By Lee A. Daniels

The racist fable that Andrew Breitbart and that loose clique of conservative confederates in the media tried to spin about Shirley Sherrod underscore a point historian Barbara W. Tuchman made years ago about the ethics of her profession.

“Leaving things out because they do not fit,” she wrote in her 1982 book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, “is writing fiction, not history.”

The point, of course – that intellectual and personal honesty is a prerequisite for participation in the public sphere – applies to the practice of journalism in its many forms as well. It is a principle, as we have seen, that those who pushed the false story of Shirley Sherrod ignored for a particular reason. Because that version “fit” one of the enduring themes of white-racist discourse in America. – the assertion that black Americans are now victimizing white Americans

It’s what I call the “Whites are the New Blacks” dynamic.

This fable was not only employed as one of the justifications for Negro Slavery (we have to oppress them or else they will oppress us). It was an overt and implicit plank of the doctrine of White Supremacy that ruled American society from the end of the Civil War to the passage of the 1960s civil rights acts.

Oh, yes, this gambit goes, at one time in the long-ago past, some whites did treat blacks badly. But we whites fixed that. Now, things have gone too far. Now, blacks and those damned white liberals are discriminating against regular white people.

This was the cry of those white Southerners who committed the violent acts upon which Jim Crow in the South stood, and of the whites who condoned or tolerated that violence. And, too, this was the cry of those white Northerners who, as in Boston in the 1970s, committed themselves to opposing by any means necessary mild efforts at school integration.

It is implicit in the coded words of those who, since the 1960s, have publicly pretended that “reverse discrimination” against whites and a “political correctness” that favors black Americans are in any measure significant in American society.

Indeed, the now of this racist fable has always been any moment blacks sought to take the full measure of their American citizenship. It has boiled to the surface of the society again precisely because of the symbolic and substantive importance of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency.

The shock and anxiety, and the resentment and fear that signal event produced among that diminishing segment of White America still in thrall to racist sentiments triggered almost from the moment his election victory was announced an explosion of anti-Obama conspiracy theories. Virtually all of these crackpot notions are rooted in the perverse idea of black-over-white domination.

Until recently, that reference was largely implicit. But over the last few months, white conservatives more and more began brashly asserting that Obama is intent on “enslaving” Americans (read: white Americans).

Rick Barber, a former U.S. Marine Corps veteran and neophyte political candidate running for the GOP nomination for an Alabama congressional seat drew a flash of national attention with an campaign advertisement titled “Slavery” that included images of a Nazi concentration camp, African slaves, North Korean prisoners, and a fictional conversation with ‘Abe Lincoln.’ ”

“Hey, Abe,” the voice-over asks, “if someone’s forced to work for months to pay taxes so a total stranger can get a free meal, medical procedure or a bailout, what’s that called? What’s it called when one man is forced to work for another?”

‘Lincoln’ responds: “Slavery.”

(Barber, who ran as a Tea Party candidate, lost the primary runoff to the “regular” Republican candidate, Montgomery City Council woman Martha Roby.)

It’s no coincidence that former Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams also used “Abraham Lincoln” in his racist screed denouncing the NAACP –- which, of course, proved the latter’s point that the Tea Party was infected with racist individuals and factions. The adherents of white racist ideology have never recovered from the destruction of Negro Slavery, the ultimate measure of control over black Americans, and, a century later, that of Jim Crow, its less-satisfactory successor. In their perverse American Dream, the prospect of racial equality – a prospect now symbolized by a black President of the United States — is a nightmare.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.