Condoleeza Rice Addresses The Issue Of Race In America In Straightforward Way
In an interview with the Washington Times she makes a straightforward and honest assesment of the race issue – without the type of vitriolic condemnation that often accompanies the subject:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national “birth defect” that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country’s very founding.
“Black Americans were a founding population,” she said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”
As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that.”
“That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today,” she said.
She goes on to say that there has also been enormous progress concerning race. progress that has allowed her to become a very prominent person on the world scene.
Read the whole thing. Rice talks about the Olympics and the possibility of a boycott because of China’s repression of Tibet. Her take? What would be the point? Our boycott of the 1980 Olympics didn’t change a thing as far as Russian policy went toward Afghanistan and only hurt athletes that had trained their entire lives for the event. More refreshing common sense.
It’s an interesting piece. Could this be the first shot fired at the VP spot?
