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Shirley Sherrod says she’d love to have a conversation with President Barack Obama, but doesn’t want him to personally apologize for her ouster from the USDA in a racial flap that stemmed from out-of-context remarks.
Asked on NBC’s “Today” show this morning whether she thought she deserved a phone call from Obama, the black former Southern regional official replied: “I think I do.”
“He’s the president of the United States of America. I’ve received the apologies that are important. I really would not want the president to apologize to me, but [I’d] love to have a conversation with him though,” she told NBC.
I”d like to talk to him a little bit about the experiences of people like me,” she continued, “people at the grassroot level, people who live out there in rural America, people who live in the South. I know he does not have that kind of experience. Let me help him a little bit about how we think, how we live and the things that are happening.”
Sherrod, 62, resigned Monday as the USDA’s director of rural development in Georgia after a conservative website posted a clip of a speech that included her saying that she didn’t help a white farmer as much as she could have because of his race. She said the clip excluded her comments that she did help the farmer keep his farm. The farmer and his wife came to her defense Tuesday and said she should have kept her job.
Before the incident, Sherrod said during the “Today” interview that she didn’t even know the name of the conservative blogger, Andrew Breitbart, who posted the partial video clip online.
“He knew that his actions would take Shirley Sherrod down,” she said. “He didn’t mind doing that. He probably hoped, it would also deal with the NAACP, but what he did was getting me. And that, I cannot — well, he’s never offered to apologize for what he’s done — but it would be hard for me to forgive him at this point.”
On Wednesday, Sherrod did receive apologies from the White House and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for her forced resignation.
“This is a good woman,” Vilsack told reporters. “She’s been put through hell. I could have done and should have done a better job. I’ll learn from that experience. I want this agency and department to learn from this experience, and I want us to be stronger for it.”
Earlier Wednesday, Sherrod was in CNN’s studio — sitting on camera and watching White House spokesman Robert Gibbs apologize on national TV. “Decisions were made based on an incomplete set of facts,” he told reporters at the daily briefing.
Sherrod smiled and nodded her head.
“It makes me feel better,” she told CNN later. “This shouldn’t have happened. It took too long, but it makes me feel better that the apology has finally come.”
The apologies came after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which at first condemned Sherrod but then said it had been “snookered” by conservative activists, put the full video of Sherrod’s speech on its site Tuesday night.
Vilsack said he had asked Sherrod to come back to work at a different position at the USDA. Sherrod said the position would be in the agency’s office of outreach to combat racial discrimination within its ranks.
She told NBC this morning she was inclined not to return to the agency, adding: “The secretary said he would e-mail it to me. I have not seen it yet, so before I say no totally, I would like to look at that to weigh it.”
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