President Obama spoke to Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official who was ousted after a race flap, and expressed his "regret" over the events of this past week, the White House said this afternoon.
According to the White House, Obama "emphasized that [Agriculture] Secretary [Tom] Vilsack was sincere in his apology yesterday, and in his work to rid USDA of discrimination."
On Thursday morning Agriculture Department officials e-mailed Sherrod a specific job offer and today Obama told her he hoped she would take it.
Sherrod was offered a job tasked with settling lawsuits from minority farmers who say they were discriminated against in applying for farm loans. Vilsack on Wednesday said Sherrod was offered the job because she "has a unique set of skills trying to turn the page on our civil rights chapter which has been difficult."
Two questions:
1. When will Obama keep his nose out of state and local affairs, quit micromanaging and just mind the general running of the country? He had no business injecting himself into this matter. In fact, his involvement simply made this a much bigger mess than it had to be.
2. When will the race debate actually be over? The answer is when people of color - all colors - stop using race as an identifier and simply start treating people as people. By continually focusing on "black America" or "white America" people of all colors are doing a disservice to us all and to the eventual goal: a truly colorblind America. People should be judged by their capability and their character, not their skin color. It's no longer whites who are the primary keepers of racially-charged views and thinking. When everything is filtered through the lens of race, that's what makes one a racist. And by constantly crying foul on the supposed basis of race, it only furthers racial tension in this country. If those people would just let the past go and quit holding a grudge for slavery and civil injustices in the first half of last century, the better we will all be. I'm not saying that the people who lived through it should forget - quite the contrary. It has made them stronger and has made them who they are. But compared side by side, civil rights has come a hell of a long way from 1950 to 2010. And that's what's important - the present. The past is ugly, but the present and the future are a whole lot brighter, if only we would all let it be.
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