The State of Black Women in Politics Under the First Black President

Shirley Sherrod

On March 27, 2010, Shirley Sherrod, USDA’s Georgia Director of Rural Development, gave a 40-minute speech at a NAACP event. During the speech, she shared her background with the audience, including the murder of her father in 1965 by two white men who were never indicted. She continued by relating an anecdote from her time working as the Director of a non-profit that aided black farmers. She spoke frankly about how Roger Spooner, a white farmer, came to her for assistance and at first she was unenthusiastic about helping him, directing him to a white lawyer so it would at least appear that she tried to help. She then went on to explain that when the lawyer ultimately failed to assist Spooner, she called everyone she could think of to find someone who could help her with the case (this took place over the course of two years). Sherrod said working with Spooner taught her an important lesson and made her realize that class played as much a role as—if not more than—race in discrimination. She commented:

Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know. And they could be black, and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people—those who don’t have access the way others have.¹

Four months later on July 18, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a 2 minute and 38 second clip of Sherrod’s speech on his website, BigGovernment.com. Breitbart (also responsible for the edited videos that resulted in the anti-poverty group Acorn’s loss of government funding) edited his Sherrod tape so it sounded as though Sherrod ended her aid to Spooner when she sent him to the white lawyer because she wasn’t going to do all she could do for a white man. He also misrepresented the story as taking place while Sherrod was in her position at USDA. Breitbart used this doctored video, taken out of context, as proof that the NAACP—who had recently criticized the Tea Party, an extreme right wing movement, for racism among its followers—was itself a racist organization that approved of their guest speaker’s unfair treatment of a white man.

Breitbart posted his video at 11:18 AM on July 19, 2010.² In the following hours, FOX News ran the video, posting it online and calling for Sherrod’s immediate resignation. Conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly taped his show that afternoon, discussing the “news” revealed in the video. By the time it aired that evening, Sherrod had resigned after receiving three phone calls in her car from Cheryl Cook, Deputy Under Secretary at USDA. Sherrod said that on the third call, Cook asked her to pull over and submit her resignation via her Blackberry because Sherrod was going to be on Glenn Beck that evening.³ Even the NAACP didn’t pause to ask questions about the source of the video. That evening, President Ben Jealous said on Twitter, an online social forum, “Racism is about abuse of power. Sherrod had it at USDA. She abused a white farmer because of his race. NAACP is appalled.”³

By the next day, it became apparent that Sherrod had been wronged. In an interview with CNN, she explained that the story she told in the video took place 24 years ago and that she had worked with the Spooners to save their farm. When asked why she didn’t tell the USDA this when they called her, she said, “I did … but they, for some reason, the stuff that Fox and the Tea Party does is scaring the administration.”³ That evening, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said on CNN that she had listened to the entire tape and that it had been taken out of context. By Wednesday afternoon, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack apologized, admitting that he had acted too quickly in ordering Sherrod’s resignation. He asked her to return to USDA in a new position, but she demurred, saying she did not want to be entirely responsible for solving the department’s race problems (Vilsack later offered her a different, outreach position at the USDA, but she again declined, saying the events that led to her resignation left “a sour taste.”⁴) The NAACP also issued a statement saying that it had been “snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart.”³ President Obama called Sherrod on July 22, 2010 to personally apologize. President Obama said that he thought Vilsack was being sincere both in his apology and his job offer. In interviews, Sherrod had expressed her belief that she deserved a call from Obama, but did not think he owed her an apology. She remarked:

I’d like to talk to him a little bit about the experiences of people like me, people at the grass-roots level, people who live out there in rural America, people who live in the South…. I know he does not have that kind of experience. Let me help him a little bit with how we think, how we live, and the things that are happening.⁵

What Sherrod said here emphasizes a key issue that came into play in her forced resignation: Obama and his staff either lack the experience and point of view of African-Americans, or the courage to consider that experience and say anything about it. Despite his own racial background, the first African-American President seems to have little to say on matters regarding race, and fumbles every opportunity to provide leadership on the issue. In an op-ed column, Maureen Dowd suggested that anyone with knowledge of the civil rights movement would have recognized the name “Sherrod;” the Reverend Charles Sherrod was a civil rights leader who co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He is Shirley Sherrod’s husband. Dowd quoted South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, who said he didn’t think a single black person had been consulted before the decision to fire Sherrod was made, and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who said, “The President needs some advisers or friends who have a greater sense of the pulse of the African-American community, or who at least have been around the mulberry bush.”⁶

Sherrod’s forced resignation brings to mind Lani Guinier’s and Dr. Joycelyn Elders’ snubs by the Clinton administration. Sadly, years later, little has changed, even under America’s first black President. Granted, Obama was not directly responsible for Sherrod’s expulsion. He only spoke with Sherrod on Thursday, two days after the full story was revealed, because he could not reach her Wednesday evening. Nevertheless, by missing several opportunities to fill his administration with a balanced group of people who could provide key insight in real time, Obama suffers the appearance of being out of touch with his core constituency in political skirmishes that should be child’s play to any Democratic President, like why it might be unwise to so hastily dismiss someone based on a video publicized by a man who had previously used falsified evidence to support a Right Wing agenda. So who in Washington did come to Sherrod’s defense? Donna Brazile—a black woman. Perhaps if a few more black women were in decisive positions within the Obama administration, Shirley Sherrod could have been spared the shoddy treatment she received, and the only embarrassed parties would have been the pundits at Fox News.

But then throughout his campaign and administration, Obama has tried to avoid any discussion about race, creating the space for the right to not so subtly play on the country’s racist sentiments (who can forget Rush Limbaugh playing Barack the Magic Negro?). Bob Herbert wrote in a column about the Sherrod incident, “…President Obama seems reluctant to even utter the word black.”⁷ CNN political analyst Roland Martin discusses the Obama administration’s avoidance of race conversations in his blog post on Kagan’s nomination, saying, “…[Obama’s] White House has been especially scared of touching anything dealing with race,” because the President can’t be perceived to favor African-Americans.⁸ The fear is obvious when we look at how quickly Sherrod was pushed out of her job as a result of the accusations of racism from the conservative media. Said author and professor Ricky L. Jones, “If anything, [Obama’s] horribly detached, ‘I’m above it all’ approach to race emboldens the mean-spirited xenophobes who long for the ‘purity’ of antebellum America.”⁹ Again, the Sherrod case proves this point—were conservatives not so aware of the Obama administration’s reluctance to address race, would Breitbart have made such an impudent move? In her column, Dowd said:

The President appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. At some level, he acts like the election was enough; he shouldn’t have to deal with race further. But he does.¹⁰

The President proved Dowd’s point when he commented on Sherrod’s forced resignation in a speech he gave at the National Urban League Centennial Conference on July 29, 2010. He agreed that people should have frank discussions about “…the divides that still exist—the discrimination that’s still out there, the prejudices that still hold us back…”,¹¹ but he says these discussions should happen “…not on cable TV, not just through a bunch of academic symposia or fancy commissions or panels, not through political posturing, but around kitchen tables, and water coolers, and church basements, and in our schools, and with our kids all across the country.” At water coolers and kitchen tables? So apparently Americans should talk about race, and the President may do so as well, but not in public forums? And when it comes to healing the 400+ year racial divide, and addressing the increasingly racist fever demonstrated by the extreme right, leadership, particularly by this country’s first African-American President, is not required.

The White House may not want Obama to be seen as favoring African-Americans, but he neglects them at his political peril because it was African-Americans, and especially African-American women, who helped to elect Obama to the White House. There is no doubt that we want him to succeed. Even after the unfair treatment Sherrod received from the administration, she said, “We love him. We want him to be successful because we feel he thinks in some ways like we do.”¹² Black leaders have tread softly in their criticism of Obama, fearing condemnation from their supporters and the White House, said Martin, but with Kagan’s appointment and then Sherrod’s dismissal, the feelings of love and the hesitation to criticize the President may be subsiding. The Black Women’s Roundtable voiced their disappointment with Obama for once again overlooking qualified black women in his Supreme Court nomination choice. Sherrod, while professing her wish for the President’s success, voiced her opinion on his lack of understanding of the experience of black women (“people like me”).¹³ If Obama is not ready to address his “Black Woman problem,”¹⁴ as freelance journalist Jeff Winbush calls it, by showing them some of the love they’ve given him, the least he could do is acknowledge the racism that clearly still exists in America, even under a black President, and demonstrate leadership on the issue of racism at the national level.

1. Shirley Sherrod, “Address at the Georgia NAACP 20th Annual Freedom Fund Banquet,” American Rhetoric.com, 27 March 2010. [↩]
2.  “Timeline of Breitbart’s Sherrod Smear,” Media Matters for America, 22 July 2010. [↩]
3. Media Matters for America. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
4. Krissah Thompson, “Shirley Sherrod Turns Down USDA Job After Video Controversy,” The Washington Post, 24 August 2010. [↩]
5. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Shaila Dewan, and Brian Stelter, “With Apology, Fired Official is Offered a New Job,” The New York Times, July 21, 2010. [↩]
6. Maureen Dowd, “You’ll Never Believe What This White House is Missing,” The New York Times, 24 July 2010.  [↩]
7. Bob Herbert, “Thrown to the Wolves,” The New York Times, 23 July 2010. [↩]
8. Roland Martin, “The Delicate Dance Between Obama and Black Leaders,” RolandSMatin.com, 14 May 2010. [↩]
9. Ricky L. Jones, “What Changes if Republicans Win?” Leo Weekly, 18 August 2010, 10. [↩]
10. Dowd. [↩]
11. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Education Reform at the National Urban League Centennial Conference,” WhiteHouse.gov, 29 July 2010. [↩]
12. Frederick Cosby, “Obama Calls Shirley Sherrod, Apologizes for Firing,” BlackAmericaWeb.com, 23 July 2010. [↩]
13. Stolberg. [↩]
14. Jeff Winbush, “Barack’s Black Woman Problem,” The Domino Theory, 22 July 2010. [↩]