KYRA DAVIS: Shirley Sherrod & The Politics Of Distraction

Okay, I’m breaking form today. This blog post isn’t going to be about publishing or about a funny little incident from my personal life. Today I want to talk about this whole Shirley Sherrod mess. It affected me so deeply that I can’t NOT write about it. But I’m not going to write about how the White House over-reacted and now seems to be taking its cues from Fox News, I’ll let Fox New’s own Shepard Smith do that. I’m not going to go on about what a jerk Andrew Breitbart is, I’ll let the Washington Post’s Johnathan Capehart do that. And I’m not even going to go off on conservative pundits for not calling Breitbart out, I’ll let Bush’s former economic speech writer and conservative blogger David Frum do that.

What I want to talk about is that now, after we as a nation have managed to elect our first black president, race seems to be a more inflammatory issue than ever. Charges of racism and reverse racism (or, as I like to call it: racism) are everywhere. People who are trying to bring us together are being accused of being divisive and are fired, blackballed and ostracized. One sentence taken out of context from an 8 page speech given nine years ago is used as evidence to prove that our first Latina justice thinks Latina women are better than white men. Illegal immigration is presented as this country’s biggest problem. Now people are expressing fear over the Black Panthers, a group that hasn’t had any real power or influence since the 1970s. I mean really, the Black Panthers? And why have they come to our attention? Because two or three men who may or may not have been endorsed by that organization were making inflammatory and somewhat threatening statements two years ago outside a voting location? I’m no fan of the Black Panthers and I’m certainly against acting threatening anywhere near a voting booth, isolated incident or not, but if you’re going to be afraid of an African American group go to South Central and check out the black street gangs. They’re the ones who are actually killing people, not just threatening, and they’re the ones who still seem to have the power and influence to recruit young people into their organizations. But perhaps that’s not as newsworthy because the people they’re killing are usually other blacks which is horrible but it’s a problem that deals with one community hurting itself, not a community taking up arms and declaring war on other communities.

And we are being told we are at war. It’s a WAR AGAINST ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. A WAR AGAINST SOCIALISM, a WAR AGAINST THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA. Our actual war in Afghanistan is barely even mentioned these days which may be why we have a 4% increase in military enlistment and a 244% increase in domestic militia groups. Now we have a self-professed Neo Nazi militia group taking it upon themselves to be Arizona’s new “border watch”

And yet perhaps that’s not surprising when you consider what our headline stories have been lately. “Obama hates white people!” becomes the new battle cry. We’re led to believe that more and more illegal immigrants are going on killing sprees (despite all evidence to the contrary)! Muslims are building (gasp) Mosques! Right here in this very country as if they have a right to a place of worship like the rest of us! Imagine!

And the the ideological pundits and biased news shows are stoking the flames, reinforcing the same message over and over again: be afraid, be very afraid.

But here’s the thing. We’re already afraid. We’re afraid because our parents have lost a huge part of the retirement income it took them a lifetime to earn in the last 2 1/2 years. We’re scared because our sisters and brothers have lost their homes to foreclosures. We’re frightened because our friends who own small businesses are suddenly unable to get the loans necessary to run ANY business despite their good credit and may therefore lose everything they have. We’re terrified because so many of us have lost or think we might lose our jobs. We’re filled with anxiety because even the big corporations who are reporting sales increases aren’t hiring.

And instead of providing us with answers, instead of coming up with solutions that might alleviate our anxiety our leaders, politicians and much of our media are telling us that we need to be afraid of immigrants, the Black Panthers and racist Tea Partiers. The plan seems not to be to help us deal with the fears we have about real issues but to distract us by making us afraid of issues that really aren’t that big of a threat. You can hate the Black Panthers, you can dislike the new mosques that are being built, you can be anti-immigration but they still shouldn’t be the headline stories. We shouldn’t be feeding our fear with more, and frequently less logical, fears. We shouldn’t be so eager to accuse someone of racism that we’ll smear their reputation and take away their job before we even bother to get all the facts. We don’t need our leaders and our media to create new fears for us. It may help get certain individuals elected but it won’t improve our current hardships. It’ll just make them worse because we’ll all be taking our eyes off the ball. We’re spending so much time shaking our fists at each other we’ve forgotten how to be a proactive and productive society.

And the really horrible irony of all this is that if you spend enough time worrying about something that isn’t really a big problem it becomes a big problem. “New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts -- and often become even more attached to their beliefs” is the tagline used to sum up a recent University of Michigan research study. We’re like hypochondriacs who have given ourselves a psychosomatic illness. And while we’re trying to convince our doctors that our sniffles are really the result of the swine flu we’ve forgotten to ask him about the cancerous tumor in our neck that is quietly getting bigger.

I love my country and I don’t want us to self-destruct. I hope to God that we’ll take this Shirley Sherrod incident as a real learning experience. I hope we’ll begin to see that we’re fabricating problems rather than dealing with the very real ones we have.

We don’t have to live in fear, but it would be nice if we could live in reality.

Kyra Davis

Bestselling Author of:

The Sophie Katz Mystery Series
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So Much For My Happy Ending
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8 comments :

DruThursday, July 22, 2010 at 11:55:00 AM PDT
Well said.
Melame JenkinsThursday, July 22, 2010 at 12:17:00 PM PDT
So very true.
TNBThursday, July 22, 2010 at 3:24:00 PM PDT
I got chills!!!!! Thank you for voicing in your blog post the sentiments expressed in my household on a daily basis in a clear and concise manner!!!
kyradavisThursday, July 22, 2010 at 4:37:00 PM PDT
To be honest it's a relief to hear that the sentiments are being expressed elsewhere. Sometimes it feels like everyone is so obsessed with all the latest inflammatory headlines that they lose the ability to see the forest through the trees!
Social ButterflyFriday, July 23, 2010 at 6:28:00 AM PDT
this was great. I am a guest. Loved your post, because I feel basically the same way. I find that people actually thrive stupidity. When I 1st saw the clip, my first question was, why is she saying that?, what is this about?. I was smart enough to know that something else was missing. I too hope that people have awakened by now, because I have been awoke for some time and it is liberating. I think this will be my blog topic for today. Thank you. I will also like to post your link to this blog, b/c u said it all. you link will be posted at iamsocialbutterfly.com
Anne OsherowitzFriday, July 23, 2010 at 6:49:00 AM PDT
After reading your blog, I listened to the Shirley Sherrod speech in full. I found it riveting. What she said about the start of racism resonated with me so strongly. She spoke of indentured servants, both black and white, being slaves who were able to earn their freedom after 7 years of servitude. About how they didn't see the differences between each other, how they married and formed communities, and about how they began to notice the inequities between themselves, the poor, and the "others", the elite, the ones with money. And about how those, the elite reacted. She said:

"The people with money, the elite decided, we need to do something to divide them. That's when they made black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. It started working so well they said, ' gosh, it looks like we've come upon something that could last for generations.' And here we are, over 400 years later, and it's still working. What we have to do is to 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 they'll do what they need to do to keep that power."

This illustrates perfectly what is happening today. In order to keep their power, the elite are seeking to divide us, by color, nationality, religion, political leaning and whatever "us against them" feelings they can exploit so that we do not unite and fight together to solve the things that our wrong in this country.

There's so much more I'd like to say, but this is probably way too long already.
kyradavisFriday, July 23, 2010 at 2:41:00 PM PDT
Social Butterfly: I'm glad you're blogging about this and I'm glad you posted a link to this blog. People really need to stop and think about things from a different angle and stop the knee jerk emotional reactions.

Anne: I think there are definitely politicians who purposely work on dividing us in order to score points with one group or another and scare certain groups into voting for them by telling them that the other group will somehow make their life worse if the opponent those other folks are backing wins. Certain members of the "media" divide for the purpose of ratings. But I also think that regardless of how it started, racism is so ingrained at every economic level that even many of the elite don't realize that this is about division and not actual superiority of one group over another (whether that be moral superiority, intellectual superiority or religious superiority). Many of the elite really do believe that the illegal immigrants are coming to get them. They actually think that the black guy they saw looking their way in the drugstore wishes them harm. And when their stock portfolio loses much of its value they are even more likely to nurse their fears particularly if the cable news show they usually tune into tells them that their fears are justified.

Rich, poor, black, white, Muslim, Christian, we ALL need to calm down and reassess how we're behaving.
azusmomSunday, July 25, 2010 at 9:46:00 AM PDT
Just gonna ditto what you and everyone else here has said.