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| 3 1 Introduction Race, Risk, and Discrimination The Significance of Race and Risk in America In July 2010, American television media revealed seemingly controversial footage of Shirley Sherrod, a black American woman and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development agent in Georgia, speaking about her being unable to treat a white farmer fairly. The videotape featured Sherrod ’s March 27, 2010, speech delivered to a Douglas, Georgia, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for its twentieth annual Freedom Fund program.1 The video clip initially had been released online by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger affiliated with BigGovernment.com, in order to show Sherrod’s and the NAACP’s racist attitudes toward whites,2 as it appeared that Sherrod described how she considered denying a white farmer access to government benefits. At the time, the story seemed shocking and newsworthy. Fox News anchors suggested that the video clip exemplified a black bureaucrat in President Barack Obama’s administration practicing reverse discrimination against whites. Indeed, in their perspective, Sherrod represented ideals that were being incorporated into the agenda of the nation’s first black president. Critics asked how a civil servant could deny benefits to others based on their race. The alleged controversy also lay in the paradox of a civil rights organization promoting racial discrimination. Some charged that the NAACP was hypocritical because, as a civil rights organization, it invited a “racist” speaker, despite its professed challenges against racism; here, it seemed as if the NAACP endorsed a speech by a civil servant who supposedly upheld discrimination against whites. In effect, Breitbart’s video snippet started a national media frenzy that characterized Sherrod as a racist, ill-willed civil servant who was “out to get 4 | Introduction white people.” The ramifications of the snippet were great, as the brouhaha over it led to calls for Sherrod to be fired, and eventually, she was asked to resign her post. The NAACP president, Ben Jealous, also denounced her speech. But, as the eventual release of and attention to the full-length video of the speech showed, the allegations of Sherrod’s “racist acts” were not true and, in fact, were unfounded. As the news story developed, the actual travesty lay in the fact that the video snippet did not capture Sherrod’s full speech. In fact, in the unedited, full video of Sherrod’s speech, she actually challenged the NAACP audience to think about supporting justice for all, despite their personal discrimination experiences and misgivings about historical racial discrimination and mistreatment of people (by whites, in particular). Sherrod’s own father had been lynched by whites in the Jim Crow South in 1965, and the perpetrators were never brought to justice. In her entire speech, she actually encouraged a standard of justice that centers on seeking greater good and not seeking racial retribution for one’s personal, past racial discrimination experiences. Sherrod even questioned her own intentions toward the white farmers, as she stated, “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”3 In its entirety, Sherrod’s speech actually relayed her personal triumphs of overcoming her own prejudices to aid a white farmer in saving his farm land. As the Sherrod news story continued to unfold before the public’s view, the white farmer and his wife, whom Sherrod assisted in saving their farm, appeared on news interviews to add veracity to Sherrod’s claims about assisting them in their time of need. They even praised her for helping them keep their farm land. Ultimately, the truth revealed a gross mischaracterization of Sherrod, and the out-of-context scope of the video prompted a national controversy without any substantiating evidence. Sherrod was branded a racist for no evidentiary reason. Soon the television media attempted to redeem Sherrod’s character, as they invited her for guest appearances to speak about the matter from her perspective. Eventually, the NAACP president apologized to her, and the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, both apologized and offered Sherrod another job with higher rank. President Obama also called to offer his regrets for the incident and to encourage her to rejoin the USDA. Sherrod respectfully declined. What is a simple moral of this story? “Don’t judge a book by...

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