Playing the Race Card
Published in Frankfurter Rundschau
(Germany) on 22 July 2010
by Dietmar Ostermann (link to original)
When Barack Obama moved into the White House, America was talking about a post-racial society. The election of a black president with a great deal of white support had supposedly signaled the end of racial discord in the country. Eighteen months later, very little of that fiction remains. As undeniable as the change is, the United States still hasn’t arrived with Obama at any kind of quasi-colorblind normality. Whoever doubts that need only watch how brutally the race card was played, how cynically old wounds were torn open for political gain and how difficult it is for even the administration of a black president to deal with the subject.
The subject and victim of this latest controversy is Shirley Sherrod, until the beginning of this week a regional director for the Department of Agriculture in Georgia. Actually, her life could serve as a lesson for change: Sherrod grew up the daughter of a black farmer in the South during the turbulent civil rights era. Her father was murdered by whites in 1965 and the perpetrators were never convicted. The daughter devoted herself to the fight against discrimination and stood up for black farmers who were systematically disadvantaged.
When a white farmer whose land was about to be repossessed asked for help in 1965, Sherrod hesitated. She hadn’t done as much as she could have to help him, she admitted last March at an NAACP banquet. But: "It made me realize that I needed to work to help poor people ... those who don't have access the way others have. It's about the poor. It made me see it really was about those who have, versus those who don't ... black, white or Hispanic.”
It was a thoughtful speech about inner struggles and overcoming prejudices. Of that, however, what appeared on the internet on Monday was a two and one-half minute excerpt that presented the content of her speech in the opposite light: Merely one passage, in which Sherrod admits she rendered only limited assistance to a white farmer.
Then things began to move quickly: Prominent agitators at right-wing Fox News jumped on the story, accusing the NAACP and the Obama administration of “reverse discrimination” and demanding Sherrod be fired. In an attempt to shield the president from political damage, the secretary of Agriculture asked Sherrod to resign. Even the NAACP distanced itself from her.
Meanwhile, a video of the entire speech has been made public showing that the government had swallowed a provocation set up by the well-known blogger Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart, who is an intimate of the Tea Party, the collection point for conservative outrage, thinks Obama has been influenced by agents of a communist conspiracy. The NAACP, Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack, the White House and even some cheerleaders for Fox News have since apologized to Sherrod.
But that’s not the end of the story, and certainly not for the president. Many African-Americans are outraged at how naively the government believed the smear campaign — and how cowardly they were in abandoning Sherrod so quickly. Black columnist Eugene Robinson talked of a targeted effort stoking the fear “that when African-Americans and other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.”
No one is talking about a post-racial society any longer.
The subject and victim of this latest controversy is Shirley Sherrod, until the beginning of this week a regional director for the Department of Agriculture in Georgia. Actually, her life could serve as a lesson for change: Sherrod grew up the daughter of a black farmer in the South during the turbulent civil rights era. Her father was murdered by whites in 1965 and the perpetrators were never convicted. The daughter devoted herself to the fight against discrimination and stood up for black farmers who were systematically disadvantaged.
When a white farmer whose land was about to be repossessed asked for help in 1965, Sherrod hesitated. She hadn’t done as much as she could have to help him, she admitted last March at an NAACP banquet. But: "It made me realize that I needed to work to help poor people ... those who don't have access the way others have. It's about the poor. It made me see it really was about those who have, versus those who don't ... black, white or Hispanic.”
It was a thoughtful speech about inner struggles and overcoming prejudices. Of that, however, what appeared on the internet on Monday was a two and one-half minute excerpt that presented the content of her speech in the opposite light: Merely one passage, in which Sherrod admits she rendered only limited assistance to a white farmer.
Then things began to move quickly: Prominent agitators at right-wing Fox News jumped on the story, accusing the NAACP and the Obama administration of “reverse discrimination” and demanding Sherrod be fired. In an attempt to shield the president from political damage, the secretary of Agriculture asked Sherrod to resign. Even the NAACP distanced itself from her.
Meanwhile, a video of the entire speech has been made public showing that the government had swallowed a provocation set up by the well-known blogger Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart, who is an intimate of the Tea Party, the collection point for conservative outrage, thinks Obama has been influenced by agents of a communist conspiracy. The NAACP, Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack, the White House and even some cheerleaders for Fox News have since apologized to Sherrod.
But that’s not the end of the story, and certainly not for the president. Many African-Americans are outraged at how naively the government believed the smear campaign — and how cowardly they were in abandoning Sherrod so quickly. Black columnist Eugene Robinson talked of a targeted effort stoking the fear “that when African-Americans and other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.”
No one is talking about a post-racial society any longer.
False reporting here…Fox didn’t air a word about this incident until after Obama’s administration fired Sherrod. They jumped the gun on the brief exerpt of the video. If you had done any research, the release of the video was not about Sherror, it was about the NAACP’s APPROVAL of those statements. The NAACP had the full footage and did nothing to intervene.
The racism in the U.S. was engineered over a century of the Democrat party founding, funding and directing the actions of the KKK and resisting civilrights legislation right up until the 1960’s. That Civil Rights legislation was written by Republicans who tried to pass it during Eisenhower’s administration, but the Democrats, including JFK voted it down.
If you want the truth about racism in the U.S., here it is:
“An Open Letter to the Democratic Party
By Lt. Colonel Frances Rice,U.S. Army Retired: Contributor to the LHI
“We, African American citizens of the United States, declare and assert:
Whereas in the early 1600’s 20 African men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship as slaves and from that tiny seed grew the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery which shaped the course of American development,
Whereas reconciliation and healing always begin with an apology and an effort to repay those who have been wronged,
Whereas the Democratic Party has never apologized for their horrific atrocities and racist practices committed against African Americans during the past two hundred years, nor for the residual impact that those atrocities and practices and current soft bigotry of low expectations are having on us today,
Whereas the Democratic Party fought to expand slavery and, after the Civil War, established Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes and other repressive legislation that were designed to disenfranchise African Americans,
Whereas the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, and their primary goal was to intimidate and terrorize African American voters, Republicans who moved South to protect African Americans and any other whites who supported them,
Whereas, according to leading historians (both black and white), the horrific atrocities committed against African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction were financed, sponsored, and promoted by the Democratic Party and their Ku Klux Klan supporters,
Whereas from 1870 to 1930, in an effort to deny African Americans their civil rights and to keep African Americans from voting Republican, thousands of African Americans were shot, beaten, lynched, mutilated, and burned to death by Ku Klux Klan terrorists from the Democratic Party,
Whereas Democratic Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman rejected anti-lynching laws and efforts to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission,
Whereas the Democratic party has used racist demagoguery to deceive African Americans about the history of the Republican Party that: (a) started as the anti-slavery party in 1854, (b) fought to free African Americans from slavery, (c) designed Reconstruction, a ten-year period of unprecedented political power for African Americans, (d) passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution granting African Americans freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote, (e) passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 granting African Americans protection from the Black Codes and prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations, (f) passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 granting African Americans protection from the Jim Crow laws, (g) established Affirmative Action programs to help African Americans proper with Republican President Richard Nixon’s 1969 Philadelphia Plan that set the first goals and timetables and his 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act that made Affirmative Action Programs the law of our nation, and (h) never sponsored or launched a program, passed laws, or engaged in practices that resulted in the death of millions of African Americans,
Whereas Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (a 1954 decision by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower) was a landmark civil rights case that was designed to overturn the racist practices that were established by the Democratic Party,
Whereas after Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the vote of African Americans, he banned African American newspapers from the military shortly after taking office because he was convinced the newspapers were communists,
Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Law, opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was later criticized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for ignoring civil rights issues.
Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy authorized the FBI (supervised by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy) to investigate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on suspicion of being a communist,
Whereas Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, made a 14-hour filibuster speech in the Senate in June 1964 in an unsuccessful effort to block passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and was heralded in April 2004 by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd as a senator who would have been a great leader during the Civil War,
Whereas when the 1964 Civil Rights Act came up for vote, Senator Al Gore, Sr. and the rest of the Southern Democrats voted against the bill,
Whereas in the House of Representatives only 61 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act as compared to 80 percent of Republicans, and in the Senate only 69 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to 82 percent of the Republicans,
Whereas Democratic President Bill Clinton sent troops to Europe to protect the citizens of Bosnia and Kosovo while allowing an estimated 800,000 black Rwandans to be massacred in Africa, vetoed the welfare reform law twice before signing it, and refused to comply with a court order to have shipping companies develop an Affirmative Action Plan,
Whereas Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore created harmful racial division when he falsely claimed that the 2000 presidential election was “stolen” from him and that African Americans in Florida were disenfranchised, even though a second recount of Florida votes by the “Miami Herald” and a consortium of major news organizations confirmed that he lost the election, and a ruling by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission declared that African Americans were not denied the right to vote,
Whereas the Democratic Party’s soft bigotry of low expectations and social promotions have consigned African Americans to economic bondage and created a culture of dependency on government social programs,
Whereas the Democratic Party’s use of deception and fear to block welfare reform, the faith-based initiative and school choice that would help African Americans prosper is consistent with the Democratic Party’s heritage of racism that included sanctioning of slavery and kukluxery, a perversion of moral sentiment among leaders of the Democratic Party whose racist legacy bode ill until this generation of African Americans,
Now, therefore, for the above and other documented atrocities and accumulated wrongs inflicted upon African Americans, we demand a formal written apology and other appropriate remuneration from the leadership of the Democratic party.”
And the Democrat party has been feeding and exacerbating racism and exploiting it while keeping a large percentage of the Black community socially, culturally and economically isolated and subjugated. And that same, ill-informed community has been largely voting Democrat ever since the KKK told them to vote Democrat or else.
Then, in 2009, Kenneth Gladney, a Black tea party patriot was physically assaulted at a tea party rally by…can you guess? By SEIU thugs…Democrats one and all.
Please try to get your facts straight.
Best regards,
Gail S
http://www.backyardfence.wordpress.com