Shirley Sherrod's Firing/Rehiring: USDA's Latest Chapter in a History of Racial Missteps
In the bizarre firing and then rehiring of Shirley Sherrod, USDA secretary Tom Vilsack unwittingly cast himself as the nervous, guilt-ridden white guy who proves himself to be totally unskilled in dealing with issues of race. Which, given the USDA's history of racial strife, is not all that surprising.
On Monday, after the media jumped all over an irresistible story about a black USDA official supposedly caught on video talking about how she refused to help a farmer because he was white, Vilsack appears to have panicked. He immediately fired Sherrod, Georgia's state rural development director, without going to the trouble of asking her about the incident or dispatching a staff member to watch the whole video.
Of course, it turned out that in the misleading portion of video posted on BigGovernment.com, Sherrod had merely been relaying an anecdote about how she learned to overcome racial discrimination.
Vilack's reaction might have been different if he were not running an agency that's been accused of racial discrimination more than a few times before. Some 74,000 black farmers have sued the department for a pattern of denying blacks access to loans and other assistance through the federal farm program. In February, the USDA reached a settlement and agreed to pay the farmers more than $1 billion.
In announcing the settlement, Vilsack acknowledged that the USDA screwed up and that black farmers often lost their land or plunged into debt after being denied loans routinely awarded to white farmers. He called the whole thing a "sordid chapter" for the department.
On Wednesday, he followed that up in his press conference to apologize for Sherrod's firing, saying "I am very sensitive to the civil rights issues facing this department."
Maybe a little too sensitive, although Vilsack clearly comes off as sincere and well-meaning.
But here's where the story gets complicated. One of those aggrieved African American farmers is none other than Shirley Sherrod. In the 60's, she started a farm group with several other farm families. This group, New Communities, later sued the USDA and was awarded a $13 million settlement, with Sherrod and her husband getting $300,000 for "pain and suffering." And that money happened to be awarded, according to an account on Ruraldevelopment.org, just days before she got the USDA job in July 2009.
It's unclear whether Vilsack knew about this when he decided to fire Sherrod. Did he watch the video and conclude that her beef with the USDA had hardened her into the sort of black person who discriminates against white people? If so, it's understandable why Sherrod might not want her job back.
FoxNews.com and conservative blogs are trying to make hay of the fact that Sherrod got a huge settlement and nice government job around the same time. But such conspiratorial suggestions don't make much sense.
What would the USDA be buying through awarding Sherrod a job, except maybe some appeasement of guilt? They'd already agreed to pay out $13 million and the larger $1 billion was in the works. And Sherrod wasn't exactly given an elevated position in the department. Besides, if she was the sort of person to trade political favors, wouldn't she be clamoring for that new job Vilsack is offering?
Image by Flckr user g-hat
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