Some of my black blogging brethren have gotten so twisted up in knots about this Shirley Sherrod fiasco THAT SHE OBVIOUSLY BROUGHT ABOUT HERSELF that I believe the logic section of their brains have been deprived of oxygen.
Because in spite of the incontrovertible facts that surround the origin of this mess, which was birthed from the same template of social domination racially obsessed white men have been using since our black asses were dragged off of those slave ships, this has morphed into GOP Jedi Mind Trick #17,642, wherein the attacker and his cohorts succeed in getting the public to indict a third party for failing to properly address a controversy they have manufactured all by themselves in their dank right wing lairs.
However you feel about the president's response, or lack thereof, IS relevant, but it is not the main event. Not even close. Blaming Obama for this mess, or the NAACP for this mess, is like blaming Martin Luther King Jr. for getting in the way of that bullet that James Earl Ray’s rifle fired.
It is like blaming the slaves for not coming to their masters aid and helping them to win the Civil War.
It is like blaming the African captives who died on those slave ships - the ones that brought many of our ancestors here - for depriving the slave traders of their rightful profits.
To the silly rabbits out there, and you know who you are, TRICKS ARE FOR KIDS.
Shirley Sherrod has a platform this week that it looks like she is trying to take advantage of to advance OUR cause, but many of you are already afraid that she will talk too much.
That she will lose her moral authority, or her claim to victimhood, or some other such nonsense, because she is not willing to comport herself as if she is bucking for a promotion for the executive suite at the tight ass corporation YOU work for, instead of being what she is – a sixty something year old black woman who was probably only a couple of years away from retirement in her old job, a level headed woman of at least average intelligence who is availing herself of the chance to tell it like it is, unfiltered, unbought and unbossed.
Two days of one lone voice in the wilderness is too much?
Are you so ready to see Mr. Charlie back in charge, because that looks normal, because that feels RIGHT, that you are willing to trade Mrs. Sherrod's hearfelt, unpolished candor for the very same vitriol you got last week and the week before that from a TV station that should lose its FCC license, or at the very least, the ability to call itself a news channel?
Some of you are on my blogroll.
Some of you are my friends - at least the internet version of friends.
What I want to remind all of you of is something many of us used to say back in grade school, when we first began to learn about slavery, or watched Roots, or got to hold real live slave shackles in our hands.
“I couldn’t have been a slave” was a favorite. “I woulda had to kill me some white folks” was another. “You wouldn’ta caught me picking no damn cotton” was another.
But the ugly truth is, practically all of us with slave ancestry are descended from people who didn’t kill anybody. Dead black people don’t propagate, an equation white slave owners bent on quelling the hot blood of insurrectionists knew all too well.
And yet here we are, fighting against the exact same forces of evil, in a venue where we run no risk of being maimed or mauled or killed for taking it to our enemy electronically with each and every keystroke, and all I see is the same type of “woulda coulda shoulda” folks doing the same thing now that they would have done in the 1800’s – doing the master’s dirty work for him.
One other sentiment I started to see is the old “we don’t need to get these white folks riled up” meme.
Why not?
Even the slaves, in as inhuman a position of deference as they were, understood that there was only so far their masters were willing to go. That they were too valuable to lose in large masses, just like our black asses are too valuable to America today to have all 44 million of us vamoose into thin air.
Very few men, even race crazed white men and the puppets on their payrolls, are willing to burn down their own house while they are in it.
It doesn’t take much to put puppets like the FOX News goon squad and the Andrew Breitbart’s and Michelle Malkin’s and all the rest of the right wing tools who are willing to prostitute themselves unconditionally to satisfy the crazy race fetishes of very, very rich men on their heels. We have put them on their heels before, and we can do it again.
All I will say is, the last time we decided to make Mr. Charlie and HIS rich masters take two steps back, and grudgingly recognize in us African Americans another half-measure of humanity, we didn’t waste any time trying to convince each other that Martin Luther King was guilty for stepping in front of that bullet on purpose in 1968.
We kept our eyes squarely locked on our enemy, met him toe to toe, and let the unedited tapes of our enemy’s unchecked depravity speak the truth to the world.
