Thank you, Lord Saletan
Dude is not exactly my favorite person, but he’s done a Good Thing. And now I don’t have to do it, which makes me happy because I’m in a bad mood anyway.
Here’s the deal: one of the things that’s been annoying the living fuck out of me about the Sherrod business is the wingnut claim that the NAACP people in the video laugh and cheer at racial discriminination. No, they don’t. It’s a weird upside-down kind of world where you can watch a video in which people clearly do not laugh and cheer, and still come away saying ooh look, they laughed and cheered! What the fuck?
So Lord Saletan has done exactly what I was getting ready to do, which is parse the goddamn video (since apparently people can’t be relied on to simply watch the thing; no, we have to provide a blow-by-blow narrative of the action):
Breitbart’s followers have parroted this indictment in messages to numerous media outlets, including National Review and Slate. But is it true? Let’s look at the video. The key section starts around 16 minutes in. I’ll quote the speech and describe the reactions from the audience, to the extent I can discern them. You can check my version by listening to the audio as you follow along. Here’s Sherrod:
When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people, and to black people only. [Pause. Silence.] But, you know, God will show you things, and He’ll put things in your path so that—that you realize that the struggle [Audience: Alright] is really about poor people. [Audience: Alright, alright.]
Racial appeal met with silence; non-racial appeal met with approval. Sherrod’s next words:
You know, the first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he—he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. [Audience: Alright. Murmurs.] I know what he was doing. [Audience: Alright.] But he had come to me for help. [Audience: Amen.] What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. [Laughter.]
The audience seems sympathetic to Sherrod’s resentment of the farmer’s arrogance, as she perceived it. How should we interpret the laughter? Is it laughter at her power to withhold help from a white man? Or is it laughter at her power to withhold help from a guy with an attitude? The evidence so far suggests the latter: The audience has embraced an appeal for “poor people,” shunned an appeal for “black people only,” and given Sherrod her only Amen when she noted that despite the farmer’s attitude, “he had come to me for help.” But let’s keep listening.
I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. [Audience: Mm-hm.] So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. [Sherrod smiles and pauses. There's a single staccato noise somewhere in the room. No words, no laughter.] I did enough so that when he—I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. [Pause. Silence.]
This time, Sherrod has mentioned only the farmer’s race, not his attitude. She delivers the crucial line—”So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do”—with a smile and a wry tone that invites any racist to laugh or blurt out approval. But she gets nothing. I had to listen to this clip more than a dozen times before I realized that the “applause” Breitbart describes could only be the staccato noise. To interpret this as applause, you would have to believe that a single person, representing an otherwise silent audience, suddenly decided to change the congregation’s language of affirmation from call-and-response to clapping—and just as suddenly, after a single stroke, decided to stop.
As Sherrod renounces her old attitude, the audience comes alive:
Well, working with him made me see [Audience: Mm-hm] that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t [Audience: That's right, that's right], you know. And they could be black, and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people—those who don’t have access [Audience: Mm-hm] the way others have [Audience: Mm-hm].
So, let’s review the Breitbart gang’s allegations:
When … she expresses a discriminatory attitude towards white people, the audience responds with applause. False.
The NAACP … is cheering on a person describing a white person as the other. False.
The NAACP audience seemed to have approved of her actions when she talked about not helping the white farmer. False.
They weren’t cheering redemption; they were cheering discrimination. False.
As Ms. Sherrod recounted the first part of her parable, how she declined to do everything she could for the farmer because of his race, the audience responded in approval. False.First Breitbart and his acolytes falsely accused Sherrod of discriminating against whites as a federal employee, despite having no evidence for this charge in the original video excerpt. Strike one.
Then they misrepresented Sherrod’s story as an embrace of racism, when in fact she was repudiating racism. They later pleaded ignorance of this fact because they didn’t have the full video. Strike two.
Now, with the full video in hand and posted on their Web site, they’re lying about the reaction of the NAACP audience.
I’ll add one other thing, which I daresay is outside Lord Saletan’s experience. The part where the NAACP audience laughs? What they’re laughing at is the kind of anecdote all black people and all feminists know very well: the sexist/racist white guy who needs your help but can’t resist trying to show how much better he is than you. I personally think the NAACP audience is laughing in recognition of the situation and Sherrod’s very human response (“how much do I want to help this schmuck?”).
Not that I suppose any of this really matters. Andrew Breitbart is a white supremacist hoaxer, and he’s going to keep right on with his lying bullshit.
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Update: You know what else Andrew Breitbart is? Not anonymous. Yeah. He’s totally, completely, not anonymous. Everybody knows his name. His whole media empire is named after himself. So why in the fuck did CNN use the Sherrod hoax as an excuse to complain about “anonymous bloggers” who do terrible things like this?
6 Responses to “Thank you, Lord Saletan”
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lambert strether says:
Surely our “progressives” have behaved just as badly as Breitbart?
Since they’ve made the story all about racism, when in fact the real story is that Sherrod comes to see its about rich vs. poor?
July 24th, 2010 at 9:06 pm EST -
Violet Socks says:
I think they’re complicit, but no, if we’re plotting things on the evil meter, I would still put Breitbart’s role here on the far end. He’s the one who deliberately tried to pass off a hoax.
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myiq2xu says:
It bears repeating that Sherrod wasn’t talking about something recent – she was talking about an incident that took place a quarter of a century ago.
Even if one were to find her actions then were racist, aren’t we supposed to applaud enlightenment?
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funnie says:
Stabbing somebody in the chest without provocation is pretty obviously worse than trampling over the wounded person in a craven, cowardly stampede to abandon her.
Unless, of course, you weigh your own agenda and your political complaints against the tramplers as heavily as you weigh Sherrod’s right not to get stabbed. Then I suppose stabbing and trampling do start to seem equivalent.
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Swannie says:
Flinging terms of racist and white supremacist back and forth obscures the real political contest , I think… I do think both Breitbart and Obama bit off more than they could chew with Shirley. She was probably texting her lawyer , and CNN within five minutes of texting her resignation. I am glad she knows her way around the legal system and the media .
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Joshua Simeon Narins says:
I would guess that the attack on anonymous bloggers was anti-wikileaks.
