Condi Rice, Cool As Ice
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It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma: How can African-Americans gain power and influence within the Republican Party – giving them a welcome option and an insurance policy against being taken for granted by the Democratic Party – when the GOP seems so indifferent, if not hostile, toward African-Americans?
I don’t have the answer. But it might help if Republicans had more black members who are as introspective as Condoleezza Rice appears to be on her book tour. Rice, author of “Extraordinary, Ordinary People,” doesn’t come off like the stereotypical “color-blind” black Republican, someone who acts like 40 years of Civil Rights has wiped out 400 years of discrimination. As a woman who grew up in Bull Connor’s “Bombingham,” Ala. – and a childhood friend with one of the four girls killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church – she says her views can’t be easily categorized despite her party affiliation.
She rejects any notion that black GOPers are automatically handkerchief-head, house Negroes. “I really don’t care,” Rice said in an AOL interview. “I don’t need anybody to tell me how to be black. We don’t really need arguments about what it is to be authentically black. That is nothing but a tool for a silly conversation.”
I couldn’t agree more. Because like Chris Rock said, way too black folks are “keepin’ it real” … as in “real ignorant.” Rice says “the witches’ brew of race and poverty” is holding back a generation of students.
Forget about which party she belongs to. I’d like to see more replications of her reality: piano player at 3; high school grad at 15; tenured Stanford professor at 32; youngest-ever Stanford provost at 38; first-ever woman National Security Advisor at 46; Secretary of State at 50.
As a defender of affirmative action AND the right to bear arms, she doesn’t fit neatly into preconceived notions. And when it comes to the never-ending topic of race, she correctly states that folks on the left and the right are “too easily driven to calling each other racists.” She adds: “There is nothing that is a bigger hot button than to question somebody’s motives and to call it racist, and unfortunately people do it on both sides.”
I don’t know why she’s a Republican, though I agree that blacks should have a presence in the GOP. Whatever.
Condi is cool with me.
DS
