The election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was supposed to be a sign of our national maturity, a chance to transform the charged, stilted “national conversation” about race into a smarter and more authentic dialogue, led by a president who was also one of the nation's subtlest thinkers and writers on the topic.
Instead, the conversation just got dumber.
The America of 2010 is dominated by racial images out of farce and parody, caricatures not seen since the glory days of Shaft. Fox News often stars a leather-clad New Black Panther, while MSNBC scours the tea party movement for racist elements, which one could probably find in any mass organization in America. Obama’s own, sole foray into the issue of race involved calling a police officer “stupid,” and regretting his own words. Conservative leaders and the NAACP, the venerable civil-rights group, recently engaged in a round of bitter name-calling that left both groups wounded and crying foul. Political correctness continues to reign in parts of the left, and now has a match in the belligerent grievance of conservatives demanding that hair-trigger allegations of racism be proven.
“I thought we were going to move beyond this,” said Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative historian of race and a Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who called the current racial climate “a catastrophe.”
“There’s a kind of heightened racial consciousness that’s very worrisome. It’s not good for us, it’s not good for the very fabric of American society,” she said, objecting in particular to the claims of racism against the tea party movement.
The turn toward racial farce drew an embarrassing, reactive reversal from the Obama administration Wednesday morning, as Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack promised in a terse statement to reconsider the firing of Shirley Sherrod, his hitherto obscure Georgia director of rural development. In a video posted Sunday on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website, Sherrod recounted a story in which she considered refusing a federal grant to a white couple based solely on race. The deceptively edited video seemed to present yet another racial stock figure turning her resentment into a kind of petty tyranny, and the Obama administration did not hesitate in demanding and receiving her resignation.
But an extended version of Sherrod’s speech suggested she was in fact preaching the exact opposite message. The story she was recounting had taken place more than two decades ago – and she was using it to tell a far more nuanced tale. She had, the white farmer from the anecdote emerged to testify, saved his farm. The line delivered just before the excerpt began introduced the anecdote as a lesson from God that “the struggle is really about poor people,” not race.
White House officials Tuesday pinned the decision to fire Sherrod on Vilsack, who said the appearance of the edited clip was — regardless of its actual meaning — simply too damning.
“The controversy surrounding her comments would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question, making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia,” he said in a statement.
The White House, an official said, backed Vilsack’s decision – drawing, in turn, mockery and outrage from both sides of the ideological spectrum, and a second reaction from the White House, where aides took credit for pressing Vilsack to back off.
“I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner,” Vilsack said in a second statement.
