Shirley Sherrod and Roger Spooner, the farmer whose land she saved from foreclosure
There’s a lot to say about this week’s Shirley Sherrod fiasco, in which a federal employee was asked to resign because of slurs promoted by a right-wing blogger. Here are my two cents:
Watching the (real!) video of Ms. Sherrod’s presentation to the Georgia NAACP, it’s clear that she’s speaking to “family.” Her description of the trials Black farmers faced in the mid-to-late 1900s is met with affirmation. (Sherrod’s own trials included the murder of her father by a white farmer.) People nod, relating to her, as Sherrod describes the conflict she felt when, after pledging to work with black farmers, she is approached by a white man who (a) seems to look down on her, but (b) expects her to help him anyway. Her audience clearly knows what this feels like, and has no trouble recognizing that her story is one of spiritual growth. It’s as if Sherrod is recounting her pain, her struggle and the lessons she learned to friends around her kitchen table.
White people of good will can learn a lot from this video. We rarely have an opportunity to hear the unfiltered stories our black friends tell each other; how can we, when our very presence in the room changes the social dynamic? (If you doubt that this happens, think about how conversations among women change when even one man is present, or vice versa.) Much as we may want to understand how other groups experience the world, that information can be hard to come by — harder than many of us want to believe.
“Know (and respect) your audience” is the first rule of good public speaking, and Sherrod certainly nailed that requirement. She spoke to her audience with unadorned power, elevating their common experience. Her presentation was candid and clear, and just right for the context in which it was delivered. The videotape of her remarks was then “edited” (falsified) to foment controversy; but often, such fancy footwork isn’t even necessary. All you have to do is take “kitchen table talk” out of its original context to make it (and the person who speaks it) sound “extreme.” In this case, people who’ve never been black in the rural south were SHOCKED, SHOCKED by comments and home truths that were completely unexceptional to Shirley Sherrod’s audience.
Well, guess what: Sherrod wasn’t talking to them! If she was, she’d have said things differently.
