Nigeria Content Online

A soft-spoken
African-American woman with a gentle manner became the most famous face
in U.S. politics this week, in Kafkaesque confusion involving race,
right-wing media and officials of the Obama administration.

“On behalf of the
administration, I offer our apologies,” White House spokesman Robert
Gibbs said. Until this week, Shirley Sherrod was a largely anonymous
government employee helping struggling farmers in a poor part of the
country. But a right-wing Internet blogger found video of a speech she
gave, mentioning her work with a white farmer she found condescending.
“I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost
their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person
save their land,” Sherrod said in the widely viewed and quoted excerpt.
“So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do.” Edited out,
though, were her explanation that the work was done decades earlier for
a different employer, that it taught her to look past race, and that
she even offered the disagreeable white farmer exactly the help he
needed.

Indeed, when CNN found his family, they were grateful and credited
Sherrod with saving them from financial disaster. But the country’s
leading civil rights organization, the National Organization for the
Advancement of Colored People had already called for her dismissal and
President Obama’s agriculture secretary had ordered her fired from her
job. They were reacting not just to Sherrod, but also a lot of painful
history. Tens of thousands of black, Hispanic and female farmers have
complained over the years of unfair treatment by the Department of
Agriculture, when they wanted government assistance. So a largely black
organization and the cabinet secretary of America’s first black
president wanted to demonstrate their rejection of any form of
discrimination. When the full facts emerged, the NAACP complained that
it had been intentionally fooled by the blogger and the media that
repeated his account. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to
Sherrod and offered her a new job. And Obama’s America was left
scratching its head about race and politics once again.