Missing Pieces to Think About

The media discourse covering an event this week concerning the USDA firing an employee, Shirley Sherrod (former Director of Rural Development in Georgia), for “reverse racism”¹ and then apologetically offering to rehire her contains some missing pieces.  Some media is covering how the USDA did not fully investigate, but trusted the video clip especially edited by a conservative media individual, Andrew Breitbart to take the employee’s remarks out of context. The April 23, 2010 PBS show Need to Know broadcast featured a guest, Terence Samuel arguing that this series of events really showed how the USDA director was living in a past moment, expecting race to be about conflict not reconciliation, and that the outcome of the entire employee’s speech was really how Black women and White men have something in common in that moment (both facing the quick labeling for being “a racist”). To watch this discussion go to this link: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/video/need-to-know-july-23-2010/2465/ .  The situation was complex, but there are more tools of analysis to draw from in order to make sense of these events.  I use the concepts of hidden transcript and White privilege for more insights.   

The hidden transcript concept goes well with this. James C. Scott brilliantly writes of hidden and public transcripts in his body of publications (including Domination and the Arts of Resistance). To very simply explain, the hidden transcript consists of those words and actions done “behind the scenes” apart from bosses, or parents or powerful people as one strategy to deal with the frustration of being less powerful, less in control, taken advantage of, and oppressed.  Often the hidden transcript can blend over into the public at a moment’s notice.  Sherrod was speaking in front of an audience who she believed would take her comments as part of the struggle of African American people who have a unique history and present day experiences facing racism on a constant and consistent basis. Students discussing the topic of hidden and public transcripts in one of my classes brought out the way new media and technologies may broadcast the hidden transcript to those it was not intended and out of context. Similarly the edited version of Sherrod’s remarks makes the slice of the speech appear as even more like a hidden transcript (something kept within a group of people who have faced similar life events and social positions), for the complete contextual journey of this USDA employee was missing from the clip. This particular hidden transcript (along the lines of "White people do not need help") is theorizing about what academics and diversity trainings call White privilege.  Having lived in the Jim Crow South, Sherrod (at seventeen²) faced the murder of her father by a White farmer and the continual privileging of Whites over Blacks within an entire social system.  The great social distance between those families and individuals labeled by society as “White” and those labeled as “Black” compounded Sherrod’s belief that White people didn’t need any help, economically or socially.  The story she tells within the speech moves from describing a White privilege that is unitary and homogenous to looking at how poverty or a shared economic struggle makes a differential experience of White privilege. Even within a working class, however, there still may be social systemic rewards for being White, though poor.  Here I turn to another event of the week that the public spent little time discussing. This is an event that exemplifies White privilege.  Black farmers actually did face numerous acts of discrimination by the USDA and were part of a series of successful major lawsuits against the USDA. However, this week Congress denied to pay a recent monetary settlement that the courts ruled was due to these farmers.  bell hooks book, The Culture of Place, reminds us that the agrarian roots of African Americans deserve closer attention and, to take her point further, that the lack of attention of what happened in Congress this week regarding African Americans shows how much Black agrarian life continues to be dismissed in the mainstream. Another question to ask when thinking of privilege regards the number of African Americans employed at the USDA. The following questions also crossed my mind. Was the quickness of the USDA action due to the fact that the racism was allegedly against a White farmer?  Would there have been more deliberation and slower action if the alleged racism was against a Black farmer?

It does appear as if there was more deliberation and slower action for Black farmers this week.  As stated earlier and again here for emphasis, during the same week as the firing of Sherrod and the attempt to reverse the firing, Congress refused to pay Black farmers in a lengthy lawsuit for discrimination by the Agricultural Department branch of the USDA and also refused to pay Native royalty owners the share of their settlement after years of having their royalty money funneled back to the U.S. and not property managed by the Interior Department.  Jalonick & Evans (2010, July 23) in The Washington Post wrote the following about the USDA lawsuit:

For decades, minority farmers have complained of being shut out by local Agriculture offices, well after the days of blatant segregation. African-Americans, for example, complained that loan committees across the rural South were dominated by white "good ol' boys" networks that gave the vast majority of loans and disaster aid to whites while offering scraps to blacks.

 Little media discourse or conversation focused on this. The current state of the economy, the federal deficit, and the upcoming election worked to create this instance of institutional racism. (Shirley Sherrod had been part of one of these class action lawsuits as a winning plaintiff.  However, during the brief media frenzy, she becomes an instigator of racism not the survivor of systemic racism.)  Focus for this week was on Sherrod who was fired for an “imaginary” act of racism, an alleged act done before she became a government employee.

Not only the lack of coverage of the non-existent settlement money but other larger themes can be seen as more missing pieces.  Media and public interaction moves away from or sidesteps conversations about race as a continuing significant identity and category that shapes people’s lives, moves away from considering whole contexts of statements and subaltern voices and the concomitant hidden transcripts in favor of sound bites. Public and media voices move away from connecting history to the present day, as well as from building foundations for potential conversations about racism and classism and the continuing struggles of racially and socioeconomic diverse communities and Native Nations who actually faced many acts of racism and classism historically and face them in the present-day.  An exception to this would be on Face the Nation on April 25, 2010 including the guests Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West.  This link will take you to the show: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6712165n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

I hope this blog entry provides more input on thinking about last week’s events and future conversations on race.  The different missing pieces give us tools to think differently as David Pilgrim has said that we need to talk about race in a better manner and with better strategies.  Looking at hidden transcripts, entire contexts, histories, and nuances helps us toward that goal.

Notes

1. Reverse racism is a term that is very contentious, so I put it in quotation marks.
2. This was a very different experience recorded in the song “At Seventeen.”

References

Jalonick, M.C., & Evans, B. (2010, July 23). Despite Sherrod spotlight, black farmers denied. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072304584.html