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Obama Administration Intimidated by Right on Race, Critics Say

1 year ago
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Bruce Drake
Bruce Drake
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The fallout from the Shirley Sherrod affair continued Sunday with a leading black commentator saying the Obama administration "has been intimidated by the far right wing," and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich blaming the Obama administration's "incompetence" in rushing to judgment on her for his initial description of her as a racist.
Sherrod, an African-American who had been the Georgia state director for rural development, was forced to quit after conservative gadfly Andrew Breitbart attacked her on his website -- it turned out incorrectly -- for a talk she gave to the NAACP where one part appeared to suggest she had failed to come to the aid of a white farmer. Breitbart cited it as a case of reverse racism and said he was using it as a counterpoint to the NAACP's accusation of racism in the Tea Party movement.
Sherrod said she was told the administration wanted her out because the story was going to be aired on conservative talk show host Glenn Beck's Fox News program. President Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to her and Vilsack offered her a new job after a full version of an NAACP video of her talk -- and the white farmer -- made clear that her remarks were taken out of context and that she had assisted him.
Michael Eric DysonMichael Eric Dyson, a sociology professor at Georgetown University who has written widely on racial matters, said on CBS' Face the Nation, "I think the unfortunate reality is that there's a kind of gag order imposed on the Obama White House when it comes to issues of race. There's an understandable lamentation among the Obama-ites that, look, we don't want to ... pigeonhole ourselves into the corner of race."
"We're not living in a post-racial era," he said. "The Obama administration has been intimidated by the far right wing, which is addicted to a kind of paranoia of race that then leads to paralyzing racial conversation, which means there's no word from the White House that's positive about the issue of race."
Appearing on the same show, Princeton professor Cornel West, another leading writer on racial affairs, said "what you have is you have a P.R. operation where the White House is reluctant to want to intervene in issues of race" and added, "I would say to my dear brother Barack Obama, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."
On Fox News Sunday, Gingrich said his initial statement on the administration's sacking of Sherrod – in which he excoriated her "kind of viciously racist attitude" -- had been made "in the context of a clip which had been validated by the secretary of agriculture who had fired her."
Calling the incident "one more example of the Obama administration's continuing incompetence," Gingrich said, "Clearly, when you look at the complete clip and when you look at the background information and when you listen to the white farmers say she had actually been very helpful, I think ... a fair case can be made that this administration acted with destructive irresponsibility in the way that they fired her."
Former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, appearing on the same show, turned his sights on Fox itself, saying, "I think Fox News did something that was absolutely racist" when it came to the Sherrod story.
Dean also decried what he said was Fox's focus on another racial controversy -- a 2008 voter-intimidation case involving members of the Black Panther Party that some conservatives say shows that the administration is not protecting the rights of white voters. Dean dismissed the story as "this phony Black Panther crap."
When Fox moderator Chris Wallace reminded Dean "that the Obama administration fired or forced Shirley Sherrod to quit before her name had ever been mentioned on Fox News Channel," Dean said the firing had been driven by the belief that the story "was about to go on (Fox's) Glenn Beck, which is what the administration was afraid of."
The voting case referred to by Dean involved Black Panther Party members and was in the news last week when J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer appointed during the Bush administration, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that voting section attorneys in the department "have refused outright to work on these sorts of cases, saying things such as, I didn't join the Justice Department to sue black people."
In the voting incident, which occurred on election day in 2008 in Philadelphia, two Black Panther Party members wearing military gear stood outside a polling place, prompting allegations that they were trying to discourage some people from voting.
Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative who was appointed to the commission by former President Bush and is vice-chairman, disputed Adams' allegations in an appearance on Face the Nation.
Thernstrom said of the case that the two had shown up in what was "largely black precinct" and that "we have no direct evidence that they actually intimidated anybody, stopped them from voting ... We certainly have no direct evidence that anybody in the Justice Department said, 'We're not going to prosecute this case because we have racial double standards, we protect blacks. we don't protect whites.'"
"I think is evidence is extremely weak" in the Philadelphia case, Thernstrom said.
Filed Under: Barack Obama, Race Issues, Obama Administration, Shirley Sherrod
Tagged: Abigail Thernstrom, Black Panthers, Blank Panther voter case, Cornel West, dailyguidance, Fox News, Howard Dean, J. Christian Adams, Michael Eric Dyson, Newt Gingrich, voter intimidation case
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