Shirley Sherrod was the virtually unknown Department of Agriculture official whose speech about how she didn’t give a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” to help him save his farm back in 1986 got her accused of reverse racism. The result was that Shirley, the daughter of a leader of the Civil Rights movement, was fired from her job, while the sinister Fox anchorman Bill O’Reilly grinned and gloated over the story on Fox ‘News’.
But the clip of the speech Fox used turned out to be an out-of-context snippet from a longer speech that was in fact a repudiation of racial bias. In short, Fox had been had by a right-wing ruse to demonise an innocent woman.
Shirley was offered a new job, Bill O’Reilly had to apologise on air, and Shirley received a 7-minute phonecall from the President himself. Sherrod behaved in an exemplary manner and beat the racists at their own game. Everyone happy now?
No, because the story doesn’t end there. Here (if you can bear it) is the unedited version of what O’Reilly said by way of apology. He used the old ‘No Smoke Without Fire’ approach to further demonise Sherrod. Actually, Bill, you needn’t have bothered. Short of wearing devil’s horns in the clip, you couldn’t have made yourself look any worse.
This story is still marching on, on extremely strong legs. CNN had 20 minutes on it last Sat. I had the sound off because A friend said they’d shown a bursting dam and I wanted to compare it to one we had in our province, but the on screen personalities seemed quite heated still.