends. Listening to them makes it sound like black people run all the corporations in the Fortune 500, or that the criminal justice system is wildly tilted toward keeping white people in prison at rates far higher than their proportion of the general population, or that black cops shoot white people in the back on subway platforms, or that banks redline white neighborhoods, or that black people brought white people here in chains, stripped them of their culture and identities, sold them as property, and then complained that they couldn't get their shit together after all that good treatment had ended.

I just don't understand why these white assholes freak the fuck out over the slightest vaguest hint of the remotest possibility that a black person might have treated a white person unfairly. I mean, they're on psycho hyper-aware lookout for anything at all that might be twisted to show that blacks are just as racist as whites.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

That is, because these conservatives are total fucking evil racist assholes, they're trying to justify themselves using the classic rhetoric of the four year old caught stealing: "Well, he did it, too!!!!" Very disturbing, but not surprising. They are, after all, racist assholes. What's surprising is how the mainstream media, mostly white, presumably "liberal," whatever that's supposed to mean these days, swallow this racist drivel hook, line, and sinker.

Personally, I think the media's racist, too.

UPDATE

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The White House did a sudden about-face Wednesday and begged for forgiveness from the black Agriculture Department employee whose ouster ignited an embarrassing political firestorm over race. She was offered a “unique opportunity” for a new job and said she was thinking it over.

More here.

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