Yesterday, Condi Rice went home to Birmingham. Let's try to leave aside the bizarreness of dragging British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to Alabama, though I can't help but mention that this would be the exact same Jack Straw who plays a starring role in the Downing Street Minutes--do you suppose they chatted about that?
Here's Jack's best bit:
"The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force." (emphasis added)
I want to focus instead on what columnist Eugene Robinson called "an intensely personal lesson in the American civil rights movement."
Now according to Dale Russakoff of the Washington Post, who did a long profile of Condi Rice which appeared in September of 2001, just before the 9-11 attacks:
"When the civil rights movement came to Birmingham, the Rice family – like middle-class blacks in general – kept its distance." (emphasis added)
Yet Robinson notes that Rice invoked that same civil rights movement when she spoke to reporters on the plane: "The history of how African Americans won civil rights, she said, illustrates 'that the United States should have a certain humility when it talks about the spread of democracy and liberty but also that freedom denied is not always denied, that, in fact, there comes a time when people are able to rise up and to get their freedom'." (emphasis added)
And despite her use of the civil rights history yesterday, Russakoff's piece makes it clear that Rice doesn't believe it was necessary:
"Condi Rice believes segregation was collapsing of its own weight before federal law dismantled it – a view she says she shared recently with official visitors from Northern Ireland. 'I said I felt that segregation had become not just a real moral problem, but it had become a real pain in the neck for some [white] people,' she says. 'People had begun to make their own little accommodations'." (emphasis added)
Russakoff, who also grew up in Birmingham at the same time, in a white neighborhood, makes Rice's view of Dr. King's movement even clearer:
"This was a time and place that shaped everyone born into it. Our generation started life in a world where 'colored' and 'white' signs demarcated every public space, where the Ku Klux Klan bombed dozens of black homes and churches with impunity, and where history, money and police power conspired mightily against change. And then that world crumbled before our eyes.
I saw all this much as history now portrays it – a mass movement of the powerless, coupled with the force of federal law, triumphing over oppression.
Condi Rice saw it differently. In her own family, she says, liberation came not through a movement but from generations of ancestors navigating oppression with individual will, wits and, eventually, wallets – long before King or the federal government took up the cause. It is one of her frustrations, she says, that people routinely assume she was beaten down or deprived as a child until the civil rights movement arrived. 'My family is third-generation college-educated,' she says with proud defiance. 'I should've gotten to where I am'."
That's the point. For the entire history of the United States, perfectly talented people with Black skin were not allowed to get to where they deserved to get--until Rosa Parks said no; until Dr. King said no more; until thousands and thousands of unnamed Southern Blacks sat down, marched, protested, tried to register to vote...
And since she was preening at the Alabama-Tennessee football game, does she not understand that there were plenty of good Black football players long before they were allowed to play at Alabama? Much less get educated there...
If she really believes that "liberation came not through a movement", and that "segregation was collapsing of its own weight before federal law dismantled it," well, she's not as smart as she's been portrayed in the press, but that's her right to believe such "revisionist history" (as she taught her boss to say).
But then she should quit hypocritically misusing the civil rights movement on behalf of Bush Administration foreign policy.
Even some of us white boys know that's in bad taste...
For more on Ms. Rice, I suggest Laura Flanders' book on Condi and the other female enablers of George W., Bushwomen.
And some of you might be interested in former NSC staffer Roger Morris's detailed examination of Ms. Rice's role in Plamegate, which can be found here.
[Update: broken links seem to be fixed now]