The Courage to Hope by Shirley Sherrod

Author:Shirley Sherrod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER 11

Joining Obama’s Team

By 2009, I had been working at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives for almost twenty-five years. I probably knew more about rural development in Georgia than any other human being. I had witnessed the tremendous emotional uplift that the election of the first black president had given to farmers and to all black Americans. Watching Barack Obama being sworn into office, Charles and I felt very positive. We just knew that things were going to change, because his election was something we could never have imagined forty years earlier. Of course, Georgia is a red state, and it went for John McCain. The last time the state had voted Democratic had been in Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. But our spirits were still high, because Obama was in the White House.

There was a lot of talk that Obama’s presidency signified that we had entered a postracial era. Charles and I knew in our hearts that that wasn’t true and maybe never would be. I felt some sympathy for the idea that Obama didn’t want his presidency to be defined by racial issues, but because he was black, any racial issue that did come up landed in his lap. It reminded me of having been in meetings over the years as the only black person, and if a question about blacks arose, everyone would swivel in their chairs and look at me for an answer. I once even complained, “Why am I always the only one who can speak to race?”

In Obama’s case, an example of this thinking came early in his presidency, after an incident involving the noted Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who was arrested after James Crowley, a white police officer, “caught” him breaking into his own house. Obama was immediately pursued by the press for his opinion, and he willingly jumped into the fray, even inviting Gates and Crowley to the White House, where they sat on the Rose Garden patio talking and drinking beer. The so-called beer summit drew more scorn than praise, in part because it seemed contrived and in part because it was naive to think that racial healing could be that simple. After the beer summit, Obama tended to stay silent on racial controversies. He didn’t want to be perceived as the president of the black people, nor did he want his initiatives to be mired in old wounds and unresolved conflicts. Many of my colleagues and friends in the movement wondered if important racial issues would be put on the back burner out of Obama’s reluctance to be perceived as favoring our community. We feared that we’d be worse off than we’d been before he was elected. These were critical concerns. The economic desperation in black America was growing. The disparity between blacks and whites in terms of wealth, jobs, home ownership, and education was increasing, not declining. It was urgent that those very real concerns be addressed. Yet who would address them?

The highly vocal Tea Party and other

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