Two Minutes in Georgia

The most obvious aspect of the Shirley Sherrod affair is its shabbiness. How many minutes do you spare before deciding to destroy nfl throwback jerseys
someone’s life? It would be nice if the answer to that question were a number greater than two. In March, Sherrod, the director of rural development for the Department of Agriculture in Georgia, gave a speech at a local N.A.A.C.P. Dinner. It was about forty-three minutes long. A few days ago, Andrew Breitbart posted and publicized a clip from the speech. (Who is Andrew Breitbart? See Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker Profile for more on that.) The clip was two minutes—long enough for N.A.A.C.P. officials to condemn her, and for frightened Department of Agriculture officials to call Sherrod on her cell phone and demand that she resign. She says that the final call came when she was driving, and that she was told to pull over and end her career before she even got where she was going. The entire speech is nfl jerseys
worth watching in whole, and not just for the sake of making sense of a political and media mess. Sherrod talks about how, as a seventeen-year-old in rural Georgia, in 1965, she dreamed of getting off the farm and out of the South, but after her father was murdered (by a white man, she says), leaving her mother with a newborn, she decided to stay; about how a case involving another relative, who was lynched, wound up before the Supreme Court; and about how little racial differences should matter: “It’s sad that we don’t have a room of white and blacks here tonight.” She also evangelizes a little for careers in agriculture.

But maybe forty-three minutes is too long to sit still. The anecdote that has been the subject of all the yelling—the one that got Sherrod accused of being a racist, although it never should have—runs from about 15:50 to 21:25 in the video above, or five and a half minutes. After what’s happened in the last few days, she’s owed that much of people’s time.

It’s not just a matter of quotes being taken out of football jersey
context (although there is that). The two-minute clip Breitbart ran is introduced with this text: “Ms Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position, overseeing a billion dollars… She discriminates against people due to their race.” And here’s Breitbart’s description of the action: