Monday, March 31, 2008

Rice on Race: Right, Not Wright   [Lisa Schiffren]

Sometimes we have to say something nice about politicians. At the moment I have a great urge to point out one of the salient virtues of our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

In an interview last week, Ms. Rice offered a very different, infinitely more personal, less ideological, and also more proportionate understanding of the African-American experience in this country than the more high-flown, eloquent prose we have heard lately from Barack Obama and the low rage and incitement to hatred we have heard from his minister. Condi — as it sometimes seems hard to recall in face of all of her later successes — spent her childhood in the still segregated deep south, where talented and hardworking family members were subjected to routine humiliations our society generally no longer recalls. She saw both the local successes and the impoverishment and opportunity deprivation in the black community in which her parents lived. Up close and personal, she watched the legal and practical structure of segregation come down in her youth.

Rice herself seems to have been amply rewarded for merit — talent and hard work. But it wasn't just personal discipline and intelligence that set the course of her life. The choices she made made all the difference. The very fact that she became a Sovietologist, and a conservative one at that, suggests that she chose to live her life in accordance with her personal interests and goals. She did not run to bury herself in a group identity. Just the opposite, actually. Becoming a Sovietologist during the Cold War was a large statement of identification as an American, interested in studying our nation's greatest enemy. In a real sense it is precisely the opposite track from that taken by a young man raised internationally, educated at the best institutions, who chose black liberation theology as his personal religion; chose to do community organizing work in a famous black inner city, and to affiliate himself with the likes of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, product of a middle-class Philadelphia upbringing, who sees the U.S. as the world's fount of evil, in need of God's punishment. Obama went from international to tribal; while Condi moved from segregated to global. The personal implications of these directional choices suggest, in the former case, an adult's need to create an identity to match his skin; in the latter, it suggests a solid core, due partly to comfort with her identity, family, faith, and nation upon which the life/edifice of her choosing might be built.

Ms. Rice is not a Pollyanna. She isn't interested in sweeping the nation's racial past under the rug, or pretending that it was prettier than it was, or that the problems are all behind us. She makes the interesting point that blacks are not recent immigrants. They were part of America's founding, even if Europeans came here "by choice, and Africans in chains." This she describes as a national birth defect. That unlovely metaphor implies, correctly enough, a continuing lag in the opportunities for, and the accomplishments of black Americans. But this does not make America an evil and inherently racist place forever. For her the issue of race is filled with "paradox and contradiction," and still unresolved issues. Of course that is true. But it does not elicit from her a hint of the passionate hatred that Wright offers, the unrelenting gloominess that Obama offers, or the shame and distance we have heard from Michele Obama.

Why is that? Condoleezza Rice reminds us of what we know when we watch the footage of civil-rights marches and lunch counter sit-ins, where black women in hats and gloves, and black men in suits and ties protested firmly and with unassailable dignity for equality as Americans. She reminds us of what we feel when we watch Martin Luther King's call to America's higher and better self. "What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn't love and have faith in them — and that's our legacy," Ms. Rice said. I suppose that is a paradox. Or maybe it is a statement of great patriotism and patience.

Yet, she adds, "enormous progress" has been made. And that is manifest in the fact that the United States of America is represented at the highest possible levels around the world by a black woman. Though, as Republicans, we don't like to call attention to those personal details. The fact that someone from any particular background, can become Secretary of State here — whether black, female, immigrant from Nazi Germany or the Caribbean — should speak for itself. Here are some more paradoxes: Michelle Obama was never proud to see that. And the race-baiters inside the black community and among the intellectual left hate America more now than they did when no one would have blamed them for it.

03/31 08:50 AMShare