Rush to Judgment, Rush to Redress
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Shirley Sherrod was just the lastest in a long line of cases where race fueled a rush to judgement, followed by a rush to redress. And the rush works both ways, sometimes, as evidenced by the Duke Lacrosse scandal and D.C.’s Beltway sniper attacks.
On Monday, TheRoot.com took a look at nine historic examples of this phenomenon (with captions written by yours truly). We could’ve come up with 9,000 if we had more time, dating to the Scottsboro Boys and beyond, back to when folks took a look at Frederick Douglass and assumed he was just another ignorant, inarticulate Negro.
There’s been a lot of talk about “teachable moments” regarding race, especially since President Obama took office and held his “beer summit” with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley.
It’d be nice to learn something new from one of these “moments,” instead of reinforcing the same-old, same-old.
DS
