Shirley Sherrod accused of racism
Shirley Sherrod, the former United States Department of Agriculture director of rural development for Georgia, says that her cutoff was unfair collateral damage of a larger political derby between the Tea Party movement and the NAACP, but Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, sustains that it is due to a controversial anecdote that she said earlier this year.
He referred to the speech that Shirley Sherrod kept at the March NAACP awards ceremony, when she described a situation in which she was first in the position of saving a white farmer from losing her farm. Sherrod claimed that the farmer did everything to show her that she was superior to her, not knowing that in that time she was deciding how much she will help her. She later recognized that she did not give the white person the full force of what she could do, because she was thinking of the many black people that have lost their farmland.
The video from the awards ceremony is cited as proof of Sherrod’s racism, because it seems to show that a government employee discriminated a white farmer on the basis of race. The incident she was talking about took place in 1986 while she was working for a non-profit organization, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. She claimed later that she used this example to emphasize the fact that the situation made her realize a larger lesson, and she shared the story to explain to everyone that people are equal and should be treated in consequence, not regarding their race.
