Transcript at bottom of this post

I got this via Gwen, at Sociological Images, who says that:

Peter N. sent in an image that illustrates the social construction of race. He visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, and took a photo of a plaque on the wall that reprinted information published in the Johannesburg-based newspaper The Star on March 21, 1986. The article reported on changes in the official racial classification of over 1,000 South Africans in 1985.

For some reason the whole thing puts me in mind of Phila’s flea’s waltz:

Now, let’s put aside all this foolishness, and consider the delicate science of flea-training, as set forth by a nineteenth-century adept:

They are placed in a reversed position to each other – one looking one way, the other another way. Thus tied, they are placed in a sort of arena on the top of the musical box; at one end of the box sits an orchestra composed of fleas, each tied to its seat, and having the resemblance of some musical instrument tied on the foremost of their legs.

The box is made to play, the exhibitor touches each of the musicians with a bit of stick, and they all begin waving their hands about, as performing an elaborate piece of music. The fleas tied to the gold paper feel the jarring of the box below them, and begin to run round and round as fast as their little legs will carry them.

This is called the Flea’s Waltz.

You see why, don’t you?

Transcript of image below:

1985 had at least 1000 ”chameleons”

Political staff

PARLIAMENT – More than 1000 people officially changed colour last year.

They were reclassified from one race group to another by the stroke of a Government pen.

Details of what is dubbed “the chameleon dance” were given in reply to Opposition questions in Parliament.

The Minister of Horne Affairs, Mr Sluffel Bolha, disclosed that during 1985:

- 702 coloured people turned white.

- I9 whites became coloured

- One Indian became white,

- Three Chinese became white.

- 50 Indians became coloured.

- 43 coloureds became Indians.

- 21 Indians became Malay.

- 30 Malays went Indlan.

- 249 blacks became coloured.

- 20 coloureds became black

Two blacks became ‘other Asians’

One black was classified Griqua

I I coloureds became Chinese,

Three coloureds went Malay.

One Chinese became coloured

Eight Malays became coloured.

Three blacks were classed as Malay.

No blacks became white and no whites became black

The Star, 21 March, 1986

It’s frustrating sometimes. Conservatives spent years filling the airwaves with so much pro-Republican, pro-conservative claptrap and going on so many attacks against anyone who attacked one of them, and going on counter-attacks against liberals that the media is fearful of even breathing on the rightwing the wrong way.

We, apparently, are going to spend years filling the airwaves with so much anti-Democrat claptrap and going on so many attacks against Obama, the administration, the Democratic Senate and House that the media will wet itself with joy that *they* don’t have to do it, just quote “the left”, and so there is still no fear of anyone breathing on the rightwing the wrong way. And certainly no fear of retribution for attacking Democrats – heck, isn’t everyone doing it?

From Media Matters: Following are Sherrod’s remarks at the March 27 NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet (the section in bold is what Breitbart’s video included — the rest was omitted):

***********************************************************

[11:50] SHERROD: I made the commitment on the night of my father’s death at the age of 17 that I would not leave the South, that I would stay in the South and devote my life to working for change. And I’ve been true to that commitment all of these 45 years.
[...]

[16:34] SHERROD: God is good. I can tell you that. When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people — and to black people only. But you know God will show you things and he’ll put things in your path so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people –

AUDIENCE: All right. All right.

SHERROD: — you know. The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm. He took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me — I knew what he was doing.

AUDIENCE: All right.

SHERROD: But he had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he — I assumed that the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me; either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture — and he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. So I took him to a white lawyer that we had — that had attended some of the training that we had provided ’cause Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer, so I figured if I’d take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.

That’s when it was revealed to me that y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white — it is about white and black, but it’s not — you know, it opened my eyes, ’cause I took him to one of his own and I put him in his hands, and said, OK, I’ve done my job. But, during that time, we would have these injunctions against the Department of Agriculture and — so, they couldn’t foreclose on him. And I want you to know that the county supervisor had done something to him that I have not seen yet that they’ve done to any other farmer, black or white. And what they did to him caused him to not be able to file Chapter 12 bankruptcy.

So, everything was going along fine — I’m thinking he’s being taken care of by the white lawyer, then they lift the injunction against USDA in May of ’87 for two weeks and he was one of 13 farmers in Georgia who received a foreclosure notice. He called me. I said, well, go on and make an appointment at the lawyer. Let me know when it is and I’ll meet you there.

So we met at the lawyer’s office on the day they had given him. And this lawyer sat there — he had been paying this lawyer, y’all. That’s what got me. He had been paying the lawyer since November, and this was May. And the lawyer sat there and looked at him and said, “Well, y’all are getting old. Why don’t you just let the farm go?” I could not believe he said that, so I said to the lawyer — I told him, I can’t believe you said that. I said: It’s obvious to me that he cannot file a Chapter 12 bankruptcy to stop this foreclose, you have to file an 11. And the lawyer said to me, I’ll do whatever you say — whatever you think — that’s the way he put it. But he’s paying him. He wasn’t paying me any money. You know, so he said — the lawyer said he would work on it.

And then, about seven days before that man would have been sold at the courthouse steps, the farmer called me and said the lawyer wasn’t doing anything. And that’s when I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think so to try to see — help me find the lawyer who would handle this. And finally, I remembered that I had gone to see one just 40 miles away in Americus with the black farmers. So, I –

[VIDEO CUT*]

SHERROD: Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t.

AUDIENCE: That’s right.

SHERROD: You know, and they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don’t have access the way others have.

I want to just share something with you and I think it helps to — you know, when I learned this, I’m like, oh, my goodness. You know, back in the late 17th and 18th century, black — there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for seven years and get their freedom. And they didn’t see any difference in each other — nobody worried about skin color. They married each other. You know, these were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat, except they were slaves, but they were both slaves and both had their opportunity to work out on the slavery.

But then they started looking at the injustices that they faced and started then trying — you know, the people with money — you know, they started — the poor whites and poor blacks — they — you know, they married each other. They lived together. They were just like we would be. And they started looking at what was happening to them and decided we need to do something about it — you know, about this. Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them.

So that’s when they made black people servants for life. That’s when the put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That’s when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they — it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we’ve come up on something here that can last generations — and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it’s still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us.

The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it’s health care or whatever it is, they’ll do what they need to do to keep that power.

[APPLAUSE]

[...]

[25:03] SHERROD: I couldn’t say 45 years ago, I couldn’t stand here and say what I’m saying — what I will say to you tonight. Like I told, God helped me to see that its not just about black people, it’s about poor people. And I’ve come a long way. I knew that I couldn’t live with hate, you know. As my mother has said to so many, if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we’d probably be dead now.

But I’ve come to realize that we have to work together and — you know, it’s sad that we don’t have a room full of white and blacks here tonight ’cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point as Tony Morrison said race exists but it doesn’t matter. We have to work just as hard — I know it’s — you know, that division is still here, but our communities are not going to thrive — you know, our children won’t have the communities that they need to be able to stay in and live in and have a good life if we can’t figure this out, you all. White people, black people, Hispanic people, we all have to do our part to make our communities a safe place, a healthy place, a good environment.
*********************************************************

* According to Jake Tapper, “NAACP says the tape was changed at the 21:00 mark. no edits, just a tape change.”

I think I’m just a little too old to believe in that many coincidences.

Anyway, though…

Apparently when others were piling on Shirley Sherrod yesterday, or running away from her, Lizardoids and Johnson consistently stood up for her, without even knowing what the rest of the story was. They just knew Breitbart and his tactics and what a liar he is (my addition) and figured there WAS a rest of the story.

Cole seems to think they were just about the only ones, but I am not sure about that – I didn’t hear about any of this until this morning, so most of the (non-right wing) reactions I’ve found are to the proven Breitbart lies.

One thing I didn’t know, brought out by one of LGF’s commenters, teh mantis, last night:

The whole story is BS. Brietbart has conveniently edited out the context of this story, but he forgot one crucial detail. Notice where she says that the story took place just after Chapter 12 bankruptcy was established for family farms? Andrew really should have edited that out. You know why? Chapter 12 was so established in 1986. What was Shirley Sherrod doing in 1986? She was running the New Communities black farm coop in Georgia. She was not employed by the government in any way. Some white farmer called a black coop looking for help. She helped him, but not as much as she “could” if, you know, he were a black farmer and thus would have some interest in the coop. They also gave farmers help restructuring their loans and whatnot, so she referred him to a lawyer who could help him, despite his condescending attitude.

I should also note that the her coop and the associate RDLN recently won a $1 billion+ settlement for black farmers after they were systematically denied loans provided to white farmers in the early eighties, complements of Ronnie Reagan (Pigford v. Glickman). But we all know it was those black farmers banding together in their cooperative farming blackness that are the real racists.

I don’t know why this story hit me so badly. I guess because this woman could be any one of the older Black women I know, have known - the ones who have toiled for years, taken all the spit, all the insults, all the sexism, all the racism, all the people refusing to stand by them, all the comments about being “welfare queens”, or “lazy” or having 10 kids, and all the suspicious glances when *anything* at all goes wrong, and working daily with the knowledge that should something major go wrong, it’s likely you’ll be the first gone, last rehired  – and to get through all of that to a place where you are looked up to, where you are doing good, where are where you deserve to be because you paid your dues - only to have some lying cretin with a history of targeting relatively powerless Black folks swoop down and blithely pull everything you’ve worked for away from you in the effort to get that guy, over there…

Shame. Shame on Breitbart, his supporters, the dissiminators of this nonsense, limp pickle Vilsack and the Obama admin, too, if they don’t restore this woman’s life.

The full video and transcript, at TPM

TPM (emphasis mine)

Shirley Sherrod, an appointee to the USDA, was forced to resign yesterday after Big Government posted a video of a speech Sherrod gave in March. In the video, Sherrod, who is black, recounts how, 24 years ago, she didn’t help a white farmer as much as she could.

In the speech, given to a local Georgia chapter of the NAACP, Sherrod recounts a time when, while she was working for a land assistance fund, a white farmer came and asked her for help.

“What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,” she said. “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”

[...]

But Sherrod told first to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and then CNN that her comments were taken out of context. She says that the anecdote was part of a larger story, one in which she explains how she overcame her initial prejudice.”The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it’s about the people who have and the people who don’t. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race,” she told the AJC, adding that she went on to help other white farmers.

Big Government has not posted the full speech.

[...]

Wilkerson also told us that the full speech is exactly as Sherrod described, and that she goes on to explain learning the error of her initial impression and helping the farmer keep his farm.

[...]

Sherrod identified the white farmer as Roger Spooner. CNN today interviewed his wife, Eloise Spooner, who said Sherrod had helped her and her husband save their farm.

“She’s a good friend … she helped save her farm,” Spooner said, adding that Sherrod did all she could to help them. “They have not treated her right.”

At first, the national NAACP released a statement supporting Sherrod’s resignation.

So this Breitbart cretin (part of the collective that also produced the falsely edited ACORN videos that not only got people fired, but were responsible for the demise of a nation-wide community organizing group), now is so stung by the NAACP asking teabaggers to repudiate the racists in their party that he has doctored a video in order to “prove” that the NAACP condones racism, too. Against whites.

I can just imagine how long and hard this woman worked, what she put up with in order to make it to the place where she was – only to have it all burned to the ground by in moments by the actions of some puny little man whose ethics apparently can only be spied with a magnifying glass. Disgusting. What kind of person do you have to be to just one day arbitrarily decide to ruin someone’s life? For a political victory? Though, hopefully, a very transient one as even political allies start to realize what a dishonest person you are.

Even more disgusting is wimpy Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack running her out of town on a rail (so to speak) before the full story is even known – even knowing the dubious reputation of Breitbart and his site. And the NAACP rushing in to condemn her as well (though they have now retracted that, promising to investigate.) And maybe, or maybe not, the Obama Administration. Even if they didn’t push for her firing, someone needs to restore this woman’s life.

I will probably clean this up later so that it makes more sense (and is grammatically correct and all that!) but right now I am just so angry I don’t even care what it looks like.

(Update to add links to people who say it much better than I do)

What Willis said: Barack Obama Cedes Presidency To Glenn Beck

Surprise! Sherrod Video Was Heavily Edited [Fox Update]

The WH’s reward for caving to a Fox smear

Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.