And The NAACP Is Calling The Tea Partiers Racists?

The NAACP at its recent convention attacked Tea Party activists as racists, a meme they've picked up on after our own U.S. Rep. Andre Carson made up a big fat lie and claimed he and other African-American congressmen were called niggers by Tea Party demonstrators outside the Capitol during the health care debate, despite numerous video and audio recording devices of the scene that proved no such racial epiteths occurred. This video above has surfaced from the NAACP's recent convention where Obama's federal Rural Development director for Georgia, Shirley Sherrod, made these racist comments about how she treats white farmers when they called her for assistance:

“He had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him . . . 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 — so I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”


She notes that, to avoid any later complaints, she said she took him to see “one of his own” — a white lawyer” “I figured that if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.”

Sherrod's racists comments were greeted with approval from her black audience at the NAACP event, although the group has since distanced itself from her remarks after they've gone viral on conservate Internet blog sites. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has also accepted her resignation. Hat tip to Jonathan Turley.

UPDATE: Today, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack is apologizing for firing Sherrod as is the White House. The NAACP incredulously says it was bamboozled by an edited version of her speech and is now retracting its denunciation of the comments she made at their banquet. How could the NAACP have been bamboozled? They knew what she said and yet quickly threw her under the bridge as soon as the video surfaced on the Internet. Andrew Breitbart, who first published the edited video on the Internet, is making no apologies. He maintains the video clearly shows her comments about the racist feelings she had towards helping a white farmer were greeted with approval from the audience, which was the point he says he intended to make with its release. That approval is quite audible indeed. The national news media, which jumped all over the totally false claims by the NAACP that the Tea Party movement is nothing more than the revival of the KKK under a new name, is once again blaming conservatives for the controversy. Now think about it. The NAACP didn't hesitate to throw Sherrod under the bus. Vilsack, who was personally familiar with her work at USDA, didn't hesitate to throw her under the bus--even going so far as to demand her resignation without giving her an opportunity to explain herself. And the White House initially approved of Vilsack's decision. Yet all of the above are now laying blame at the doorsteps of conservatives. Talk about hypocrites.

I'm not giving Sherrod the benefit of the doubt, and I'm not letting off the hook the NAACP audience who seemed to relish in her comments about treating the white farmer with less passion than she treated a black farmer. She clearly indicated she had used a government position in the past to treat whites differently than blacks. She didn't save the white farmer's farm as national news reports are now reporting; it was the white employee to whom she passed his case off who saved his farm through federal assistance because she said she couldn't give her fullest to him because he was white. Yes, she went on to say she regretted her racial bias, but she then went on to say her feelings evolved into the issue of  "the haves versus the have nots", while approvingly fanning the flames of animosity towards the haves in her government role. Whether people in government are using their positions to mete out disparate treatment of citizens based on their skin color, ethnicity, religion, financial standing or some other distinction for which they hold a personal bias, it is wrong; we expect government actors to remain neutral. Sherrod has demonstrated that she is incapable of neutrality.