Fear and Loathing in New Orleans: Classy

I spent part of the day on Wednesday absorbing the brouhaha over Shirley Sherrod's firing and potential rehiring. Let's just say it was better than, though not unrelated to, reading about how best to problematize "the city." Here's what I learned: Tom Vilsack reacted to conservative activist Andrew Breitbart's decontextualized exhortation of Shirley Sherrod's discussion of her allegedly racist framework for doing her job (in the deep past) by firing her. The NAACP jumped on Vilsack's bandwagon. The White House accepted Vilsack's firing as legitimate.

What?

Put differently: A bureaucratic hack reacted to a feces-throwing moron's exhortation of comments that shed light on one woman's evolving thought process on the importance of class-based thinking over race-based thinking with regard to economic policy by firing that woman. Apparently incapable of complex thinking, or even reading the remarks that sparked the controversy for themselves, the self-proclaimed voice of black mainstream politics accepts the action of the bureaucratic hack. A hyperreactive executive branch takes everyone's word for it in an attempt not to look like it supports racism.

What really happened: Shirley Sherrod spoke publicly about a gradual and important transition from interpreting oppression exclusively through a racial lens to interpreting it through a lens that foregrounds class. According to the AP story, Sherrod said:

"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with helping a white person save their land." Initially, she said, "I didn't give him the full force of what I could do" and gave him only enough help to keep his case progressing. Eventually, she said, his situation "opened my eyes" that whites were struggling just like blacks, and helping farmers wasn't so much about race but was "about the poor versus those who have."

What?

Y'all got racism from that?

White people and black people were struggling to keep their farms in equal measure. Sherrod recognized that, and admitted that, at first, she didn't see it that way. Sherrod admitted, essentially, to complex thinking and to a capacity to change her mind when offered evidence that her prior thinking was in error. Sherrod got fired for being different from everyone else in Washington. I personally hope she doesn't take her job back. She's too good for it, clearly.

The interesting thing, for me, about this latest flap for the Obama administration is its timing. The administration's condemnation of complex, class-based thinking comes in the same week as their financial reform package. If there was ever a document that failed to challenge the hegemony of finance capital and supported the status quo for the hundreds of thousands of benighted Americans who believe they're "middle class" in spite of their static wages, declining spending power, foreclosed home, and extraordinary distance from the means of production in this country (whatever they may be--production is consumption, consumption is the immediate use of things ephemerally produced), it's this document.