To believe that racism has been eradicated from most of America, one also would have to believe that Dick Cheney found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Unfortunately, there are plenty who believe that discrimination, prejudice, and racism have been eradicated from the nation, especially since the American people elected a black man as their president a couple of years ago.

Then comes the case of Shirley Sherrod and her short tenure as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s point person in Georgia, the first black Georgian to hold the position and a point of pride for the organization she served for two decades, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund.

The federation’s objective is to improve the lives and standard of living of rural people all across the south. They do this by finding markets for farmers’ goods, by improving housing, by improving education, by guiding farmers through the government credit maze, and by teaching and organizing rural people to do for themselves the things that make life better.

That’s what Shirley Sherrod had been doing since 1985 for the federation, and she did it well. Ralph Paige, the federation’s executive director, said when Sherrod was appointed by the USDA a year ago, “There is probably no one in the state who understands the challenges faced by rural communities as well as Shirley. In fact, under her leadership and creative initiatives she has been instrumental in vastly increasing opportunities and income for farmers and rural communities.”

By now, everyone in America knows her story, but, just in case there are a few who don’t: She made a speech before the NAACP in which she described her near reluctance to help white farmers as strongly as she helped black farmers. But she came to realize that it was a question not of black and white, but of poor rural people against the powers arrayed against them - mostly for acquisition of the land they occupied. Right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart got hold of a video of the speech, edited it to his liking, and put up only the first part for Internet consumption, as if she were making a confession about something of which she is still guilty, instead of letting her reveal the epiphany that she underwent in her work for the federation.

Breitbart has taken the credit for destroying ACORN, when he doctored secretly-made video tapes of a fake prostitute and her pimp, asking for advice about how to conduct their business, as if that was the routine work of ACORN, one of the most effective organizing groups in minority and poor communities around the country.

That video, too, went viral on the Internet and resulted in the dissolution of the group into its constituent parts, when it survived at all. The group was the victim of the powers-that-be (even those masquerading as liberal), literally jumping to the tune of America’s right wing.

Sherrod’s resignation was virtually immediately demanded by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and she complied. Then, when it was discovered that the tape had been edited by Breitbart, for whom the truth is a stranger, there were apologies all around and there was talk of giving her, her job back, possibly even a promotion. So far, there has been no return to the USDA.

In all of the coverage, there has been little mention of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and why they have to do what they do. The federation and other similar groups have been working for decades to try to fill in the gaps created by the inability or unwillingness of the government at various levels to ensure that poor farmers, engaged in small-farm agriculture, can survive. This work has been in the face of extreme pressure for them to sell their land to developers and to food factories that raise chickens by the millions and hogs by the tens of thousands.

For the most part, big money won and hundreds of thousands of black farmers and thousands of other farmers have been forced to lose their farms. But, for black farmers, the failures of government - including the judiciary - have been the result of a culture of racism that existed all across the south for decades or even generations. In the past two decades, in an effort to remedy and compensate them for what was clearly discrimination and bias at the local level (and these were mostly white representatives of the USDA at the county level), black farmers brought a massive lawsuit against the USDA.

From the early 1990s, an effort was made to get a settlement and, in the late 1990s, the Clinton Administration, admitting to USDA’s routine bias, reached a settlement, but it was far from equitable, considering how much in debt many of the farmers were and how many farmers were left out of any settlement.

President Obama added an additional $1.15 billion to the federal budget to add to the settlement this year, but that money has been stripped out of the budget by those who want to know first where the feds will get the money. Once again, the remaining black farmers (many are now deceased) are in financial limbo.

This problem has been the result of what amounts to an extension of Jim Crow across the south, at least in the rural areas and it has continued right into the 1990s. A case could be made that there has been an attempt by some to extend the legacy of slavery and America’s shameful, long period of apartheid well into the 21st Century. It’s clear that this is not the case for most Americans, but it is for some and, unfortunately, many of the latter are not very powerful.

This is the context of the Sherrod story and her work in Georgia. These issues are not resolved and they won’t be solved so easily, despite the progress that has been made since the last great civil rights movement in the 1960s. Her case is proof of that. The fear of the right wing by a centrist president such as Obama is starkly clear. The Democrats stand equally in fear of the right-wing propaganda machine.

Even when the white farm couple, whose farm Shirley Sherrod saved, spoke so strongly in her defense, there was not much comment by Democrats in Congress or anywhere else in her defense against the Republicans and their right-wing counterparts. Roger Spooner, the white farmer, told CNN, there was “(n)o way in the world” that Sherrod was a racist, as charged by Brietbart and others.

The fearfulness displayed by the center and center-left elements of elected officialdom in the federal government was on grand display in the case of Shirley Sherrod, and we’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop - will another, better job be offered by Vilsack and would she take such an offer?

Village loses its mayor

In another recent case, the Village of Cobleskill in the Mohawk Valley of New York saw its mayor resign in the past week for a racially charged comment he made in reference to the “Change” (He said it meant, “Come help a nigger get elected.”) slogan President Barack Obama used during his election campaign.

Unfortunately for Mayor Mark Nadeau, another official, highway superintendent Tom Fissell, recorded the conversation and made it public. Fissell also recorded a conversation with another official, Cobleskill Town Supervisor, Tom Murray, and made that public. Both used the word “nigger” and were caught on tape.

The firestorm of protest and demands for resignations were surprising to some of the (overwhelmingly white) residents of the rural farming community. After several days, Nadeau resigned, but, as of this week, Murray had not.

In many ways, the outcry against the use of such language, especially by elected officials who exert considerable power even in a small community like Cobleskill, was heartening, but it shows how far we have to go in discussing the issue of race in America.

For a long time, the north was referred to as “up south” by many who actually experienced Jim Crow. And, those who live in the north need to understand what “up south” means, before taking a self-righteous attitude about race in America. No matter how much progress the nation has made since the mid-1960s, discrimination and racism continue to exist.

The response of the people was justified, but they missed an opportunity to bring the issue more clearly into focus. They could have used the incident to set up a wide-ranging village program to learn more about African-American history, Native American history, and being more tolerant and accepting of one another and our differences.

On the other hand, maybe the resignation of the mayor was lesson enough, for now.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

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