The League of Iowa Human & Civil Rights Agencies

Remember last year’s furor involving the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the subsequent beer fest hosted by President Barack Obama at the White House for Gates and the police sergeant?In many ways, we’re seeing a replay of that situation in the current controversy over the remarks made by U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod.

For the full context surrounding Sherrod’s remarks, I also encourage you to watch the video of her NAACP speech. A video of the full speech actually shows that Sherrod was trying to make the point that, in examining her own prejudice, she learned that those who are struggling have much in common, regardless of their race.

In both the Gates and Sherrod cases, quick judgments were made tied to racial issues.

The Gates situation—just as with the USDA case—involved quick action, in part triggered by erroneous assumptions. As recently reported in The New York Times, both the Harvard professor and the police sergeant who arrested him missed opportunities to “ratchet down” the confrontation and avoid misunderstandings.

While the USDA story is being reported in political terms, it is actually a workplace story. Sherrod lost her job when an incomplete airing of her remarks became public.U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack accepted Sherrod’s resignation after seeing some of her recently recorded remarks at an NAACP banquet on March 27. Sherrod, an African-American woman, was appointed in July 2009 as the agency’s Georgia state director of rural development.

In her speech at the NAACP, Sherrod described an episode that occurred more than 20 years ago when she was working at a nonprofit organization in which she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have. Instead, she said, she sent him to one of “his own kind.” Despite her comments, Sherrod ultimately ended up helping the farmer: On Tuesday, his family was among those who came to her defense.

Vilsack, in a statement reported by The Washington Post, stated that “the controversy surrounding her [Sherrod’s] comments would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question, making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia.” Then, Vilsack reached out to Sherrod to apologize and offer her a new job with the agency. (As of this writing, it’s not clear whether she will return.) What Vilsack apparently did not have when he made the decision to fire Sherrod was all the facts, nor the context of the remarks and the history involved.

In making decisions about workplace conduct, history and context are vital. Certainly an error in judgment was made that needed to be quickly corrected and an apology issued—as it was. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes and have the capacity to grow. And where values such as integrity are concerned, when we make mistakes, we must admit them, fix them, apologize and move on. Ironically, that appears to be the point of Sherrod’s initial statement.

Stephen Paskoff is president and CEO of Atlanta-based ELI Inc., a provider of ethics and compliance learning solutions. He can be reached at info@eliinc.com.