WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun” when he decided to dismiss employee Shirley Sherrod from her job at the department amid accusations of racism. Obama tells ABC News in an interview that Vilsack acted in part because the current media climate requires everyone to scramble when something goes […]

From Southernstudies.org: Right now, if you do a web search of the words “racism” and “USDA,” the majority of links will steer you to coverage of this week’s Shirley Sherrod affair, in which the African-American U.S. Department of Agriculture staffer based in Georgia resigned after a conservative website reversed the meaning of a speech she […]

WASHINGTON — Former Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod says she wants to discuss racial issues with President Obama, but there’s need for him to apologize for her wretched week. Making appearances on network news shows, Sherrod repeats she isn’t certain she’ll return to the Agriculture Department, which forced her out earlier this week and then […]

From CNN.com: Shirley Sherrod, who was forced to resign from her government job in Georgia based on incomplete and misleading reports of a speech she gave, has been offered a new job by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack But, she said Thursday she is “not so sure.”

The Shirley Sherrod debacle, yet again, reveals an ugly and unfortunate truth. This country is suffering from a psychological disorder. Joy Leary calls it “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.”  Whatever it is, it’s clear that we have been traumatized not only by our despicable history of slavery and racism but our ongoing refusal to deal with […]

From HuffingtonPost.com: Shirley Sherrod has accomplished a number of things in her career, but she had never planned on uniting Glenn Beck and the NAACP.

From MSNBC.com: A black USDA official in Georgia has resigned after publicly admitting she didn’t help a white man trying to save his farm to the “full force” of her power and instead referred him to “one of his own.”