1115.org

During the 2000 campaign and again after her appointment as National Security Advisor, the story of a seven-year old Condoleezza Rice and her mother refusing to use the “colored” dressing room in a Birmingham department store was rolled out in multiple media outlets (including a Washington Post puff piece that ran just two days before 9/11) in an effort to display diversity and “compassionate conservatism” in candidate/President Bush’s millionaire cabinet. Despite her position as the President’s top security advisor in the months before 9/11, somehow her reputation survived, even after her testimony before the 9/11 Commission revealed the failure to heed a briefing memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” In fact, at the end of the President’s first term, she received a major promotion to Secretary of State, which was of course followed by more puff pieces about growing up in the segregated deep south.

When stories first started hitting the papers about her trip to Alabama with the U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, I admit I was more concerned with the possibility of her jinxing my undefeated Crimson Tide in their big game against Tennessee than with any political consideration. But as more stories were written, the focus shifted toward civil rights. The administration was using the trip to quiet howls of minority discontent across the Gulf region and encourage democracy in the Middle East and developing world.

Beyond the incongruous juxtaposition that is Rice’s childhood versus her New York shopping trip where she bought “several thousand dollars’ worth of shoes” at Ferragamo while the Gulf Coast was battered by Hurricane Katrina, her statements on the Alabama trip would give pause to anyone with a shred of self-awareness:

Rice drew a link between Birmingham’s successes and the problems she monitors daily in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Only with democracy is there hope for a better day, she said.

She said the city might not have escaped its racist ways were it not for democratic institutions that enabled compromise to prevail over conflict.

“At one point, not that long ago, the promise of democracy seemed distant here in Alabama and throughout the American South,” she said in her Tuscaloosa speech.

“But when impatient patriots in this country finally demanded their freedom and their rights, what once seemed impossible suddenly became inevitable,” she said. “So it was in America. So it was in much of the world. And so it will be in the Middle East.”

Democracy had precious little to do with the civil rights movement; in fact, had the Civil Rights act of 1964 been up for a popular vote, it probably (certainly in Alabama) wouldn’t have passed. Lyndon Johnson placed his Presidency and his party in jeopardy by signing the bill. Of the risk to his Presidency he said:

‘If that’s the price I’ve got to pay, I will pay it gladly.’”

Of his party, he said:

“There goes the South for a generation.”

It is the Republican party, of which Rice is a member and leader, that pounced on the situation for political gain, launching the Southern Strategy. By catering to southern racists, selecting racist judges, and hampering civil rights causes, the Republican party has done everything possible to limit the freedoms of minorities. In light of her party’s record on race, Rice’s reference to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is particularly troubling. Speaking of a church bombing in Birmingham, Rice said:

“It was meant to shatter our spirit,” she said of the bombing. “It was meant to say that we shouldn’t rise up. Just a few weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King said, ‘I have a dream,’ it was meant to tell us that, no, we didn’t have a dream, and that dream was going to be denied.”

The administration that Rice helps run is built to deny the dreams of minorities, going so far as to file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court opposing affirmative action at the University of Michigan. But African Americans aren’t the only minorities, and Rice’s “impatient patriots” also include gay men and women in this country who wish nothing more than to have the same civil rights the rest of us enjoy. Their demands fall not on deaf ears, but the ears of Republicans who use them to raise money from fellow bigots. And who could forget the anti-gay-marriage amendments that appeared on ballots across the country in 2004, drawing out even more voters who just happened to vote overwhelmingly for Rice’s boss.

Republicans reaching for the mantle of the civil rights party isn’t anything new, but Rice’s linking of the struggle for civil rights in the American south with events in Iraq and Afghanistan is both new and particularly repugnant. Democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, delivered at the barrel of American guns and without any planning or international support, is possibly the greatest threat that we face moving forward. Afghanistan is backsliding toward warlord rule, an opium-based economy, and a place that is once again a haven for the Taliban. Iraq remains on the brink of civil war, one possibly-rigged election away from a nation ruled by strict Islamic law, where women and those of other sects have even fewer rights than they did under Saddam. The only way that the 1960s American south would resemble Afghanistan and Iraq is if Johnson had sent in a handful of non-English speaking French troops, while at the same time cutting electricity, water service and all federal expenditures in each state below the Mason-Dixon line. But we’re setting a bad enough example for these fledgling democracies; revisionist history might be pouring gasoline on the fire. If more people were paying attention to Rice’s trip, that might have been exactly what happened.

We’re already past the point of no return overseas, the situation so FUBAR that not even a competent President and Congress could fix it. The fight for equal rights in this country is mostly fought with words rather than suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices. Yet it’s Rice’s own party that took the opportunity offered them by Katrina to let their inner racists out. Rice was in a perfect position to have a “Sister Souljah moment” by publicly rebuking her bigoted fellow Republicans, while at the same time helping the President communicate to those displaced by Katrina that he wasn’t just paying them lip service. Her silence spoke quite loudly indeed, as did her phony photo-op weekend in Alabama.

That she managed not to jinx the Tide (6-3 winners vs. Tennessee) is small consolation. She has a job to do that doesn’t include justifying the unjustifiable and giving cover to an administration that cares as much about civil rights as they do about failing in Afghanistan and Iraq. As long as their Southern Strategy holds, nothing else really matters. If Rice sees Dr. King as a hero, she should renounce her party’s actions at once. She won’t, and that’s why her trip was only a sort of homecoming.