Here are some of the most striking quotations included in the article:
The first, oddly enough, from "entertainment attorney" and Huffington Post writer Miles Mogulescu:
There used to be a time when liberals, progressive and civil rights leaders stood up to right-wing bullies like Andrew Breitbart and Fox News, fighting back, sometimes even risking their lives. No more, it seems. Today these chickenshit liberals run for cover at the first sign of incoming fire from the rightwing media, abandoning fighters like Van Jones, thousands of poor anonymous ACORN members, and now Shirley Sherrod.
The second is a quite lengthy excerpt from Sherrod's speech itself, which of course was doctored by Breitbart to make Sherrod appear "racist":
You know, back in the late 17th and 18th century...there were Black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for seven years and get their freedom. And they didn't see any difference in each other--nobody worried about skin color. They married each other. You know, these were poor whites and poor Blacks in the same boat...
[T]hey were slaves, but they were both slaves, and both had their opportunity to work out of the slavery...They lived together. They were just like we would be. And they started looking at what was happening to them and decided we need to do something about it...Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them.
So that's when they made Black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding [whites and Blacks] to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And...it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we've come up on something here that can last generations.
And here we are. Over 400 years later, and it's still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us. The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power, and whether it's health care or whatever it is, they'll do what they need to do to keep that power.
Seems to me like a hearty condemnation of racism - in fact, it's probably the most accurate characterization of the function of racism as an ideology that most people are likely to hear in their lives. But what do I know? It's the twenty-first century and apparently the only racists in this country are those hangers-on who are stuck in the sixties and insisting on dated ideas like "social justice" and "equality." They're also apparently invariably people of color. They're the same people who declared war on Christmas and want to deprive heterosexuals of the right to marry.
Apparently Breitbart adduced his doctored video to support his claim that "some NAACP members condoned racism despite publicly opposing it" in retaliation to the latter organization's demand that Tea Party leaders "repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches."
Speaking of which, here's an excerpt from the mock letter from NAACP President Ben Jealous to Abraham Lincoln, written by Mark Williams, a man who, until he was recently expelled from the National Tea Party Federation for making these "clearly offensive" remarks, had appeared on CNN, NPR, and MSNBC as a spokesperson for the Tea Party movement:
We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People, and we demand that it stop...
The tea party position to "end the bailouts" for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare, and isn't that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bailouts directly to us coloreds...
Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government "stop raising our taxes." That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?...
Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.
Holy shit! That's really fucking racist. Nonetheless, he appeared on Geraldo At Large a few days later in a televised conference with the NAACP, the National Urban League, Rev. Al Sharpton and others, in which it was agreed that all parties need to "dial down the rancor" in order to find "common ground." But I have to disagree. And not because I'm on of these new "racists" who wants to foment bitterness, but because ... well, I don't think I need to say why. I endorse, rather, these remarks by Alain Badiou in a letter to Slavoj Zizek - published in the former's latest book, The Communist Hypothesis - which concern the effort among leftists to draw up the (historical, theoretical) balance sheet of the emancipatory politics of the past: "The discussion may be lively, and sometimes antagonistic, but it is amongst ourselves, and the rules of the discussion imply an absolute refusal to collaborate with the adversary's ranting."
