As of 11:00 pm July 20, Shirley Sherrod had no job; the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture was refusing to reconsider, and the White House was supporting the termination.

So ends my previous post about the Shirley Sherrod affair.

When I went to bed last night, I had followed the Shirley Sherrod story all day. I hadn’t planned on that, but it was the extension of another subject about which I had been blogging.

I was wanting to write a follow-up to my blog post about the NAACP and the Tea Party.

So when I saw that the Tea Party was pushing back with claims of racism in the Obama administration, specifically targeting  Shirley Sherrod, it got my attention.  I follow very closely what for lack of a better term I would call “the politics of racism”.

My last post, published around midnight two days ago, left us with an unfairly defamed woman being forced to resign her post with the USDA, with neither her agency’s head nor her president coming to her aid.  The NAACP, quick to condemn her, had just reversed its position, and was calling upon the government to do the same.

I awoke the next day to an entirely new mood.  The White House had viewed the speech in question at the insistence of the NAACP, and notified the USDA that a review (actually a view) was in order.

Next came a press conference in which White House spokesman Robert Gibbs delivered a heart felt (if awkwardly articulated) apology to Ms. Sherrod, which was later followed by another press conference by the head of the Department of Agriculture.

Ms. Sherrod was not offered her job back, but was vindicated nonetheless, and offered another post, which at this writing she has not accepted.

I originally started this blog site because I was troubled by what I saw as a “new racism” directed toward my Hispanic friends. This has caused me to do a lot of reflection and research.

My conclusion was that there is a residual racism of that practiced forty years ago.  There is a generation which has not fully come to terms with our country’s new demographic that is making our citizenry as much brown and black as white.

This means that we can not longer see ourselves as a white nation.  We are European, but also Asian, Hispanic, and Black.  This means, for example, that “Black History” is “our” history, if we are  USAmericans.  We are a collection of immigrants and decendants of immigrants along with the descendants of the Native Americans.

This change is hard for some to stomach.  I use that word deliberately, for I easily perceive the visceral reactions of whites who are quick to stereotype black and latino families in ways that are demeaning and degrading.

Depending on age, some of this racial residue comes from people who were adults during the Jim Crow years.  For others, it has been passed down one or two generations.  But it is there, always attempting to wrap itself in political correctness, but residing just below the surface, nonetheless, ever seeking a justified moment in which to emerge.

The edited and deceptive video was such a moment.  Fearful that the right had “found something”, the NAACP, and the government including the White House sought to quickly dismiss this obviously racist government worker.  Only she wasn’t.

For the time being the racism has moved ever so slightly below the surface, until it can be summoned up by a politician seeking a cheap vote.  Some things have never changed.