Sad And Mean

Working its way around the blogosphere today is this story:

A video was released by a Republican blogger of a black lady who works for the United States Department of Agriculture giving a speech to the NAACP (the Afro-American-interest U.S. civil rights organization). Her job at the USDA is to assist farmers in financial distress. In that speech, she talks about how, when assigned to help a white farmer, due to that farmer's race, she provided that farmer with less help than she would have if he had been black. The Republican blogger claimed that this was evidence of the racism that pervades the NAACP, to whom this lady was giving the speech.

The lady was forced to resign her job.

Now, it turns out that the excerpt of the speech in this video that shows this evidence of racism was part of a larger speech of redemption from her admitted racism: The event in question happened when she was working for a state agency, long before she was hired at the Department of Agriculture. She was using it as an example of how she overcame her own racism... a story of her redemption. (She eventually saw the error of her ways, worked with the white farmer to help save his farm for the next 2 years, and apparently is now considered a friend by that same farmer of whom she spoke.)

I always say that there are people out there who are paid to make you stupid. I should probably add that there are also people out there who are paid to make you scared, hateful, and bitter.