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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6064
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 08:36 pm: | 
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Commentary: Condi Rice Doesn’t Utilize the Asset That Distinguishes Her Race and Gender: Empathy
Date: Wednesday, June 27, 2007
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee,
BlackAmericaWeb.com
Back in 2002, I could tell that Condoleezza Rice didn’t appreciate me asking her the woman question.
That was when members of the William Monroe Trotter Group, the leading group of black columnists in the United States, met with Rice at the White House. Everyone else was posing questions of security, Iraq and Middle East policy -- all carefully crafted to avoid a dressing-down from her if one of us asked a question hadn’t been subjected to an intense intellectual weigh-in.
Me, I went for it and asked the simple question. I asked Rice what strengths she believed she could bring to her job -- she was national security advisor then -- as a woman.
At first she said that was hard to know since she couldn’t recreate herself as a man and see how she would have done it. I then interjected by saying that she had seen how the men had done it -- meaning that since she was in a job that had been mostly held by men, there was no need to transgender herself to answer that question, as there were many male examples before her.
Rice then admitted that my question was a fair one. She said that part of her strength was in bringing various sides together. While she didn’t want to wholeheartedly admit that bringing sides together was a woman thing -- and while I don’t necessarily agree that’s a woman thing -- I figured that was the best answer I was going to get out of her.
Turns out even that pithy answer from the future Secretary of State, like mostly everything else that has come out of this administration, was nowhere close to being true.
Rice’s loyalty to the Bush doctrine, instead of whatever loyalty she might have had to the ideals of bringing people together, continues to evaporate in the explosions of the Iraq War -- a war that killed thousands of U.S. troops and Iraqis, and is now transforming scores of Iraqis from citizens into refugees.
This week, Western and Arab reporters grilled Rice, who is in France, about euphemistic statements she made about the Iraq War and the Mideast a year ago, in which she likened all the suffering and bloodshed to democratic “birth pangs,” and not chaos wrought by U.S. ineptness and interference.
And if Rice united any sides, it was al-Qaida and the Iraqis who have now allowed anger to metastasize into terrorism.
Yet, I have to wonder whether things would have turned out this way if Rice wasn’t trying so hard to conceal what some would call her woman side or, for that matter, her black side. That’s the side that sees; the side that empathizes with people more than ideology. That’s the side that knows that, to the thousands of Iraqi women who have been driven from their homes by insurgent violence into prostitution in Syria, democracy means nothing without stability.
Then again, maybe its Rice’s determination not to see that has gotten her where she is today.
That saddens me because besides having intellect and ability, having empathy is the thing that ought to distinguish powerful women and powerful black people. It’s the thing that ought to make us celebrate when a black person or a woman gets the kind of job that Rice has; that finally, someone will help remove the invisibility that struggling people are too often relegated to for the convenience of others.
But not Rice.
Rice is, no doubt, a smart woman. But I don’t look for women like her to merely dazzle their bosses with their intellect. I look for women like Rice to see the world differently than the white men who run it. I expect for them to not see their womanliness as something that they must hide, or as a defect, but as an asset that has the potential to enrich and to strengthen.
I look for them to at least see suffering of people like the Iraqis, and not to persist in forcing ideological visions on them that don’t fit -- and then persist in covering up the pain of that ill fit with feel-good talk about birth pangs and the like.
Then again, judging from my encounter with Rice six years ago, I’m almost convinced that she doesn’t care about bringing anything new to the table as much as she cares about fitting in at the table.
If that’s the case, then I have to say congratulations. Well done.
http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud/weathersbee627 |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4765
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 11:27 am: |
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Are you Tonyaa Weathersbee? |
Renata
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Renata
Post Number: 2328
Registered: 08-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 09:16 pm: |
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I think in this case, Condoleeza is a typical political type. When asked a very simple question (some that may only require a "yes" or "no" answer), they have a way of giving an answer (sometimes a very long winded one) that doesn't even answer the damn question.
I like the person who wrote this article...very true. |
Troy
Veteran Poster
Username: Troy
Post Number: 671
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 10:07 am: |
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Hi Tonya and everyone else.
Please do not copy and paste material on these discussion boards if you do not own the copyright -- even if you include a link to the original source. Of course if you have permission to post the aricle please indicate that permssion was given.
Going forward, simply excerpt a small portion of the article to make your point and paste a link to the to allow others to read the entire article.
I know posting the article makes it a lot easier for readers and in many cases the copyright owner does not mind as more people are exposed to the the article or the web site where the article is posted.
Thanks everyone for continuing to participate. Just help me out here by giving me one less problem to deal with....
Peace |
Troy
Veteran Poster
Username: Troy
Post Number: 672
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 10:25 am: |
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The article is interesting. Diversity is a strange thing: typically those in power do not want people with a variety of opinions they want people who will get with the program and tow the party line.
The most successful Black people are those that do not upset the status quo. Just because you are Black does not mean you bring divesity. The most successful Blacks, in corporations and govenment, are successful, in general, because they fit in and make those around them feel comfortable.
Managaing diversity is very difficult most entitles don't really want diversity. Most people are unable to tolerate divergent opinions, styles and beliefs.
This is the reason so much Black talent goes to waste in corporations and why many prominent Black people are accused of not acting Black (whatever that means) or supporting those behind them... These are not the traits that got them to where they are in the first place.
I got a very interesting book on Condi ce as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power by Marcus Mabry http://books.aalbc.com/biograph.htm is has some good family photos and appears to be a deep look into the life of one of tha planets most powerful women.
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Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4796
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 03:58 pm: |
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Troy:
You make it sound like she is working at a cookie factory or something. Condoleeza Rice is a war criminal. They hung people for doing what she did at Nuremberg.
Now because she has on a suit and has power it plumb tickles you to death. I can't believe it. Just like when Negroes was just so tickled to death to have another Black on the Supreme Court they overlooked the dreadful record of Clarence Thomas.
Well, he's kicking middle class negroes in the butt, too, now what do you think.
Oh, but he has Honorable before his name.
Man!
This is the reason so much Black talent goes to waste in corporations
(Black talent is not being wasted in corporations. Those Negroes are doing just what they are supposed to do--usually window dressing or being handling community relations. It's just what I would have somebody whose talent is mostly bootlicking to do) |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 9097
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 05:48 pm: |
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Who do you know that were tickled to death about about Clarence Thomas being appointed to the supreme Court, chrishayden? You just pull things out of the air to prate about. If ever anyone is a pariah in the black community, its Thomas. He's the poster boy for Uncle Tomism. If Condoleeza has acquired some power, more power to her. Just because she doesn't filter it through the sieve of race doesn't not dimish the fact that she is empowered. Power per se is what it is. |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6113
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 08:45 pm: |
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The New York Times just did a piece on that book too and here’s one of the photos
Madame Secretary
By Jonathan Freedland
July 1, 2007
TWICE AS GOOD
Condoleezza Rice and
Her Path to Power.
By Marcus Mabry.
Illustrated. 362 pp.
Modern Times/Rodale.
$27.50.
It is one of the paradoxes of the Bush administration that the senior official whose face is among the most recognized around the world, and who is consistently ranked as the most popular at home, is perhaps the least known. Condoleezza Rice has regularly enjoyed poll numbers 20 points higher than those of the man she serves; in 2006 she topped an Esquire survey of the women men would most like to take as a date to a dinner party, ahead of Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Aniston. Yet, while most Americans probably have a good sense of what Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell have stood for, not many could confidently set out the beliefs of the current secretary of state. She is highly visible, speaks often and yet is strangely enigmatic.
“Twice as Good,” by Marcus Mabry, the chief of correspondents for Newsweek, works hard to solve the Rice puzzle. It digs deep into the story of her family, including her slave ancestors, and the hugely influential figure of her father, the Rev. John Rice. We follow the family’s journey from segregation in Alabama to educational opportunity in Colorado and finally to California. We learn much — with a detail uncommon in a political biography — of her almost frighteningly intense childhood.
An only child, Rice was groomed for greatness from birth. Initially home-schooled, the 4-year-old Condi would, Mabry reports, “put on her coat, leave her front door, walk to the end of the walk and then turn around and come back inside the house.” When she wasn’t studying, she would practice the piano for hours on end: she could read music before she could read. She didn’t fidget; she didn’t seem to need to go to the bathroom like other children. Her mother would let her play with the children across the street only if their doors were open and she could see her daughter at all times. Mrs. Rice once told a friend she would have no other children because she couldn’t take “this love” from Condoleezza.
Mabry supplies details like these for every chapter of his subject’s life. He tells us of her weakness for athletic men, especially “bad boy” types, and of the succession of football players she dated in college (though Rice has succeeded in keeping her later private life private). He charts her academic career, including her rocky spell as the youngest-ever provost of Stanford University, appointed at just 38, and of her earlier stint as a Soviet specialist on the first George Bush’s National Security Council. Yet still one feels oddly estranged from her.
That is not because Mabry has failed to get to the heart of Condoleezza Rice. Rather, it is because of the chilly steel he finds there. His search for vulnerabilities or doubt reveals only a cold, unwavering self-discipline. One of the book’s most telling moments comes when the 17-year-old Rice realizes, after surrendering her childhood to the goal of becoming a concert pianist, that she is not, after all, good enough. Her teacher ruled that while “technically competent ... she was too detached emotionally to be a great pianist.” She needed “disciplined abandon”: she had the discipline all right, she just couldn’t let herself go. Yet even this major blow barely troubles her. She simply decides to pursue another goal.
All of this is connected inseparably with race. Mabry, himself African-American and sharply alive to even the subtlest distinctions between different black experiences, shows that Rice inherited her father’s view of racism: don’t deny it, but don’t be defined by it. Opposed to the activism of Martin Luther King, John Rice saw individual effort, rather than collective action, as the path to black empowerment: be twice as good, and you can make it. Individual willpower became his daughter’s touchstone. She believes in will, and she certainly believes in power.
These insights help make sense of what is perhaps the most crucial period of Rice’s career, when she served as Bush’s first-term national security adviser. Mabry shows how several key Rice traits meshed with the failings of the rest of the Bush team, to disastrous effect. A group of national security principals that (bar Powell) was consumed with the hubristic determination to invade Iraq despite multiple warnings of calamitous results needed to hear a contrary voice. But Rice, like them, had an iron faith in her own beliefs. While the White House disdained those from what one official once notably called the “reality-based community,” so Rice had learned in segregated Birmingham to believe “that what mattered was what you and your self-defined society believed, because the world beyond was often wrong in its most critical judgments.” Back then the cocoon was the Rice family and its immediate circle; now it was the Bush administration. But in each case, Condi shut out what she did not want to hear.
If she was temperamentally ill-equipped to bring to the security council the skepticism so desperately required in that prewar period, her relationship with the president ensured she would never play the role of dissenter. Mabry describes the bonding of Bush and Rice before the 2000 campaign as nothing less than a courtship. The now legendary story of her Freudian slip at a Washington dinner party when she referred to the president as “my husb-” has stuck partly because it seems to convey some emotional truth. Even Rice’s own friends speak of a woman whose usual good judgment deserts her when it comes to Bush: “She cannot say no to that guy.”
It is surely this bond that explains the ideological gymnastics that make Rice so hard to pin down. She was, first, a realist, then a neoconservative enabler as Bush’s national security adviser and now a pragmatic cryptorealist as secretary of state (pushing for talks with Iran, for example). The obvious explanation for her changing course is her loyalty to the president. Mabry is kinder, suggesting that her conversion to the necessity of democratic transformation of the Middle East was genuine: she was “a realist who had been mugged by 9/11.”
Even if sincere, Rice emerges as badly flawed. She presided over a dysfunctional security apparatus, never able to pull together the warring Defense and State Departments and regularly outmaneuvered by Rumsfeld. It’s also clear that she ignored repeated warnings of both the seriousness of the Qaeda threat and the risks of an Iraq invasion. The former arms inspector David Kay calls her the worst national security adviser since the office was created, and the verdict seems harsh but not wholly unwarranted.
Rice’s defense would rest on her extraordinary presentational skills, her fluency and poise under inquisitorial fire. So what if she is more a synthesizer of others’ ideas than an original thinker, runs this logic; she has a sure political touch. Except even that is in doubt. Caught shopping for shoes in New York as the corpses floated in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Rice explained that “I didn’t think about my role as a visible African-American national figure. I just didn’t think about it.” Given what we know of her upbringing, that isn’t psychologically surprising — but it showed a political tin ear.
None of this would matter much if Mabry’s subject were merely a departing secretary of state. But it’s plain, even from the jacket photo of a 9-year-old Rice posing outside the White House, that this is a book about a woman who just might become president. She certainly has the right profile for it: moderate on abortion and gay rights, firm on guns, a Californian, Rice could someday be the Schwarzenegger Republican the party is looking for. There is no doubt that she has the self-discipline and confidence. She has already come so far; who would bet against her going farther?
Jonathan Freedland is an editorial page columnist for The Guardian.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/books/review/Freedland-t.html?em&ex=1183262400&en=476ceadb11af040a&ei=5087%0A
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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6114
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007 - 09:03 pm: |
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Hi Tonya and everyone else.
Please do not copy and paste material on these discussion boards...
Ooops...I JUST read this, my bad! |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 9413
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 05:14 am: |
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Condi Rice headed the National Security Council during the very WORST attack on American soil by a foreign aggressor in the nation's HISTORY.
Rice: "...no one could have predicted that terrorists would use airplanes as missiles.". WTF???
Then she got PROMOTED to the traditionally lofty position of Secretary of State.
Rice has been a primary advisor, architect and, now, figurehead during the nation's very worst foreign policy fiasco.
Let's be really REAL here: The ONLY reason this chick's name (and A$$) is NOT be burned in effigy is, ironically, she's female...and BLACK. |
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