Andrew Breitbart has another notch in his belt: the forced resignation of a black USDA appointee in Georgia who Breitbart has on tape addressing a local NAACP chapter earlier this year and seeming to admit that she didn’t give a white farmer all the help she could have because he was white. Or at least that’s the story you get from Brietbart’s Big Government and from Fox.
But that was enough for the Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to issue a statement condemning her remarks, and for the national NAACP to do the same.
But the Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed the woman, Shirley Sherrod, and if what she says is true, there’s a lot more to this story. She tells the paper that the incident she was recounting happened 24 years ago, before she worked for the USDA, that she went on to provide considerable assistance to the farmer, that she eventually became friends with the farmer and his wife, and that the whole point of retelling the story was to show how she had managed to move beyond race herself.
Sherrod is on CNN telling a similar version of events right now.
But none of that part of her speech is in the clip that Breitbart and Fox are running. We’re on the hunt for the full video. The local production company won’t release it to us without the sign off of the local NAACP chapter. But the guy who owns the production company confirmed to us over the phone that the entire video matches what Sherrod is saying.
I’m going to wait to pass judgment until I see the entire video. Maybe a lot of other people should have, too.
