See all Shirley Sherrod posts.
This should be an interesting case. I think Sherrod will win. Andrew Breitbart intentionally doctored a video to make it look like she was saying the exact opposite of what she really was saying. This seems to be a hobby of Breitbart, who apparently does not find support for his positions in the real world, so he constructs fake evidence to back up his beliefs.
Obama urges a dialogue on race after Sherrod case
July 29, 2010
By Mimi Hall
USA TODAY
President Obama said Thursday that all Americans should spend more time talking about a sensitive subject that he has addressed only sparingly since he took office: race.
In a speech to the National Urban League and on the ABC daytime talk show The View, the president talked about race relations in the context of the controversy surrounding the recent firing of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod.
Sherrod's own comments about race were misconstrued after a snippet of a 43-minute speech she gave to the NAACP was posted last week on the conservative blog biggovernment.com. The clip made Sherrod, who is black, appear racist as she recounted a time when she purposefully didn't give a white farmer the help he needed. The whole speech reveals that she was using the anecdote as part of a broader story about racial reconciliation.
They day after she was fired, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized for taking action based on just the edited video and offered Sherrod her job back. She has not said whether she'll take it. She announced Thursday that she will sue the blogger, Andrew Breitbart, who posted the video...
Race isn't the problem -- economic inequality is
Shirley Sherrod says the social war is about money, not race.
Associated Press
By Michelle Singletary
July 25, 2010
Instead of focusing on the politics behind the firing and subsequent redemption of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod, we should consider what she was trying to tell us when she addressed the NAACP.
Sherrod became the latest hot-topic story after a conservative blogger posted a video that was edited to make it appear she went out of her way to not offer help to a white farmer when she worked for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund decades ago. Sherrod was summarily asked to resign and then, in a New York minute, was vindicated when the full video of her speech revealed she had been instrumental in saving the man's farm.
Given her work and experience, we need to hear Sherrod out.
There is a disturbing and widening gulf between the rich and the poor in America. And it would be even wider except for the fact that so many middle-income families have borrowed their way to a comfortable lifestyle. They are just a paycheck, a divorce or a heath crisis away from financial ruin.
Sherrod said that while working with the white farmer, she realized that the social war we've been having isn't about race but economic inequity.
"Y'all, it's about poor versus those who have," Sherrod said in her speech. "It's really about those who have versus those who don't, you know. And they could be black; and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people -- those who don't have access the way others have."
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Over the past several decades, more and more Americans have come to this realization. The number of people who believe they are among the have-nots has doubled from 17 percent in 1988 to 34 percent in 2007, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. The economic data back up this perception. Income gains over the past few decades have been heavily concentrated at the very top of the economic ladder...
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