Who REALLY benefits from racism?

I feel like I've been so inundated with news stories that involve racism on some level (actual, alleged, utterly made up, etc.) every day for the last week or so, coming so quickly that I can't even process all of them.

There was the NAACP resolution calling on the Tea Party to distance itself from white supremacist language and imagery of some of its supporters, followed by the Tea Party Express head's farcical letter which pretty much proved the NAACP's point, and finally the Tea Party at large pushing the letter-writer out. There was the resoltion of the federal investigation of alleged voter intimidation by a member of the New Black Panther Party in 2008, followed by predictable freak-out by some on the right that the investigation didn't go far enough. Then today we have the news cycle-driven resignation of Shirley Sherrod from the USDA.

Andrew Breitbart (the guy who promoted the heavily manipulated ACORN pimp video) unearthed a video of Sherrod at an undated NAACP meeting appearing to brag about shorting a white farmer who was facing foreclosure. A certain "news" organization that perpetually pisses me off with its total inability to perform anything resembling actual journalism repeatedly aired the video and a series of screaming blonde heads decrying Sherrod's abuse of power. Sherrod was forced to resign.

(And - for the record - if Sherrod had in fact been admitting to discriminating against whites in her role as a federal offocial, she absolutely would have no business in her job. But that's not what happened. Not even close.)

I have a hard time respecting any "news" organization that takes any tip from a private citizen and publishes it in whole without asking basic questions like I was taught to do for my frakking 8th grade school paper. Questions like - does this information accurately reflect what was said, done, etc.? Does the person bringing this story to me have an ax to grind? Are we being fair?

For one thing, it might be relevant to mention that the incident Sherrod refers to happened in 1986, or, 23 years before she went to work for the USDA. So, what we're looking at here is most definitely NOT a federal official abusing her authority. I think it's fair to ask what Sherrod's track record has been with respect to discrimination during her time at the USDA, but I would think that would be pretty easy to determine if some enterprising reporter were willing to spend more time in dusty file rooms than calling around trying to find another underinformed talking head to fill another 10 miuntes of air time.

CNN did something crazy - they went and found the white farmer Sherrod was talking about and asked him for his side of the story. Radical, I know. He says that Sherrod's efforts saved his farm. "'I don't know what brought up the racist mess,' Roger Spooner told CNN's 'Rick's List.' 'They just want to stir up some trouble, it sounds to me in my opinion.'"

The moral of the story (and what Sherrod intented in recounting it to the NAACP) is that, while her initial reaction to a white man asking her for help was to blow him off, she realized that she was wrong. It took a great deal of courage to admit that to herself, not to mention to other people. It may surprise white people to know that black people don't universally love and trust us. And you know what? It doesn't really matter what Sherrod, or anyone else, feels in their heart. It matters what we DO.

And what too many in the media and in Washington did today was to fall for the false equivalency that one possibly racist black person (be it Sherrod or the NBPP guy arrested for standing while black in front of a polling place) magically cancels out the institutional racism that, yes, still exists and impacts black people every moment of every day.

In doing so, they ignored Sherrod's entire point - class divides us far more than race. The power elite in this country would love nothing more than for poor people of every race to continue distrusting one another, because that prevents the New Deal coalition from coming back together and demanding a government that serves working people, not the wealthiest five percent of our country. Poor whites have far more in common with poor blacks and Latinos than with those most-privileged whites, and there are people in our country working very hard to make sure we never figure that out.

And that's why, despite their feigned protestations to the contrary, those same people don't WANT a post-racial society. It's racism, and the suspicion of racism, that allows them to stay in power.