Harvard Law Prof Considers Sherrod Flap a Metaphor for Country’s Racial Attitudes
The quick condemnation of an edited video of a speech by black agricultural official Shirley Sherrod highlights the nation’s reluctance to address the issue of race, a Harvard Law School professor says.
“At the barest suggestion of race, we line up at opposite corners and start hurling accusations,” says law professor Charles Ogletree, writing at the Washington Post with Johanna Wald. Ogletree is executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and Wald is director of strategic planning for the group.
Sherrod was forced to resign after she was shown talking about her reluctance to help a white farmer in the edited video, posted by a conservative blogger, the New York Times reports in a media analysis published today. A longer version showed Sherrod using the experience to explain how she overcame her own misconceptions about race and ultimately helped the farmer.
Ogletree and Wald say the Sherrod flap is a metaphor for the country’s aborted efforts to discuss race. “Americans refuse to acknowledge that, in today’s society, racial attitudes are often complicated, multi-layered and conflicted,” they write.
The commentary urges Americans to confront unconscious racial stereotypes that influence well-meaning professionals, including lawyers, who oversee institutions plagued by structural racism. One test, for example, shows both whites and blacks are quicker to match black faces with violent concepts and more likely to mistake a harmless object for a gun when it is carried by a black person. Another study found that, in cases where the victim is white, the more stereotypically black the appearance of a criminal defendant, the tougher the sentence he or she is likely to receive.
“Our nation has to stop denying the complexity of our racial attitudes, history and progress,” they write. “Let’s tone down the rhetoric on all sides, slow down and commit to listening with less judgment and more compassion.”
