When I first came across Rich Lowry’s column “Shirley Sherrod and American Progress,” I wondered whether I might have stumbled upon a parody of NR thinking written by Paul Gottfried in one of his lighter moods. Or perhaps Lowry had written it as part of an elaborate plan to induce severe indigestion in poor Paul, putting the tireless right-wing critic of conservative movement out of commission.
Regardless, even Lowry found it difficult to depict this well paid, well fed, and pampered federal bureaucrat as oppressed by angry white mobs. He thus chose to retell a sob story he’d read in one Taylor Branch’s turgid biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. about a black man who was attacked by mean, illiterate rednecks after he flirted with one of their white mistresses. Lowry then concludes,
Shirely Sherrod doesn’t seem to have a been a good bureaucrat -- she didn’t help the “superior”-talkin’ white farmer, even if she later felt that this was “wrong” -- and she has dedicated her life to something, one would think, Lowry opposes -- securing for blacks federal goodies, suing companies and the federal government on behalf of blacks, and securing for herself life-time employment as a black advocate. But it seems that by dent of her being black and Southern, she is connected to a to a long, storied history of righteous martyrdom, and as a good conservative of the reigning civic religion, Lowry is tasked with writing about her in hushed-tones.
Ilana Mercer reveals that, in many ways, the media’s lionization of Sherrod is a case of diminished expectations.
