Shirley Sherrod’s speech to the NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet is a moving testimony to the importance of rising above the interests of tribe and kind in order to help all people in need. That she should have been fired because it was clipped and trumpeted on the conservative noise machine is a sad testimony to the hypersensitivity not only of the Obama Administration but also of the NAACP to charges of reverse racial prejudice. Sherrod will doubtless be offered her job back, and I hope she takes it. Even more, I hope the video will be seen by lots and lots of white people fearful that people of color will use their ascendancy to get even. This is how black people in organizations like the NAACP actually talk among themselves.

Back in 1993, I did a story for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on how African-American farmers across the South had for decades been screwed out of USDA loans by the (all-white) loan boards. I traveled to Dewy Rose (birthplace of Ty Cobb) to interview a black farmer who was a case in point, and who earned particular disfavor for having been a leader in the local NAACP. So I am more than sympathetic to Sherrod’s initial lack of enthusiasm for helping her white farmer get relief. And more than impressed at how she was able to overcome it.