Sherrod: Our continuing obsession with race

“Silly me,” said Annette John-Hall in The Philadelphia Inquirer. When we elected Barack Obama in 2008, I thought, like many Americans, that our nation had taken a giant step forward on the issue of race. But that was terribly naïve. Under our first black president, racial animus and resentment not only continue—they’ve flared with a new ugliness. Witness what happened last week to Shirley Sherrod, a midlevel official with the federal Department of Agriculture. Right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart released heavily edited footage of a speech Sherrod made to the NAACP in which she appeared to brag about withholding aid from a white farmer decades ago. That footage led to an immediate “gotcha” frenzy on the conservative blogosphere and talk-show circuit; a panicky Obama administration demanded her immediate resignation. Within 24 hours, said Cynthia Tucker in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it emerged that Sherrod—whose father was murdered by whites—gave a much longer speech in which she movingly described how she had overcome her own racial prejudice and got the farmer the aid he needed. “God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people,” Sherrod said. The White House apologized, Sherrod was offered her job back—and once again, the dominant topic in America was race.

The sliming of Shirley Sherrod was no mistake, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. It was part of a larger campaign by the Right to stoke white racial resentment against President Obama. Conservative superstars such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have made the case explicitly: Obama is a “racist” who wants to tax whites and steal their wealth as “payback” for black slavery. They’re aided and abetted by the “cynical right-wing propaganda machine,” led by Fox News, which continually promotes the “poisonous fiction” that under Obama, “reverse racism” is flourishing, and whites are being shunted to the back of the bus.

It’s Barack Obama who’s stoking the racial fires, said Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online. It began during the presidential campaign, with Obama belittling the “bitter” white voters of Pennsylvania and dismissing his own grandmother as a “typical white person.” In office, Obama accused a white policeman of acting “stupidly” in arresting his friend Henry Louis Gates, tried to appoint professional race-baiter Van Jones to a White House job, and nominated Sonia “Wise Latina” Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. “America has largely moved beyond race,” but this president—and liberals—remain hung up on skin color and ancient racial grievances. In fact, said David Harsanyi in The Denver Post, the president’s liberal supporters have been hurling “irresponsible accusations” of racism at anyone who dares criticize the president. Maybe the Sherrod incident will teach the Left “how easily a reckless charge of racism can destroy someone.”

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The only salve for this kind of rancor is honesty, said Mary C. Curtis in PoliticsDaily.com. And the honest truth is that when the races come into any kind of conflict, “we believe the worst instead of the best of one another.” In her NAACP speech, Sherrod admitted that she resented the farmer at first, assuming he felt “superior” to her because he was white; only when she confronted her own prejudice was she able to see the farmer as another human being, who needed her help. America might start with a similar admission: Even though we’ve elected a black president, white and black Americans still view each other with resentment and fear.