Too Quick to Blame the NAACP?????

The criticism of the NAACP is well-deserved.  One, it shows that there is a lack of experience at the helm.  Julian Bond would have or should have known better the moment the name Sherrod and Georgia were mentioned in the same breath.  Two, even without the name, the NAACP should have known that something from its own Web site was not racist!!!  (At least it is my understanding that Breirbart got the clip from the NAACP Web site.)    It was the NAACP that legitimized the story!  More senior movement people have had a long history with racist lies.  The right wing lies about everything, including centuries of murder and of which Mrs. Sherrod's father was a victim of.  If there were a vibrant black press as during The Movement days, the NAACP would not have been operating in such a vacuum. 

Having laid much of the blame at the feet of the NAACP, pardon the cliche but hindsight is 20/20.  Below Rochelle Riley of the Detroit Free Press raises all of the right questions.  Even so, there is a propaganda war out there that the NAACP dediced to take on.  They challenged the racists to root out the racists in their ranks.  The NAACP was asking them to commit suicide.  The racists had to defend themselves.  They defended themselves by attacking the NAACP at its soul contenenacing anti-white discrimination!!!   What the NAACP was prepared for was to reject "reverse racism" in its ranks.  What it was not prepared for was for Fox News, a news organization, to LIE!!!   Distort, yes.  But LIE!!!  And have every news source repeat that lie.  

By the time the NAAC P got the story it was  9 hours old.  It had been ruminating since about 11:00a.  The story of thei USDA official committimng reverse discrimination was all over the blogosphrere. Given the repugnance of the lie, the inexperienced NAACP leadship got "snookered."    They didn't understand that the whole purpose of Fox News is to lie -- it is no exaggeration that we should be reminded  of the ability of the Third Reich to construct reality, or the press of the Jim Crow South.  Racist realities remain hegemonic.  Fox News is the propaganda arm for America's white nationalism. 

Media Matters gets it right when they say that Fox News is the "Wille Hortonization of the Presidency"   It was Roger Ailes who injected the Willie Horton commercial into the Bush-Dukakis campaign in 1988.  Now Ailes has a cable network to use to stoke the flames of white resentment and promote his white nationalist views. This smear is at the feet of Fox News.  At 9:11p NAACP issued its denounciation of Mrs. Sherrod in response to this 9:04p. report. RGN

9:04 p.m.: "Fox News Alert": Hannity reports that Sherrod has resigned and discusses the incident with Gingrich. On his Fox News program, Sean Hannity reported that Sherrod "resigned just a short time ago after she was caught on tape appearing to tell an audience that she had used her position to racially discriminate against white farmers." Hannity then aired Breitbart's "shocking video." In a later segment, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich stated: "Secretary Vilsack did exactly the right thing. I mean I often disagree with this administration. But firing her after that kind of viciously racist attitude was exactly the right thing to do." Hannity later stated: "My only thing is they weren't the ones that caught it. It was on Breitbart.com and it happened some time ago. So it's interesting that it took the new media to expose this." (accessed via Nexis)


Posted: July 23, 2010
Shirley Sherrod, Fox, NAACP, USDA and Obama

BY ROCHELLE RILEY
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

"Working with him made me see that it's really  about those who have versus those who haven't. They could be black, they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to help poor people -- those who don't have access the way others have."
-- Shirley Sherrod

When the news broke Monday that a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee was fired for being a racist, I wondered just what she had called her co-worker or client or supervisor.

When the venerable NAACP repudiated her, I figured she must have slapped somebody. Then came the news Tuesday that Shirley Sherrod not only was not a racist, but had shared with an audience her "Come to Jesus" moment, the moment she realized racism was wrong.

But this is where the story stopped me in my tracks: NAACP President Ben Jealous released a statement Tuesday saying his organization had been "snookered by Fox News and tea party activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias."

Huh?
A strange sequence Sherrod was fired after Fox Entertainment (it's not news) posted an edited video clip of Sherrod  from a conservative activist. In the clip, Sherrod says she took a white farmer to a white lawyer
so he could be helped by his own kind. But she went on to say something that you didn't see on the activist's site or on Fox:

"Working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who haven't. They could be black, they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to help poor people -- those who don't have access the way others have."

The family whose farm Sherrod eventually helped to save appeared on CNN to defend her.

So here's my question: A tea party activist posts 2 minutes and 38 seconds of a 43-minute speech.
Fox runs the video.  The NAACP watches Fox. The Obama administration reacts to the NAACP.  The USDA tells Sherrod to resign. ...

Oh, yeah ... the question: What the heck is wrong with the NAACP?

For full video of speech see Shirley Sherrod link to left.