opinion

Johannesburg — To be fair to Obama, he has not promised that his presence in the White House means the end of racism.

BY NOW, you have probably heard of Shirley Sherrod, a US woman who recently endured a week from hell. Sherrod, a black public servant in the US government's agriculture department , was fired last week after she was falsely accused of antiwhite racism.

Her sacking followed the airing of a video doctored by a right-wing activist to make Sherrod sound racist. Sherrod was driving when she was called by an official from her department and told to resign. When Sherrod told the official she was driving, the unnamed official ordered her to pull over and resign via her Blackberry.

The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), America's premier civil rights organisation, was also quick to go after Sherrod, basing its attack solely on the doctored video. Ironically, the doctored video was of a speech given by Sherrod at an NAACP function in her native Georgia. Sherrod, the daughter of a farmer murdered by a white man in Jim Crow America, has devoted her professional life to helping America's farmers and rural poor.

In her speech, Sherrod shared a story about overcoming racial resentment. The story concerned a white farmer who, even though he needed Sherrod's help to save his family farm, acted superior when he approached Sherrod.

Sherrod said in the speech that she was put off by the man's attitude and did not want to help him. But she did. Even then, she did not go beyond the call of duty. However, it was while dealing with the farmer that Sherrod had an epiphany. She realised that the problems confronting poor black farmers in the American south were no different from those confronting poor white farmers. The only thing that stood between these groups was race. Sherrod's story was about racial reconciliation. However, in the hands of the right-wing activist who doctored the video, Sherrod's speech became instead a racist diatribe in which a black government official boasted about denying a white man help.

It was left to the white farmer whose land Sherrod had helped save, country singer and farmer Willie Nelson, and Donna Brazile, a media analyst and Democratic power player, to jump to Sherrod's defence. Brazile prevailed on CNN to look at the entire video of Sherrod's speech. The white farmer testified that Sherrod had helped keep him on his farm while Nelson said Sherrod was a friend of small farmers, black and white.

The NAACP, the agriculture department and the White House had, as they say in the US, long thrown Sherrod under the bus. It was only after CNN and other media outlets, which had initially aired the video without question, started looking at Sherrod's speech in its entirety that her former government employers, the White House and the NAACP apologised to Sherrod. President Barack Obama called Sherrod to apologise while Tom Vilsack, the US Agriculture Secretary and her former boss, offered her a new job.

The Sherrod episode is the latest to show that, far from minimising race as a political factor in US life, Obama's election and presence in the White House have, sadly, made it a bigger fault line in US politics. Even the doctored Sherrod video grew out of a racial skirmish that began when the NAACP passed a resolution recently urging the Tea Party movement, a right-wing and predominantly white collection of antigovernment groups, to act against racism in its ranks.

The movement has, among other things, compared Obama to Hitler and Lenin and its members have been known to carry racially inflammatory placards at their rallies. Supporters of the Tea Party movement responded to the NAACP resolution by accusing the NAACP of reverse racism.

The Sherrod video was then doctored to "prove" the NAACP's racism. The move was cynical and sick.

That the Obama administration was quick to condemn Sherrod without bothering to first check the facts and get her side of the story points to the ways in which race has become a burden for Obama and his government. To be fair to Obama, he has not promised or suggested that his presence in the White House means the end of racism and America's problems with race. But he has also been skittish in dealing with race, lest he be accused of favouring blacks. That has actually been one of the most consistent right-wing charges against Obama: that he hates white people and is catering to black needs at the expense of white needs.

There is no truth to the charge. In fact, save for Obama, his immediate family and a handful of advisers, the Obama White House is as white as the White House has always been. But Obama is a black man governing a country that is majority white. It would not take much to convince some voters that Obama is indeed an antiwhite bigot. Hence his skittishness. Meanwhile, decent people like Sherrod must suffer. So much for freedom and bravery.

Dlamini is author of Native Nostalgia (Jacana 2009).

Be the first to Write a Comment!

Copyright © 2010 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.

AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.