What’s lost in this story, this blame-game endgame as the story winds down, is Sherrod’s original speech. Some people are starting to examine this, and I think it’s worth a second look also. As Sherrod said,

it was revealed to me that, y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white

Later in the speech, she reiterates this point:

Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t. They could be black. They could be white. They could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people …

God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people – it’s about poor people.

We have gotten so wrapped up in black vs. white, in identity politics, that we’re overlooking her main point: race isn’t the dividing issue, it’s class, or if you prefer, economics.

The story of this country is often told as a story of race, a story of unequality—which it is. But there’s another equally compelling story, one that doesn’t get told as often, the story of the wealthy vs. the rest of us. Those who first came to this country from England weren’t the poor; they were those who had enough money to be able to pay passage, to be able to provide for themselves. The first ships were paid for by investors and holding companies, and owners of land patents granted by the crown to the gentry and lesser nobility. This was the pretext for the first explorations and settlements, from the religious dissenters and separatists who colonized New England (many were what we’d identify as middle class) to the entrepreneurs (again, those who had money) who first established footholds in the mid-Atlantic colonies. The fact that these settlers wanted and desired assistance in the form of labor led to the first slaves, in 1619. This is also true for the earlier Europeans who first ventured into what is now the Americas: the Spanish came, as we’ve been taught, for “Glory, God, and Gold.” Wealth and the pursuit of the same form a full one-third of this trinity. To acquire glory and gold required labor, which quickly came in the form of slaves—first the native populations, then forcibly exported Africans.

Power and slavery came to these shores, hand-in-hand. We’ve learned and absorbed the history and narrative about slavery, but we haven’t really examined the other half of the equation. The story Sherrod was telling wasn’t really new; it’s a story as old as this nation. It’s just a tale that hasn’t been heard often enough.

The conflict between the haves and have-nots is an age-old one, but too often those in power fear the potential for such a conflict (from time to time in history, the poor and lower classes have a disconcerting habit of trying to assert themselves and level the playing field, you know), that the few at the top often try to distract the population at large with other events.

A good example of this can be seen in literature: one of my favorite books is To Kill a Mockingbird, which is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year. In the book, Mayella Ewell and her family are at the bottom, considered “poor white trash” by the rest of Maycomb. Economically, politically, and in some ways, socially, the Ewells actually had far more in common with Tom Robinson and his neighbors than they did with the Finches, the Radleys, Mrs. Dubose, or Miss Maudie Atkinson. Even though the dividing line in the book was race, class was always an underlying factor. Everyone fit into a pecking order, from the oldest families at the top down through the Cunninghams to the Ewells. On the other side, you had the black community, with its own social divisions. The “poor white trash” once served as slaves alongside blacks, then they were above blacks, and today they’re in the same economic boat as many blacks.

The early days of this nation saw blacks and whites serving together as indentured servants and slaves, but over time, indentured servitude was removed, whites were increasingly segregated from blacks, and race became the bright line, the dividing point that those in power decided to use in order to not only clearly define who was a slave and who was not, but to keep blacks and whites from making common cause based on their economic status. As long as there was someone else and something else to look down on, to sneer at, to hate, that shiny trinket distracted the poor whites just enough from doing something about their own miseries. Divide and conquer is an ancient tactic in warfare, and it has been no different in America when it came to race and class.

The same tactics are being used today: instead of examining why jobs have vanished and real wages are suffering and continue to be stagnant over the last 30-40 years, people point to the “illegals” and loudly cry out that everyone would just be a-okay if we sent those “illegals” back where they came from, so they would “stop taking our jobs.” Funny, but this was a common concern in the antebellum years in this country: black slaves and freedmen were cheap labor, cheap enough that the Republican Party was founded partly on the premise of “free labor” [no competition with those slave workers!]. Lincoln certainly wanted to free the slaves, sure, but he also thought, like many others, that they should be repatriated to Africa [”My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land." - Abraham Lincoln, Peoria, Illinois, October 1854]

We are so concerned with the “other”: the blacks, the women, the gays, Latinos, Asians, the “illegals”, we don’t stop to think about why they’re here, or why they’re protesting, why they want equality: sure, blacks wanted to be free, they wanted to end segregation, but they also wanted to achieve economic equality and mobility. Martin Luther King understood this; this was why, at the end of his life, he was in Memphis, preparing to march on behalf of the sanitation workers. He understood that it was not just enough to be able to ride the same buses and order food in restaurants next to whites, but it was also important to be able to afford that bus ticket and be able to buy that meal.

Women understood this: it’s why the ERA was in part about achieving economic parity, and why Lilly Ledbetter and the Fair Pay Act are so important. Other “minority” groups aren’t just fighting for recognition and social equality—they’re also trying to broaden economic mobility as well.

This is what Shirley Sherrod realized that day, decades ago, when she was considering what to do about the Spooners and their quest to save their farm. Growing up in the South in the days prior to and during the Civil Rights era, she lived in a world where the poorest whites, the Ewells and Cunninghams and Spooners, were always just above, just a little bit better than the Robinsons and Millers and Sherrods, even though they might be at the same economic level, in the same economically depressed environment.

Instead, she came to the realization that it’s “really about those who have versus those who don’t…” It’s not just about race, it’s about those at the top versus everyone else.

Skin is just a color, a differential on the surface. The nice black family in suburbia has much more in common with their white neighbors next door than they do with the unemployed black family in the urban ghetto. If Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X all lived today rather than 40-50 years ago, King would have more in common with and aspire to be more like Kennedy than he would Malcolm X, a ex-con from a troubled childhood spent in foster homes.

What happened this week has been transmitted and manipulated by Breitbart, Fox News, the White House, and the Corporate Media as a story about racism and race.  Sherrod stands almost alone trying to point out that we in this nation are slowly transcending race, and the real story is one of power, of economic inequality. Sherrod wants the conversation to be about poverty, about wealth, and how to change the imbalance. For all his “blackness” [and as much as Breitbart, the "Birthers" and others on the right-wing fringe want to make this about Obama's race and background], Obama doesn’t really have a whole lot in common with Sherrod. As she pointed out, the President is “not someone who has experienced some of the things I’ve experienced.” I imagine that while Sherrod would love to have a conversation with Obama about race, she probably would also want to steer the discussion in the direction of economic issues- because that is where she sees the real divisions in this country. She feels this is worth discussing, and it’s the reason why she shared her story with the NAACP months ago. It’s a conversation worth having.