The Narrative Shifts
by digby
This may be the stupidest AP "fact check" in history: "Black racism. Is it a problem?"
Only liberals suggest otherwise.
"White America understands by now, you'd better be very careful in the way you treat people of color. In this history of this country that's great advice. That's as it should be. We've had a shameful past," he said. "Now the fear is that the pendulum has swung so far the other way, that white people mind their P's and Q's and don't say anything that can be perceived as racist, but blacks can talk about hurting people."
Clearly whites have huge grievances against blacks who are taking advantage of the system with all their "special rights " and all. Unlike Shirley Sherrod, as Will Bunch discovered:
For all the over-warped speed in initially getting that bogus version of the Shirley Sherrod story out there and pushing her our the door at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, other details in this story have been surprisingly slow to emerge. In particular, I'd been waiting to hear more about a comment from Sherrod on CNN that her father had been murdered by a white farmer in 1965.
Now we know a few details. Her dad was named Hosie Miller, and he was a deacon at Thankful Baptist Church in Newton, Ga., toward the southwest corner of the state. He was also a farmer who, according to CNN, grew corn, peanuts, cotton and cucumbers and raised hogs, cows and goats. Forty-five years ago, Hosie Miller was shot to death -- in the back, no less -- by a white farmer in what his daughter now describes as ostensibly a dispute over a few cows, although the exact circumstances were murky.
A grand jury investigated the case, and no one was charged. All of the grand jurors were white, as was typically the case before the passage of the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. From that incident, a movement was born. Indeed, according to this article, Shirley Sherrod's mother -- Grace Hall Miller -- became the leader of the civil rights movement in Baker County after the killing, organizing marches and other protests from her home. The then 17-year-old Shirley Miller decided to stay in the South and become an activist; she soon married one of the leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, a man by the name of Charles Sherrod. Shirley Sherrod told CNN that ""I decided to stay in the South and work for change."
How unusual was it for a black man to be killed by a white man in the Deep South up through the mid-1960s with no one brought to justice. Way too common. We hear a lot about one particular killing in Mississippi -- the 1964 murder of a trio of civil rights activists that included two white college kids from up North -- but in reality dozens of black men were killed for taking a stand, for trying to vote or just on a whim.
Sherrod got over that, as she testified in her notorious video. But it's nothing compared to the anguish that Tea Partiers endure at being called to account for things like this:
Certainly the tea party has every right to fight back against obvious reverse racist attacks that suggest signs like that might signal racism. In fact there's no difference at all between them and Shirley Sherrod. Clearly whites and blacks have been equally hurt in this horror of American racism.
Meanwhile, O'Reilly gave an typical wingnut apology tonight last night. In other words, he said he was wrong for having jumped to conclusions --- and then doubled down:
O’Reilly continued to condemn Sherrod’s comments on his show Tuesday night, saying she made a mistake, even after it had emerged that her words had been misrepresented.
On Wednesday, the host said that he “did not analyze the entire transcript, and that was not fair.” Still, O’Reilly called her a "longtime liberal activist" and said the language Sherrod used suggested that she “very well may see things through a racial prism." He said she belonged in the private sector, not working for the government.
So even though she said that she had learned that the problem is not a matter of black and white, it's not good enough. She's a "liberal activist" and only those who are right wing activists (or completely dead inside) should be allowed to work in government. After all, the "private sector" has many opportunities for someone who seeks justice for black farmers. Tons of corporations are heavily invested in that issue.
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