Our Disease Keeps Flaring Up

Perhaps we are living in a kairos moment, a God moment, and God Herself is parting the waters.
A brouhaha broke out last week when Ben Jealous, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), presiding over the 121st convention of that group drafted a resolution asking that the leadership of the Tea Party denounce the “racist elements” of that group. He was referring to the Tea Party members spitting on black legislators, referring to President Obama and his family in racist terms, and some of the other things we have all seen.
Jealous didn’t say the Tea Party itself was racist. He said that there were (and there are) racist elements in the Tea Party who have done and said offensive things and that the leadership should denounce them.
Mark Williams, the head of the Tea Party Express, fired back, saying that the entire NAACP was racist, and then he wrote a very offensive blog, a satire of Jealous, he said, where he had Jealous writing a letter to President Abraham Lincoln, asking what “we coloreds” would do, now that people expect us to take care of ourselves.
A member of the Tea Party later expelled Williams from the Tea Party Express, a black man, actually, who couldn’t say that what Williams had written was racist (“I am not able to say what is racist and what is not,” he said) but it was offensive, and took away from the goals of the Tea Party, which is to push for less government, less government spending, and lower taxes.
Well, folks got riled up, on both “sides,” and someone dug up a speech where Shirley Sherrod, who until this week worked for the federal government, was heard on tape saying that she was offended when a white farmer acted like he was talking down to her and didn’t do as much as she might …
But what she did do is help this same farmer save his farm, when it seemed nobody else could or would. The elderly white farmer said on television this week that she was not racist, that she saved their farm, a farm which they still have. “She’s not no racist,” the elderly Mr. Spooner, the farmer, said. “Seems to me like somebody just wanted to stir something up.” His wife agreed.
Ms. Sherrod says that as she was doing her job yesterday, “the White House,” or someone from the White House, a Cheryl Cook, Deputy Secretary for Underdevelopment, called her three times and pressured her to resign her post. She said that this Ms. Cook told her first to go on administrative leave. She was driving a government car, so she left her meeting and was on her way home. On that drive, she got three calls from Ms. Cook, pressuring her to resign. Ms. Cook said that Glenn Beck was going to run the tape that evening of what she’d said on that tape, and finally, asked pull over to the side of the road and offer her resignation.
Then, to add insult to injury, Ben Jealous, on behalf of the NAACP, denounced this woman.

My question is, why didn’t the government and Jealous look into the entire statement and speech Sherrod made before they threw her on the chopping block? Sherrod said that she promised her father, the night he was murdered by a Klansman, that she would not leave the South and that she would do all she could to end racism, in her own little way. She said she decided to turn the pain of knowing her father had been murdered for no other reason than he was hated by some whites … that she would turn this negative into a positive.
Someone should have looked into the depth of this story before they threw Sherrod under the bus.
All of us who are African American have felt the discomfort of feeling looked down upon by some white person just because of our color. We have known the difficulty of doing right when we have felt like not doing it. I think I heard her say that though on the day she met with Mr. Spooner she didn’t do all she could on that day, she eventually relented to her sense of right in the eyes of God, and helped that man save his farm.
Oh, the story needs to be opened and told. The Tea Party and Right Wingers who dug this up as a sort of trump card following the dispute between the Tea Party and NAACP got her fired. How many real cases of discrimination have gone ignored? How many white government workers have not done all they can to help black farmers.
Oh, by the way. Ms. Sherrod made the statement 24 years ago, and she wasn’t working for the government at the time.