Race in America - Post Commentary

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?
Rice's parents tried their best to shelter their only daughter from Jim Crow racism, and they succeeded. Forty years later, Rice shows no bitterness when she recalls her childhood in a town whose streets were ruled by the segregationist police chief Bull Connor. "I've always said about Birmingham that because race was everything, race was nothing," she said in an interview on the flight home.
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.
She doesn't deny that race makes a difference. "We all look forward to the day when this country is race-blind, but it isn't yet," she told reporters in Birmingham. Later she added, "The fact that our society is not colorblind is a statement of fact."
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.
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."
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.
Saturday, November 5, 2005; Page A17
Eugene Robinson [op-ed, Oct. 25] thinks that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has a worldview different from other African Americans because she doesn't understand the African American experience. As a white American, I, too, have trouble understanding the African American experience as defined by Robinson.
I have trouble understanding what is wrong with confronting racial inequality by overcoming barriers and achieving great things, by remembering and honoring the struggles of the past, or by simply building self-confidence and self-esteem as a child by learning to play Bach fugues on the piano.
Whatever a majority of African Americans may feel about George W. Bush and his policies, how does Rice's being a Republican make it so easy to dismiss this extraordinary woman's rise from segregated Birmingham to one of the most powerful positions in this country? Do you have to be a Democrat to be an authentic African American? If that is what Robinson believes, who is really inside the bubble?
-- Stefan Silzer
I would like to attempt to answer Silzer’s comments regarding Robinson’s October 25th article. Silzer claims to be unable to ‘understand the African American experience as defined by Robinson”. He goes further suggesting that the ‘realty’ is one in which people refrain from attempting to “overcome barriers and achieve great things… or by building self-confidence…as a child by… play [ing] piano”.
Unfortunately the reality for African Americans in this nation is not that simple. While we white people have the privilege to believe that if people work hard they can accomplish anything, people of color in this nation are faced with the additional burdens of active and subtle racism.
Children whom are from working class backgrounds rarely have the leisure time to spend playing instruments and are instead working to supplement their parent’s income. Furthermore, they are faced with greater obstacles in admission to higher education due to culturally biased tests, poor high school educations, and nepotistic selection practices. People of color routinely pay more for housing and cars. This list goes on.
As much as we would like to chalk racial inequality up to individual shortcomings, I think our nation’s history and current state speak volumes to the fact that the American dream does not exist for everyone.
- krissy haltinner