"Real" blackness


When group identity trumps personal choice
Eugene Robinson doesn't think that Condi Rice is a "real" black. Evidently skin color is supposed to come with prepackaged politics.

Like a lot of African Americans, I've long wondered what the deal was with Condoleezza Rice and the issue of race. How does she work so loyally for George W. Bush, whose approval rating among blacks was measured in a recent poll at a negligible 2 percent? 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?

After spending three days with the secretary of state and her entourage as she toured Birmingham, where she grew up in a protective bubble as the tumult of the civil rights movement swirled around her, I have a partial answer: It's as if Rice is still cosseted in her beloved Titusville, the neighborhood of black strivers where she was raised, able to see the very different reality that other African Americans experience but not to reach out of the bubble -- not able to touch that other reality, and thus not able to really understand it.

I have a hard time accepting this attitude that all blacks are supposed to be liberal or else they are not truly black.

Why is it that the only people publicly making distinctions based on "race" are liberal?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - October 27, 2005 at 04:45 AM  Tag


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