From Media Matters’ transcript of former USDA Official Shirley Sherrod‘s speech before the NAACP:
SHERROD: — you know. The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm. He took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me — I knew what he was doing.
AUDIENCE: All right.
SHERROD: But he had to come to me for help. 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 I was going to give him. 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. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he — I assumed that 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. So I took him to a white lawyer that we had — that had attended some of the training that we had provided ’cause Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer, so I figured if I’d take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.
So, apart from the racial dimension, this is the kind of thing that happens to me when I’m rude to someone at the DMV. If you’re nasty to someone who’s providing you a service, they’re not going to work as hard, particularly if they have something they know you really want. Obviously the race factor, and overcoming it, is a big part of the story, but this strikes me as a fairly common occurence in modern life.
