"This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black."

That is the most outrageous, truly evil editing I've ever seen. The original, nefariously compressed by NBC, was:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

NBC now serves up a weak apology. I hope Zimmerman sues.

Flashback: Remember when Shirley Sherrod sued Andrew Breitbart for presenting the center section of a speech she gave, where she admitted discriminating against a white man, and left out the ending, where she talked about her realization that what matters isn't race, but class. I wonder if those who were outraged at Breitbart are outraged by the much more outrageous editing done by NBC.

ADDED: Some commenters question the way I referred to the Sherrod-Breitbart conflict. I will answer by referring to what I wrote at the time, back in July 2010.

"Does Allen West hate women?... [T]he answer seems to be more that Allen West hates everyone."

Oh, boy. It's Amanda Marcotte responding Michelle Goldberg:

That doesn't spare him from being a sexist, however, since his hatred for women has an ugly, gendered tone to it, as evidenced by his strange war on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose main sin seems to be a willingness to disagree with West while in possession of a vagina, causing West to claim she's "not a Lady."...

That said, calling a Democrat "not a Lady" and claiming that liberal women are the source of the country's economic woes because we supposedly neuter men are, if anything, the least worrisome parts of the entire Allen West phenomenon. 

Wait. West said ball-busting women have wrecked the economy? Let's refer to the source material: Michelle Goldberg:

Liberal women, he claimed, helped cause the debt by “neutering American men,” which apparently undermined their fiscal rectitude. 

No link for that quote. Isn't it funny that Shirley Sherrod is suing Andrew Breitbart for presenting a quote of hers out of context? Imagine if the law permitted that! We'd all be afraid to say anything. But, okay, I'll go find the context myself. Here. It's a bit rambly, but he's calling for people to be strong and staunch in their conservative virtues. Speaking to a group a women, he praises strong women — even quotes Sarah Palin's "fight like a girl" — but calls on women to demand strength from men. Palin's "fight like a girl" was a "poke in the chest" to men, goading men to fight.

A little more Marcotte:

As Goldberg recounts, West acts erratically, lashes out randomly, has a victim complex that makes Sarah Palin look thick-skinned, and has acted out violently from his rage issues. But the space between Tea Party ideology and unhinged rage is whisker-thin.

So... Palin and West are telling conservatives to stand up and fight, and Goldberg and Marcotte are, really, trying to say no, don't fight. They are happier with tame, sedate Republicans. The method they are using is to portray the fighting Republicans as angry and crazy. I'd like to say that Marcotte and Goldberg are hacks using a boring old rhetorical device, but I think these angry/crazy characterizations do leave an impression.

People are trying very hard to ruin Allen West right now, before he gets anywhere, and they are trying to ensure that Sarah Palin stays down where they think they crushed her.

ADDED: Instapundit says:

Yeah, first Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, now Amanda Marcotte: What is it with the Democrats sending white women to attack a black man, anyway? Are they trying to play on gendered racial fears among white voters? It’s some kind of dog-whistle, isn’t it?

"They were trying to show that my intention was to get Pigford defunded."

"And, I had never heard of Pigford, so for the last four and half months, all I’ve been doing is eating, breathing, sleeping Pigford, researching Pigford, finding whistleblowers who are hiding in plain sight who have been wanting to tell the story of how this was rigged."

Sherrod...

... deflected.

Will Wilkinson and I talk about Shirley Sherrod, Journolist, Top Secret America, Wikileaks, and road trips...

... on the new Bloggingheads.

A question about the Shirley Sherrod incident and taking things out of context.

Don't we constantly extract quotes and clips from larger contexts? I do blog posts by that method all the time. I find the juiciest line and quote it often deliberately out of context or with intent to misdirect for humorous or shocking effect. It's the reader's responsibility to figure out what to do with it. I'm not ashamed to operate that way. For one thing, I give links, so you have a path to the larger context. And, more important, by depriving you of a pat, self-contained package, I'm forcing you to read critically and keep going.

There's always more to the story. When we purport to put something "in context," it's never the whole context. We're choosing the frame of information that serves our interests, interests that may include but are rarely limited to the pure understanding of the truth. Traditional newspapers may have led their readers to think that they'd processed all the information and digested it into a simple-to-read article, and they often abused their readers' trust. The web doesn't work like that. The web activates its readers, and I think that's for the good.

With that in mind, let's look at the Andrew Breitbart post — "Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism–2010" — that started the sequence of events around Shirley Sherrod.
Ironically, the post began: "Context is everything." The context Breitbart chose was the NAACP's impugning of some of the people in the Tea Party movement as racists.

The constant calls to “repudiate the racists from your ranks” have not only been insulting, but have also served to force a false standard upon America’s fastest-growing and most vibrant political movement that no other group could ever live up to nor would ever be asked to live up to.

Breitbart reminds us of the claims that Tea Party people spit on black congressmen:

Congressional Black Caucus members staged a walk through the Tea Party crowd in front of the capitol the day before the health care vote.  They claimed they were threatened by a violent mob and were subjected to the vile N word slur fifteen times. With the unpopularity of the toxic health care bill that the majority of Americans did not want, the Democrats needed a November strategy. Neutralizing the growing Tea Party movement with charges of racism was clearly its post-health care reform vote priority.

Breitbart details his own efforts to prove that story was phony and the failure of mainstream media to follow up.

That was the important context to Breitbart as he offered up the vido clip. He identifies Sherrod as USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaking a the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia, giving a "meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience." He misstates (and later corrects) that she's talking about how she treats white people today, in her current job. That's an atrocious, blatant error, which, as we all found out, is easily refuted by watching the video of the full speech. (I should say, more accurately, the speech minus the gap that "an NAACP spokesman" said occurred "when the tape was switched in the recording." Really? They use tapes to record? Tapes that are inadequate to hold a speech of less than an hour? My pocket digital cameras have better video capacity that than. I'm skeptical.)

Back to Breitbart:

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

So part of the context to Breitbart is about the present-day audience, responding positively to Sherrod's account of feeling conflicted about helping a white man who wasn't giving her the deference warranted by her power. The speaker and the audience shared a feeling of understanding a sort of stereotypical white attitude.

Breitbart features a second quote from the speech in which Sherrod "nearly begs black men and women into taking government jobs at USDA — because they won’t get fired." He concludes that the Democratic Party and the NAACP are "scared." And then, it seems, they really were scared, because the NAACP immediately denounced Sherrod and the Obama Administration fired her. They impulsively did what seemed like the most obvious thing to avert the bad press they saw coming. Then, they acted ashamed of doing that, apologized, and seemed to hope that — with the aid of a willing mainstream press — we'd all want to concentrate our attention on bad Mr. Breitbart.

We learned much more about Shirley Sherrod, but we don't know everything. The context frame was widened, to her full speech, her life story as she chose to tell it. But there are gaps even in that (even aside from the tape-switch gap). I want to know more, and I don't think we know the whole story about why she was fired. The official story is pretty embarrassing for the administration, and I don't quite believe it. They jumped because of the Breitbart post? What are they hiding? I suspect that they don't want us delving into the inner workings of the USDA, and they don't want us listening to all the various things Shirley Sherrod has said and will say. Why wasn't she on any of the Sunday talk shows?

***

Context is important, but we can and do speak before we have the whole context. We are in the middle of a conversation. At any given point in a conversation, somebody may be happy with the state of development of the context, and it may be clear that the narrower context was deceptive. But that doesn't mean the context can't be opened up even further. I'm skeptical. I want to keep reading and thinking, and I hope you do too.

UPDATE: The link to Breitbart's "Video Proof" post no longer works. Here's a link to Memeorandum, linking to may commentators who, like me, wrote about it.

"The Obama White House is too white"... so it keeps "tripping over race rather than inspiring on race."

Says Maureen Dowd:

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong....

The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. 

(Gays! Where did that come from?)

His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less. “Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?” asked a top black Democratic official....

“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” [Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina,] told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”

Dowd ends by recommending that Obama hire Shirley Sherrod for a newly created position called "Director of Black Outreach."

“Shirley Sherrod, who didn’t know who Andrew Breitbart was 72 hours ago, now knows him well enough to say that he wants to put all blacks back into slavery."

"If I were David Axelrod, I’d be calling this woman and beg her to stop talking. And, yes, she does owe Andrew an apology."

Apologies, apologies, apologies. I'm more on the side of standing by what you have done (unless you actually believe you were wrong). Defend yourself!

For example, here was Rush Limbaugh on the radio yesterday:

People have asked me about this woman Sarah Spitz, who's now "apologized," and they want my reaction to it. And this is another thing I'll react to it but I really don't want to. This bores me as well, this whole concept of forcing people to apologize for things they meant to say. Why is she gonna apologize? She meant to say it, she wrote it, stand by it. You want to watch me die, Sarah? Say it! Where are your guts? Well, she's "apologized."...

[It's] the latest trend in apologies, "That's not who I really am." You know, "That's not the person I am." Bull! It is who you are! You are a commie! You are a full-fledged Marxist liberal! You do wish I was dead. It is who you are.

I don't care whether it's Tiger Woods saying, "You know, that's really not who I am." It is. It is who you are! What, did somebody steal your personality for a day and grab hold of your hands and start typing on your keyboard and it wasn't you? "This is not who I am. I want everybody to know, as a publicist I understand and this is not who I am." It is who you are!

Ha. Exactly. I said the same thing about Tiger Woods, by the way, back in February.

"Sherrod may be the only official ever dismissed because of the *fear* that Fox host Glenn Beck might go after her."

Notes Howard Kurtz:

As Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack tried to pressure her into resigning, Sherrod says Deputy Under Secretary Cheryl Cook called her Monday to say "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight." And for all the focus on Fox, much of the mainstream media ran with a fragmentary story that painted an obscure 62-year-old Georgian as an unrepentant racist....

The administration's concern about Beck stems in part from his campaign last year that prompted the resignation of White House environmental official Van Jones over divisive remarks -- a controversy that some news organizations acknowledged they were too slow to cover. Ironically, Beck defended Sherrod on Tuesday, saying that "context matters" and he would have objected if someone had shown a video of him at an AA meeting saying he used to pass out from drinking but omitting the part where he says he found Jesus and gave up alcohol.

Accused of frigidity, I push back.

The accusation.

The pushback.

AND: Here's the Hattie Carroll stuff in the same comments thread. And here's my parody of the Bob Dylan song, written upon the death of William Zantzinger (of Zanzinger, if you prefer) in January 2009. And, by the way, "The Bob Dylan song that turned on Jimmy Carter is the one that Barack Obama calls a favorite."

"Without a doubt, Ms. Sherrod is owed an apology," said White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs.

The NYT reports:

The apology capped what had been a humiliating and fast-paced turn of events for the White House, the national media and the N.A.A.C.P., all of whom, Mr. Gibbs said, overreacted to a video that appeared to show Ms. Sherrod saying that she had discriminated against a white farmer. The remarks were taken out of context from a longer speech in which she said she learned to overcome her own biases.

And yet... she did discriminate against the white farmer. (Later, she helped him. To paraphrase John Kerry: I discriminated against him, before I didn't discriminate against him.)

Later, [Agriculture Secretary Tom] Vilsack held his own news briefing to say that he had called Ms. Sherrod to apologize and had offered her a new position with the agency.

How embarrassing!

The full video... shows that in her speech, Ms. Sherrod goes on to say that she had learned from working with the farmer that all people must overcome their prejudices. 

Make a note for later use: When someone discriminates based on race, if they subsequently assert that it's important not to do that, it's wrong to hold her or him accountable.

Mr. Vilsack cited his department’s “zero-tolerance” policy on discrimination in explaining her ouster.

Ms. Sherrod took to the airwaves on Tuesday, especially CNN, where she said that the N.A.A.C.P. was “the reason why this happened.”

“They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and all of this came out as a result of that,” she said.

Ha. Everybody got whipsawed by race. Wanna all just fold our cards in the long-running race game? Ah, no... I didn't think so. You still think you can win, don't you? And the play is so exciting....

I watched the full Shirley Sherrod video.

Here's the video along with text of much (but not all) of the speech. Sherrod does admit that she practiced racial discrimination against the white farmer. Later, she helps him, after it is "revealed to" her that what really matters isn't the difference between black and white but the difference between rich and poor. The fact that she later came around to helping the man doesn't change the fact that she previously discriminated against him.

It's good that she changed her attitude, but the role of a government official making decisions about people's lives is not to experience personal transformations and revelations. It was an abuse of power. It's good that she learned from it, and it's interesting that she was opening herself up and telling such a personal story now. It exposed her to criticism, and her understandably sensitive boss fired her. It's important to acknowledge that Sherrod not only admittedly discriminated against the farmer (years ago), but she saw fit today to speak as if she were proud of the story with its narrative arc of personal growth.

ADDED: The incident with the white farmer occurred when Sherrod worked for the Georgia field office for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund, and I don't know the specifics of that work and how it might affect the extent of her duty not to discriminate based on race. I don't mean to express an opinion about whether Sherrod should have been fired. There is a lot going on in this story, and I'm interested to see how it unfolds. I'm holding a position of neutrality here, and I will make my observations as they come to me.

One thing I'm seeing that I don't think many people are talking about is that Sherrod brought religion into her work and her narrative. Her speech began with a genuinely moving story of her childhood. It brought me to tears when she spoke of the murder of her father. Because of that murder, she made a "commitment to stay in the South and devote my life to working for change." The commitment seems to have been a promise to God, as she continues:

God is good. I can tell you that. When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people -- and to black people only. But you know God will show you things and he'll put things in your path so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people...

This ties to the line in the anecdote from the video clip: "That's when it was revealed to me that y'all, it's about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white -- it is about white and black, but it's not -- you know, it opened my eyes..." Toward the end, she repeats this idea: "Like I told, God helped me to see that its not just about black people, it's about poor people. And I've come a long way. I knew that I couldn't live with hate, you know. As my mother has said to so many, if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we'd probably be dead now."

That's a beautiful idea. It is impressive that she resisted hate, but a public servant has a duty not to discriminate based on race, whatever her personal background is and whether God revealed something to her or not. 

Benjamin Jealous and the Shirley Sherrod video.

Here's the statement by NAACP President Benjamin Jealous trying to shift the blame to "Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart" for editing the Shirley Sherrod video to heighten an apparent confession of racism. When he saw that video, Jealous's reaction against Sherrod was immediate. She was toxic and had to be spat out.

To react like that is to display the same human weakness that underlies racism itself. You see one thing, you see the whole person as nothing but that one thing, you feel instinctive aversion and fear, and you reflexively push that person away. Blaming those who showed you that one thing does not absolve you from your responsibility to rise above the level of instinct and fear. It is up to you to go beyond your first perception, to search for the truth, and to use reason and judgment before you make a decision about someone.

Jealous doesn't acknowledge this personal responsibility. Indeed, he continues to operate in this instinctive, reactive mode. It's not as if he went looking for the truth about Sherrod. Sherrod came forward and defended herself by relating the whole story and complaining about the edit. Her presentation was a new embarrassment, and Jealous's current statement is a reaction to that. Moreover, his shot at "Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart" is another instant reaction. Not only does Jealous assume a motive behind the edit — "the intention of deceiving" — he assumes Fox News and Breitbart did the editing. But Breitbart says he received the video already edited.

***

Here's the full Shirley Sherrod video. I will comment on it in a separate post.