Ms. Sherrod was done a disservice in having her comments edited in a fashion that did not represent what she was trying to say. Yes, but it is also not a wise thing to go before the NAACP to offer a confessional about how one has evolved from seeing oppression in terms of white culpability, to understanding it in terms of the culpability of those “who have.” In other words, the role of minor federal agricultural officials is not confessionals to lobbying organizations about the unfairness of present American culture. One is free to do it, but one is almost asking to be quoted out of context in doing so. (The antithesis would be something like a border-dwelling federal official, who had lost a relative to Mexican smugglers, speaking before a zealous close-the-borders, mostly white group about how he came to no longer see the problem in terms of brown people, but now largely in terms of poor people, white and brown alike. Now that would be an insane thing to do, and a Republican administration, battling selectively edited videos on the Daily Kos and Huffington Post, would have fired him.
