The Black Commentator: Condeleeezza's Crimes

[SemiCharmedQuark]

This is from April 2004. I think the article is mistaken in that I think the Bush Administration still feels that Dr. Rice is the key to their desired 25% of the black vote in 2008.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/84/84_cover_condi.html



:snip:

In the false glow of their delusions, Republicans truly believed that Condoleezza Rice was the ultimate political asset – a Black woman who could by her presence wash them clean of racist stench, and then perform the same ablution the next day, and the next. Rice made it easy for the super-privileged to love themselves. Unlike coy Colin Powell, Rice did not bargain or seek her own space, but settled into the very fabric of Bushness. In so doing, however, Rice lost all power of personal agency. Having surrendered everything to the Bushes, her Blackness gradually lost its value as a cloak for her patrons’ racism. The affirmative action opinions of a loyal Black servant carry little weight, as Rice discovered in January of last year when Colin Powell’s pronouncements on the subject totally eclipsed her own. Her benefactors noticed that, too. That’s when the talk of high office, stopped

Rice’s rich white admirers hugged and squeezed her too tightly – until there was nothing left but them all over her. It is common in African American circles to speak of “lost” Black souls, but in Rice’s case it is almost literally true that she doesn’t know where she stands and to whom she is speaking.

“nowing what we know about the difficulties of our own history, knowing what we know about how hard it is to build democracy, we need to be humble in singing freedom's praises,” Rice told the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, last August. “We” need to be humble about singing freedom’s praises? We Black people, who still tingle to Dr. Martin Luther King’s joyous, boundlessly exuberant “Free at last…thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!” are supposed to be humble about freedoms so dearly won? Rice’s speech was an appropriately cautionary message to privileged white Americans, that they should not so boastfully lecture other nations on America’s democratic credentials. But for a Black gathering, Rice’s words were more than strange – they were evidence of profound personal disorientation. A Black woman who doesn’t know how to talk to Black people is of limited political use to an administration that has few African American allies.

:snip: