Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Sherrod, Obama, and Preemptive Surrender

Waving the white flag.
Shirley Sherrod, Barack Obama,
And the policy of preemptive surrender

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2010

In one week of the Sherrod Saga, America recapitulated the whole history of racism since the Civil War. Even more than that, the whole story was another episode in a broader practice of the Obama Administration: repeated preemptive surrenders to the Big Powers of American corporate institutions. And the policy of preemptive surrender is rooted partly in a mistaken wandering of the President himself from what began as a deep spiritual search for how to unify his Kansas and his Kenya.

The saga began with a Black family that was uppity. It began organizing Black farmers and then white farmers too, just as Black folk freed from slavery had done during Reconstruction. Then came the lynching -- this time, through words and firing, rather than nooses and burnings. At first -- just as when the Ku Klux Klan broke up Black efforts to end Jim Crow and win the right to vote -- America applauded the Klan. (Compare the public response to the pro-Klan film, The Birth of a Nation.)

But then, as there was in the '60s, there was a reawakening of decency and truth. Late in the week, most of the country recognized that the TV lynching by a white-collar Klansman was unjust, untruthful, indecent. And so the institutions– -- the media, the White House, apologized.

Many commentators have explored how the rotting but unburied corpse of racism came to zombie life during that week. But there was more than racism involved. The whole episode -- the way in which the Department of Agriculture and the White House joined in the lynching -- echoed a pattern of behavior of the Obama Administration that includes issues that are not issues of race.

The pattern is preemptive surrender. Preemptive surrender to Fox News. Preemptive surrender to Big Pharma and Big Health Insurance in the run-up to the Health Care bill, when in secret conferences in the White House they were promised there would be no public option, even before the Congress began to debate it.

Preemptive surrender to Big Oil, when the president tried to buy its support for a weak climate bill by opening the Atlantic and Gulf coasts to more oil well drilling. Even when the catastrophic oil gusher produced by BP's arrogance and greed began to poison an entire region of America -- not even then did the president decide to forbid all new offshore drilling. It took a month of tragedy before even a temporary moratorium was placed upon such outrageous raping of Mother Earth.

Preemptive surrender to Wall Street, not only by focusing the great bailout on the biggest banks and ignoring small community banks and credit unions, but also by refusing to use the federal government's new ownership stake in the Wall Street banks to force massive changes in their lending practices or in their bonuses to chief executives.

Preemptive surrender to the auto companies, where the president went out of his way to say that the federal government's role in saving them would not be used to insist that they move into producing massive numbers of green autos, or into a great shift toward public transportation like the great shift the government demanded from automobiles to tanks at the start of World War II.

Preemptive surrender to Big Army, when the president gave in to generals who insisted they could rebuild Afghan society at the point of bayonets and the trajectory of Predator drones -- rather than paying attention to the history of imperial failures in the Afghan hills for the last two millennia, or even paying attention to wise counsel from Vice President Biden and Ambassador/General Eikenberry to restrict the U.S. military to the narrow task of counter-terrorism. In the guise of refusing to "surrender" to the Taliban, surrendering to clever stupidity -- to the top-down, brass-heavy, brain-dead pieces of the military. To ignoring all the needs of a civilian society that is being eaten alive by the cancer of a militarized empire.

In every case, the President and his Administration kowtowed to the biggest, greediest, and most incompetent institutions in the American economy. Instead of going day after day, week after week, to the American people as Franklin Roosevelt did in the crisis of 1933, the president begged permission from these arrogant institutions to make weak changes in American policy.

So what happened to Shirley Sherrod, as it happened before to Van Jones, is not unique, is no surprise. In this case, Fox News played the same role as Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Banking, the Army. And the Obama administration played the same role in response: preemptive surrender.

Why has this been the Obama administration's habitual response? The political reasons are obvious; the Bigs have Big power, and fighting them is hard. But there are also personal reasons.

At the personal level, Mr. Obama is meeting a deep personal need that grows from a great spiritual seeking. He is himself, as he has often said, the product of both Kansas and Kenya. Throughout his life, he has sought to reconcile these two polarities within himself.

At one level, these two sources of his beginning indeed seem to be polar opposites: conventional middle-class white America, symbolically the heartland of America in time and space -- as opposed to a desperately poor third world country that symbolically represents the other half of the human race.

So Mr. Obama seems to be constantly seeking to reconcile and connect these two realities. A praiseworthy path.

But in office, he has kept reaching to reconcile his liberal and progressive base -- the labor unions, the Black community, and the compassionate women who seek to heal poverty and despair in America and the world -- with Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Banking, Big Army.

But Big Coal is not Kansas, and it is not Kenya. Big Banking is not Kansas, and it is not Kenya. Big Oil is not Kansas, and it is not Kenya. Wall Street is not Kansas, and it is not Kenya. The military-industrial complex is not Kansas, and it is not Kenya.

For Kansas and Kenya share one profound alikeness: they are both at the grassroots of their very different aspects of the world. Bringing the two of them into a synthesis, a coalition, a unity means meeting the needs of the grassroots of the world.

But Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Wall Street, Big Army, are not the grassroots of the world. Mr. Obama's valid spiritual search for unity has carried him off on the wrong path.

The Sherrod fiasco shows how wrong that path can be. Shirley Sherrod and her husband Rev. Charles Sherrod really are the synthesis of Kansas and Kenya, though they were both born, grew up, and have all their lives worked and struggled in the American South.

I met Charles Sherrod in 1963. Nobody called him Charles, or Charlie or Chuck: he was always simply "Sherrod.” He was one of the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, on the front lines of the civil rights struggle in the South.

Like several other SNCC activists, he came for several months to the Institute for Policy Studies, then a very new Washington center for progressive thought and action where I was a Fellow. They came to us for time to breathe, share, and reflect, after months or years of intense and harrowing work in the South.

We arranged a seminar for Members of Congress to meet Sherrod and learn from him what was happening in the South -- specifically in the town of Albany (pronounced "All-Benny") in southwest Georgia, where he had been working. About a dozen Members of Congress came.

Sherrod began by telling the story of Albany almost like an observer, a reporter. Then, as he began explaining the role of the Black church there, his tone slowly shifted and he morphed into the Black minister that he was, giving a passionate sermon in the Black church in Albany.

The sermon was hair-raising. Transformative.

The members of Congress had never heard anything like it. I had never heard anything like it. They and I went from that seminar shaken to our core. I think it was one of the subterranean moments that prepared me for 1968, when Passover came shortly after the murder of Dr. King, to become a serious and impassioned Jew. It was one of the moments that moved Members of Congress toward much stronger support for much stronger civil-rights action.

Unlike almost all of the other SNCC activists, Sherrod stayed in the very same community where he was organizing -- stayed in Southwest Georgia, committed to the very same people and the very same region. He has been there ever since.

Later in the 1960s (as Freedom Summer activist Barbara Bloomfield has recalled), he and Shirley were involved in creating a cooperative of Black farmers in Georgia. At one time, the co-op owned 6,000 acres of land, and sustained itself by selling produce and livestock. Like all small farming operations, it needed assistance at the start of the season, and since the Depression, the US Department of Agriculture has allotted money to help small farmers -- but its agents actively, intentionally, maliciously failed to help Black farmers.

The co-op that the Sherrods were involved in, New Communities, died because of that discrimination. The land was lost and is now a suburban tract.

It took two decades longer -- till the victorious Pigford lawsuit in the 1990s -- for the Sherrods and others to prove a systematic pattern of USDA discrimination against Black farmers in the South. A settlement of millions of dollars with the USDA was reached in the late 1990s and then was augmented after the Obama administration took office.

Both Sherrods are rooted in the deepest kind of religious faith. The work she has for years been doing -- to empower and strengthen the Black farmers of Southwest Georgia -- and, it turns out, to empower white farmers too -- is rooted in the best and deepest nonviolent traditions of SNCC.

So it was utterly predictable -- and commensurately disgusting-- that some right-wing TV version of a Klansman would attempt to smear and ruin her.

It is horrifying -- much less predictable -- that the leadership of the NAACP would let themselves, as they themselves named it, be "snookered” by a right-wing broadcaster from Fox News. What on earth possessed their national leadership to react -- especially knowing what they must know about Fox News -- without even calling her or the local Georgia chapter where she gave the speech that was so brutally distorted?

And it is equally horrifying -- though unfortunately somewhat more predictable -- that the Obama administration would react as it did, with a preemptive surrender to Fox News.

Beneath the issue of racism resurrected like a zombie, beneath the issue of preemptive surrender to powerful right-wing forces, beneath the issue of craven "liberal" journalists racing to catch up and parrot the latest right-wing smear, beneath the issue of Obama's spiritual search turned sour -- is the issue of simple decency.

No broadcaster with one hand on a microphone should be slandering someone without checking the facts. without even bothering to call her and ask for comment.

No official, no boss, should be firing a worker on the basis of brutal accusations without once speaking to her.

No "leader of the free world" or his close cabal of sycophants should be conniving in such a machination.

Yes, we can take some heart from the fact that the Department of Agriculture, the White House, the NAACP, and even Fox News have apologized. Their apologies this past week recapitulated what the American President and Congress seemed to do in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, when he ended his speech to Congress by saying "We shall overcome!" and when the Congress did pass the law. Their apologies this past week recapitulated what the American people seemed to do to "apologize" for more than three centuries of slavery and racism by electing Obama.

But were those old apologies real? Are the new set of apologies serious? Do they go beyond offering Sherrod a job, to reexamining the whole practice of preemptive surrender to the right-wing power centers? The Sherrods and the others who brought their bodies and minds and souls to move American beyond racism have been called the "veterans of hope." Do the apologies to Shirley Sherrod mean that the new activists of hope in the present, not the past, the ones scattered all across American trying to renew democracy against the depredations of the various Bigs -- will they be heard, supported, encouraged?

For the whole series of events last week makes clear that the spirit of SNCC and New Communities ought not be dead in the land, that the work that both Sherrods have done in their extraordinary lives is not yet finished.

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is the director of The Shalom Center, and the author of twenty-some books on religious thought and action and on American public policy, including From Race Riot to Sit-in and Godwrestling -- Round 2.]

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Tom Hayden : Sherrod, Obama, and the Strength of Roots

Charles Sherrod and Carl Braden (a civil rights legend, along with his wife Anne), in 1963. Photo from Wisconsin Historical Images.

Collective amnesia

The media have been silent about Shirley Sherrod's husband, Charles Sherrod, a real hero to many of us in the '60s for his key role as a leader in SNCC in building an INTER-RACIAL civil rights movement. Charlie left SNCC when Stokely Carmichael took it over, expelled white folks, and adopted "black power" as its ideology, in order to continue building a black-and-white movement in Georgia. The notion that Charlie's wife could have been guilty of what's being called "reverse racism" against whites is therefore doubly ludicrous. Some of us who knew Charlie back when, however, haven't forgotten his shining example.

-- Doug Ireland / The Rag Blog

Remembering the struggle in rural Georgia:
Sherrod, Obama, and the strength of roots

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2010

See 'Using Race to Smear Obama,' by Eugene Robinson, Below.

How would members of the Obama administration have reacted to racist pressure from the Deep South in the early 60s? Would they have fired Justice Department civil rights monitors who antagonized hard-line segregationists?

For those of us with long memories, this is one of the key questions posed by the firing of Shirley Sherrod in a fit of official overreaction to the shameful right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart. It is true that the administration reversed course quickly after the true story was revealed, but that the Obama administration can be spooked so easily by Glenn Beck and FOX News raises a serious question: if they are so tough on national defense, drugs, and crime, where is their resolve against the deceitful attack dogs of the right?

My introduction to virulent southern racism came in 1961 when I ventured to Albany, Georgia, first to write an article about the Deep South organizing done by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, second, to become a freedom rider on a train to Albany that December.

It was then I met, and came to admire, a brave young civil rights worker named Charles Sherrod, whom everyone in the movement simply called “Sherrod.” Albany was a segregated town near Plains, Georgia, and the home of Hamilton Jordan who went on to become Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff. Sherrod was the kind of front-line young militant who eventually brought about the New South of Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore, among others. Sherrod had to face violence, and the possibility of death, every day in his effort to mobilize young people and their parents against the suffocation of fear.

Shirley Sherrod (Center) with Charles Sherrod (to her left) at the Charles Sherrod Civil Rights Park in Albany, Georgia in 2006. Photo from Rural Development.
Sherrod, and his equally committed wife Shirley, made a conscious decision to stay in rural Georgia long after the voting rights laws were passed and the national media departed. I left Albany after my two brief and harrowing experiences in 1961, and never returned until I spoke at a commemoration of the Albany civil rights movement a few years ago. The Sherrods were still there. She was engaged in programs supporting rural farmers, while he had served on the city council and was a minister in a nearby state prison. There were 500 people at the event, the stalwarts of the past.

So Shirley Sherrod’s life cannot be reduced by a dishonest and amoral right-wing blogger into a few seconds of videotape 25 years old. She is one of many thousands who had the force of character to face racist abuse, and seemingly immovable state power, when they were demonized and disenfranchised. They were the trees standing by the water, and they would not be moved. They tried to bring their morality to politics, not accept the politics of Machiavelli.

Our leaders today could learn from this strength of long ago. In fairness, government officials and leaders of large organizations, who are beneficiaries of the Southern civil rights legacy, have institutional reputations to protect. They should avoid needlessly provoking the right, and have every right to pick their fights intelligently.

But years of battering from the right have bred a defensive anxiety in the ranks of too many Democratic liberals. They flinch before they fight. It’s almost as if they internalize the right-wing refrain that they are weak, tea-sipping elitists. They give far greater consideration to conservatives, militarists, and bankers who rarely vote for them than to the millions of activists in social movements who actually made their power possible.

This is a moment when roots should be remembered, recovered from oblivion and venerated, not airbrushed out of history and polished resumes.

[A political activist for more than four decades, Tom Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center. A founder of SDS and a former California State Senator, Hayden is the author of The Long Sixties (Paradigm, 2009).]

Image by Lance Page / truthout; Adapted by Christian Haugen / webtreats.

Using race to smear Obama

By Eugene Robinson / July 22, 2010

WASHINGTON -- After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there's no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African-Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.

A few of the purveyors of this bigoted nonsense might actually believe it. Most of them, however, are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation's first African-American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down.

Sherrod, until Monday an official with the Department of Agriculture, was supposed to be mere collateral damage. Andrew Breitbart, a smarmy provocateur who often speaks at tea party rallies, posted on his website a video snippet of a speech that Sherrod, who is African-American, gave to a NAACP meeting earlier this year. In it, Sherrod seemed to boast of having withheld from a white farmer some measure of aid that she would have given to a black farmer.

It looked like a clear case of black racism in action. Within hours, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had forced her to resign. The NAACP, under attack from the right for having denounced racism in the tea party movement, issued a statement blasting Sherrod and condemning her attitude as unacceptable.

But Breitbart had overstepped. The full video of Sherrod's speech showed she wasn't bragging about being a racist, she was telling what amounted to a parable about prejudice and reconciliation. For one thing, the incident happened in 1986 when she was working for a nonprofit, long before she joined the Obama administration. For another, she helped that white man and his family save their farm, and they became friends. Through him, she said, she learned to look past race toward our common humanity.

Shirley Sherrod, then a former board member of the Farmers Legal Action Group (flag), with husband Charles and retiring board member Betty Bailey, were honored at a FLAG dinner in 2009. Photo from Agricultural Law.
In effect, she was telling the story of America's struggle with race, but with the roles reversed. For hundreds of years, black people were enslaved, oppressed and discriminated against by whites -- until the civil rights movement gave us all a path toward redemption.

With the Obama presidency, though, has come a flurry of charges -- from the likes of Breitbart but also from more substantial conservative figures -- about alleged incidences of racial discrimination against whites by blacks and other minorities. Recall, for example, the way Obama's critics had a fit when he offered an opinion about the confrontation between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a white police officer. Remember the over-the-top reaction when it was learned that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had once talked about how being a "wise Latina" might affect her thinking.

Newt Gingrich called Sotomayor a racist. He was lightning-quick to call Sherrod a racist, too. I'd suggest that the former House speaker consider switching to decaf, but I think he knows exactly what he's doing.

These allegations of anti-white racism are being deliberately hyped and exaggerated because they are designed to make whites fearful. It won't work with most people, of course, but it works with some -- enough, perhaps, to help erode Obama's political standing and damage his party's prospects at the polls.

Before Sherrod, the cause célèbre of the "You Must Fear Obama" campaign involved something called the New Black Panther Party. Never heard of it? That's because it's a tiny group that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of its few members. Also in the alternate reality of Fox News: One of the network's hosts has devoted more than three hours of air time in recent weeks to the grave threat posed by the NBPP. Actually, I suspect that this excess is at least partly an attempt by a relatively obscure anchor to boost her own notoriety.

The Sherrod case has fully exposed the right-wing campaign to use racial fear to destroy Obama's presidency, and I hope the effect is to finally stiffen some spines in the administration. The way to deal with bullies is to confront them, not run away. Yet Sherrod was fired before even being allowed to tell her side of the story.

She said the official who carried out the execution explained that she had to resign immediately because the story was going to be on Glenn Beck's show that evening. Ironically, Beck was the only Fox host who, upon hearing the rest of Sherrod's speech, promptly called for her to be reinstated. On Wednesday, Vilsack offered to rehire her.

Shirley Sherrod stuck to her principles and stood her ground. I hope the White House learns a lesson.

[Eugene Robinson's e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.]

(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group

Source / Truthout

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