This is an exchange between Fox and Friends Co-Hosts Alisyn Camerota and Steve Doocy on Shirley Sherrod, the day before Andrew Breitbart's truncated video clip was revealed to have shown the opposite of what actually occurred:
Camerota: She admits there that because the farmer was white, she doesn't extend her full helping hand to him, and she's touting this in this anecdote "touting this in this anecdote as though this is, you know, a feather in her cap, somehow, for her to be congratulated. I mean it's really a shocking admission. ... Perhaps everyone needs a refresher course on what racism looks like, I mean that is...
Doocy: Exhibit A!
Camerota: Exhibit A! and to do it so publicly and as though she was proud of her actions.
Camerota and Doocy were saying this about a woman who grew up in a county in Georgia where a white sheriff could admit to murdering a black man and get away with it, where the authorities refused to indict her father's murderer because he was white and her father was black. This is whom FOX thinks needs a "refresher course" on what racism looks like."
These people are so desperate to be victims, it's palpable. And it's not just that they're desperate to be victims, they're desperate to cast themselves as the "true" victims of racial discrimination. When you consider the larger context of the USDA paying billions in settlement money for decades of systemic discrimination against black farmers, the absolute depravity of this moral inversion becomes evident. Yes, someone needs a refresher course on what racism looks like. But it isn't Shirley Sherrod.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has written about this, and Taylor Branch wrote about something similar about the Civil Rights era in 2008:
More than once, the dominant culture has turned history upside down to make itself feel comfortable. And when a civil rights movement rose from the fringe of maids and sharecroppers, making it no longer respectable to defend racial segregation, wounded voices adapted again to curse government as the agent of general calamity. We have painted Dr. King's era as a time of aimless, unbridled license, with hippies running amok.
FOX's singular focus on so-called reverse racism is but the latest iteration of this inversion of history, responding not to the racial shame provoked by a people demanding recognition of their rights and dignity but the political interest in weakening a president who happens to be black. But the deliberate attempt to reverse the historical roles so completely -- the NAACP are the "real racists" -- is the self-implicating fingerprint. When you try to photoshop yourself into the March on Washington, the only ones who won't notice are the ones who desperately want to believe you.
