By John Ballard
Rather than belabor the obvious, I want to cite three items for the record regarding Tuesday's tawdry events we might call Sherrod-gate.
Item #1 sets the stage and has nothing to do with what happened Tuesday. An insightful piece last week in the Boston Globe validates what effective leaders have always known: beliefs trump facts.
A high school smart ass once said "Don't confuse me with facts. My mind is already made up."
Facts don�t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
The aftermath of Sherrod-gate is a study in back-peddling and vain efforts to put poop back into an elephant. We live in an era when apologies are a dime a dozen. Well, some run to twenty billion dollars but you catch my drift. When the dust settles the final results do little to change the balance of power.
The post title notwithstanding I have no illusions that many real lessons will be learned.
Less than twenty-four hours later I find little in the way of consequence except these next two items.
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Item #2 is the revelation that Shirley Sherrod is one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement too modest to bring attention to herself. This CNN profile is worth keeping.
Because of discriminatory lending practices, black farmers were losing their farms in the late 1960s and '70s. After college, Sherrod co-founded New Communities Inc., a black communal farm project in Lee County, Georgia, that was modeled on kibbutzim in Israel. Local white farmers viciously opposed the 6,000-acre operation, accusing participants of being communists and occasionally firing shots at their buildings, Sherrod said.
"They did everything they could to fight us," she said.
When drought struck the South in the 1970s, the federal government promised to help New Communities through the Office of Economic Opportunity. But the money was routed through the state, led by segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox, and the local office of the Farmers Home Administration, whose white agent was in no hurry to write the checks, she said.
It took three years for New Communities to get an "emergency" loan, she said.
"By the time we got it, it was much too late," Sherrod said.
The operation hobbled along for a few years with other financing, but creditors ultimately foreclosed on the property in 1985, she said.
Getting money for any minority farmer out of that FmHA office "was always a fight," Sherrod said. But she made a point of learning the regulations so thoroughly that she understood them better than the bureau agent, she said.
"I was such a thorn in his side," she said, that the agent eventually left the bureau for good.
Using that experience, Sherrod worked with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to help black farmers keep their land. The group worked with U.S. Rep. Mike Espy, D-Mississippi (who later became agriculture secretary), and Sen. Wyche Fowler, D-Georgia, to pass the Minority Farmers Rights Act in 1990. The measure, known as Section 2501, authorized $10 million a year in technical assistance to black farmers, but only $2 million to $3 million a year has been distributed.
With black-owned farms heading toward extinction, Sherrod and other activists sued the USDA. In a consent decree, the USDA agreed to compensate black farmers who were victims of discrimination between January 1, 1981, and December 31, 1999. It was the largest civil rights settlement in history, with nearly $1 billion being paid to more than 16,000 victims. Legislation passed in 2008 will allow nearly 70,000 more potential claimants to qualify.
"I was deeply involved in all of that work and in the settlement, and in helping farmers to file their claims," she said. "So I was having to fight USDA just for the services, for the loans for farmers, for some of the programs that should have been automatic, that others were getting."
Was she the commanding general? A captain or lieutenant in command?
Likely not. She was the equivalent of an NCO.
But those are the heroes who make or break successful campaigns, whether military, political or social. And she clearly did solid good work and got results. This woman deserves any recognition she may get.
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Item #3 is a short commentary by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Read what he says in full, but pay particular attention to this.
...We have an administration that will contort itself to defend a movement whose convention speakers call for the reinstatement of the tools of segregation. That same administration will swiftly jettison an appointee, herself the victim of homegrown terrorism, for echoing the kind of message of redemption and personal responsibility that has become the president's hallmark on race. Andrew Breitbart says that Sherrod's speech, not the Tea Party's rhetoric, is the real racism. It is an argument that is as old as American white supremacy, and one that this administration, through its actions over the past week, has tacitly endorsed.
The argument has been made that this isn't Obama, just the people working under him. That theory elides the responsibility of leaders to set a tone. The tone that Obama has set, in regards to race, is to retreat with great velocity in the face of anything that can be defined as "racial." Granted, this has been politically smart. Also granted, Obama has done it with nuance. But it can not be expected that the president's subordinates will share that nuance.
More disturbingly, this is what happens when you treat the arrest of a black man, in his home, as something that can be fixed over beers. This is what happens when you silently assent to the notion that racism and its victims are somehow equally wrong. The ground, itself, is rigged with a narrative of inversion that goes back centuries. When you treat the two side as equals, expect not just more of the same. Expect worse.
In the short-run, it's easy to see the way out: apologize. Offer Shirley Sherrod her job back, whether she wants it or not. The long-run is much more fraught. I have long backed Obama's mixture of soft words and hard deeds on race. The point is that by targeting the broader demographic areas where black people are troubled, you can, at once, settle old business for black people while helping many more white people. Health care is the obvious model.
But words, too, have power and a strategy of falling back from the rhetoric of racists, while sometimes correct, is not definitive. There has to be some amount of courage, some understanding of the moment, to accompany the quiet strategy. I do not expect Barack Obama to condemn the Tea Party's racist elements, any more than I expect Ben Jealous to lead the war in Afghanistan. But I do not expect him, or his administration, to make the work of the NAACP harder, to contradict them for doing that which the administration can not. I do not expect them to minimize those elements, thus minimizing the NAACP's fight, and then accede, to people who are pulling from the darkest, vilest reaches of the American psyche.
On the great American scourge of racism, this administration must stand, sometimes publicly, for something. Failing that it will fall--indeed, already has fallen--for anything.
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In May I complained about two contemporary journalistic pathologies which are poisoning the information well from which most people drink. Simply stated they are
- A compulsive need to find and report anything dramatic and/or new and
- the problem of "balance"--the idea that reporters must give roughly equal space to two different "sides" of a controversy
The subject then was science reporting, but as Sherrod-gate illustrates the same two pathologies apply to almost any story.
I repeat here what I wrote in May regarding poor science reporting.
"All reporting is science reporting writ large. As this article fermented in my mind since I read it, it seems clear to me that the misinformation-machine is winning far too often. Not only in the realm of science, but history, politics, and social relationships of all kinds, especially regarding race, gender, faith and economic station in life. Urban myths become immortal in the cyber-cloud, putting out toxic fungus-like spores as viral emails and preachments from the lunatic fringe."
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