Obama cabinet official reconsidering firing of USDA employee over remarks

Sherrod was forced to resign Monday. She said Tuesday she was told the White House wanted her to resign, but Vilsack has said it was his decision. White House officials have said they communicated about Sherrod with USDA officials before and after she was fired, and that President Obama himself was aware of the situation, but deny putting any pressure on the USDA as to what course of action to take.

But the full video shows Sherrod explaining that the attorney she took the farmer to did not really help him, and that she went on to help him save his farm, a fact that the farmer, Roger Spooner, backed up in interviews with media on Tuesday.

“Working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t. You know they could be back, they could be white, they could be Hispanic,” Sherrod said. “It made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people, those who don’t have access the way others have.”

“I’ve come a long way. I knew that I couldn’t live with hate,” she said.

Sherrod also referred to the audience in the room, which appears on the video to have been only black people: “It’s sad that we don’t have a room full of white and blacks tonight, because we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where, as Toni Morrison said, race exists but it doesn’t matter.”

And Sherrod urged her audience to be proactive in seeking reconciliation with other races: “The change has to start with us. Somehow we’ve got to make the other side of town work with us. We’ve got to make our communities what they need to be.”

Sherrod does say in the video that much of the protests against Obama’s health care law, which was passed by Congress a week before her speech amid great acrimony, were fueled by racist antipathy toward the president.

“I haven’t seen such mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of health care. Some of the racism that we thought was buried: didn’t it surface?” she said. “Now we endured eight years of the Bush’s, and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president.”

Sherrod also spoke at two points in the video of how secure and well-paying government jobs are, and encouraged young people to seek them out.

Breitbart has pointed to these statements as evidence of “why the Tea Party is upset.”

“It is because bureaucrats like Shirley Sherrod think that when they get into a position of power that they can hire people and not fire them,” he said on CNN.

However, though her calls for young people to obtain government jobs receive the most emphasis, Sherrod does encourage young people in the audience to “start thinking about how to become entrepreneurs.”

Here is the video excerpt posted on BigGovernment.com on Monday:

Here is the full 43-minute speech by Sherrod:

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