The Big Black Lie So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he, I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And, uh, he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. So I took him to a white lawyer….so I figured that if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.

Shirley Sherrod of the USDA’s Georgia Rural Development office spoke to the NAACP in March 2010, telling them how she had withheld assistance to a farmer because he was white.




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 know what he was doing. But he had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was talking 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. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farm land, 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 the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And, uh, he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. So I took him to a white lawyer….so I figured that if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.



Now, in case the impact of this hasn’t settled on you yet, imagine Sherrod is a white woman and she is talking about refusing to help a black man. “Took him to one of his own kind?” “I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do?”



She admits that she deliberately withheld assistance (which is her job) from a member of “we the people” based on the color of their skin.



If you look for it, you could probably find racists in any group in the country: the Knights of Columbus, Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce, a sports team, a carpenter’s union, the Tea Party movement, and obviously even the NAACP.



A key difference is that in the Tea Party movement, you won’t find people condoning it as this friendly crowd condoned Sherrod’s racism.



If the NAACP is looking for racism, they need only go look in the mirror.