Fear of racial backlash may have triggered White House blunder

July 25, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON

Is President Barack Obama afraid of talking about race? Of being seen as too black? As an anti-white racist?

Analysts say the Obama administration’s hasty decision this week to fire a black Agriculture Department employee who’d been falsely accused of racism was made in a moment of panic driven by fear of conservative media criticism or a white political backlash.

“Hysterical blindness,” said Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at the University of Florida Law School. “They are afraid of being labeled as racist.”

“They’re trying to protect him,” added Ron Walters, a retired political science professor from the University of Maryland. “He has a right to be sensitive. But in terms of managing these things, he doesn’t have a right to look weak and skittish.”

The Obama administration spent the week trying to explain how and why it acted so quickly to fire Shirley Sherrod from her job as director of rural development in Georgia for the Department of Agriculture without inquiring whether right-wing activist Andrew Breitbart’s allegation that she’d boasted about discriminating against a white farmer was true.

In fact, her explanations of how she had helped the man save his farm and how she learned from the case to treat all people equally were edited out of Breitbart’s video clip of Sherrod talking about the farmer.

Obama apologized to Sherrod, and at week’s end she was still pondering the Agriculture Department’s plea to return.

Afterward, the president spoke only briefly in public about the mistake. He told ABC that he and Sherrod shared life experiences, both learning to overcome racial stereotypes.

The nation’s first president of mixed race — white mother, black father — got to the White House by avoiding the subject of race and shunning anything that might label him a “black” candidate like Jesse Jackson and cost him support from white voters. At the onset of his campaign, in fact, there were complaints that he wasn’t “black enough” to win black votes against Hillary Clinton.

Thus, Obama gave a detailed speech on race during the 2008 campaign only after he was forced to explain his ties to the racially inflammatory Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

In office, he has avoided comments and policy proposals that could be seen as favoring blacks over whites.

“I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,” he told the American Urban Radio Networks when he was pressed to push jobs programs to help blacks.

He’s had setbacks, though.

His appointment of Van Jones as a green jobs czar at the White House backfired when it was revealed that Jones supported the “truther” theory that former President George W. Bush had allowed the 2001 terrorist attacks to happen. Fox News commentator Glenn Beck derided Jones as a black nationalist, and Jones was pushed out.

Obama also stirred up a racial storm a year ago when he said that a white Massachusetts police officer had acted “stupidly” when he arrested prominent African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The president later said his words were ill chosen.

Obama and his aides blame the news media in part for driving the administration to fire Sherrod in haste, saying the cloudburst of commentary on the Internet without fact, balance or investigation made it difficult to respond.