Is This a Parody?Or is Eugene Robinson just
this foolish?
Like a lot of African Americans, I've long wondered what the deal was with Condoleezza Rice and the issue of race. How does she work so loyally for George W. Bush, whose approval rating among blacks was measured in a recent poll at a negligible 2 percent? How did she come to a worldview so radically different from that of most black Americans? Is she blind, is she in denial, is she confused -- or what?Or could it be that she's just a heck of a lot smarter than most black Americans? Not to put too fine a point on it, but let's remember that a majority of black Americans
think OJ was innocent. Are they blind, are they in denial, are they confused -- or what?
When she reminisces, she talks of piano lessons and her brief attempt at ballet -- not of Connor setting his dogs loose on brave men, women and children marching for freedom, which is the Birmingham that other residents I met still remember. A friend of Rice's, Denise McNair, was one of the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. That would have left a deep scar on me, but Rice can speak of that atrocity without visible emotion.Well, Eugene, just because you get all doe-eyed over something that happened 42 years ago, doesn't mean that everybody does. And perhaps what Ms Rice remembers is that
Bull Connor was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat?
But then why are the top echelons of her State Department almost entirely white? "That's an artifact of foreign policy," she said in the interview. "It's not been a very diverse profession." In other words, there aren't enough qualified minority candidates. I wondered how many times those words have been used as a lame excuse.
One of the things she somehow missed was that in Titusville and other black middle-class enclaves, a guiding principle was that as you climbed, you were obliged to reach back and bring others along. Rice has been a foreign policy heavyweight for nearly two decades; she spent four years in the White House as the president's national security adviser. In the interview, she mentioned just one black professional she has brought with her from the National Security Council to State.I hate to be the one to point this out, but the Secretary of State before Rice was black as well. Indeed, blacks have held far more power in the Bush Administration than they ever did in the Clinton Administration. While decrying racism, Robinson seems to be saying that Rice should have promoted people solely because of their race (as long as that race was black).
Of course, this just points out something that I've hammered over and over again: To liberals, it's not racism if it's anti-white, it's not sexism if it's anti-male, and it's not discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation if it's anti-straight.
As we were flying to Alabama, Rice said an interesting thing. She was talking about the history of the civil rights movement, and she said, "If you read Frederick Douglass, he was not petitioning from outside of the institutions but rather demanding that the institutions live up to what they said they were. If you read Martin Luther King, he was not petitioning from outside, he was petitioning from inside the principles and the institutions, and challenging America to be what America said that it was."
The civil rights movement came from the inside? I always thought the Edmund Pettus Bridge was outside.Gawd, even his jokes are lame.
When Rice was growing up, her father stood guard at the entrance of her neighborhood with a rifle to keep the Klan's nightriders away. But that was outside the bubble. Inside the bubble, Rice was sitting at the piano in pretty dresses to play Bach fugues. It sounds like a wonderful childhood, but one that left her able to see the impact that race has in America -- able to examine it and analyze it -- but not to feel it.He doesn't have a clue as to what Rice meant by inside.
