Shirley Sherrod didn't get any second chances, according to her former place of employment, the Agriculture Department, who claim to have a zero-tolerance policy on racism. When a video clip dated from March 27 surfaced at BigGovernment.com, Sherrod was immediately forced to resign from her position as the Georgia director of Rural Development (Fox News). The clip was released days after a heated debate broke out between the NAACP and Tea Party members over allegations of racism (Shahid). .
In the clip, Sherrod describes the "first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm" (Fox News). Sherrod is addressing members of NAACP who are heard laughing as Sherrod replays her experience. Sherrod incriminates herself when she remarks, "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 help I was going to give him," she said. "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" (Fox News). .
Sherrod has argued that her comments were taken out of context. According to her, she was doing just the opposite of what her comments have led us to believe. Instead, she claims, "My point in telling that story is that working with him helped me to see that it wasn't a black and white issue" (Shahid). Through her work, she says she discovered that it is more about the have's and the have not's than about blacks and whites. She also adds that the video was taken in 1986, before she began working with the Agriculture Department (Shahid). Eloise Spooner, the wife of the farmer who Sherrod allegedly wronged, came forth and said that Sherrod did a good job in "getting in there and doing all she could do to help us" (Shahid).
