A Comment About

‘Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, Who Cares? Call Them Racists’

July 20, 2010 - 12:18 pm - by Rand Simberg
Larry J
2010-07-20 14:17:41

If you go to Breitbart’s site, you’ll see that the title of the story is “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism – 2010.” The focus of the story is the approval the audience gave to Ms. Sherrod’s story of her initial unwillingness to help someone because the man was white.

We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

The primary focus of condemnation in the article is the NAACP more than Ms. Sherrod.