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LIVE & KICKING
BY Tony Sewell
Is Condoleezza Rice the end of blackness?
I remember attending a firebrand black Nationalist meeting last year when a speaker got up and said no way on earth would they allow a black man to become President of the United States. However, what about a woman?
In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, talking through one of her black male characters, says: “Well, you know what dey say. Uh white man and uh n***ger woman is the freest thing on earth! Dey do as dey please.”
ATTITUDES
This quote is fascinating. It refers right back to slavery, and although it is uttered by rightly resentful enslaved black men, it speaks volumes particularly about our attitude to someone as successful as Condoleezza Rice.
Black men may well feel that the people who seem to have power over them are white men and black women. Not only do they have more autonomy but are they conspiring together against the black man?
There is also the implication that just as he gets a hard time from, say, his white boss, he will equally get grief from his black woman indoors.
It isn’t surprising that most African American men do not like Condoleezza Rice, not because of her politics but because of her asexual coldness.
In her book The End Of Blackness‚ Debra Dickerson says: “National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice epitomises the loveless, over-accomplished black woman home alone with her bulging resumé. No one wants her for anything except her mind.
“Like other over-achieving black women, she’s no doubt stood in lonely equality with her white male peers and heard them lament the lack of women with whom to dally.
“To white men she’s not a woman. To black men she’s not a f***able woman; even the vaunted black penis cannot bridge the chasm between them. What black masculinity does to white me, black female competence does to black men.”
Some black commentators have described the relationship between her and George Bush as slave master and his mistress.
Perversely, these commentators think that because they would never want to sleep with her, then their male competitor with a small penis – the white man – would show interest. It tells us more about the teller than the tale.
No, as we have said, there is no sex from Condoleezza. She is somewhere between Bush’s nanny and another one of his drinking chums with a skirt.
It would be easier to deal with Ms Rice as a helpless victim oppressed by a bunch of white bigots. The problem is that she’s just as bigoted as her boss. She isn’t someone’s lackey but was driving foreign policy from the front.
MYTH
According to commentator Bonnie Geer, there is a myth of Condoleezza Rice, written in the New Statesman.
Raised in the black, middle-class enclave of Titusville, Alabama, which was brimming with achievers, Dr Rice simply applied herself.
Her supporters point out that she has not got where she is because of race. But Condi’s career also owes much to the climate created by the civil rights and women’s movements, and the federal government’s push towards affirmative action.
Her initial fellowship at Stanford, where she became a distinguished member of the faculty in the School of Politics, was paid for with university funds reserved for the minority faculty, while her professorship in the Political Science department was created for the customary national search process. These writers can’t understand how someone who benefited from the protest movements in the Sixties should now be opposing measures which helped them up.
The answer is simple: she belongs to a different class and feels she is now free enough to be what she wants to be – and the first thing to go out of the window was her sex.
BY Tony Sewell
Is Condoleezza Rice the end of blackness?
I remember attending a firebrand black Nationalist meeting last year when a speaker got up and said no way on earth would they allow a black man to become President of the United States. However, what about a woman?
In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, talking through one of her black male characters, says: “Well, you know what dey say. Uh white man and uh n***ger woman is the freest thing on earth! Dey do as dey please.”
ATTITUDES
This quote is fascinating. It refers right back to slavery, and although it is uttered by rightly resentful enslaved black men, it speaks volumes particularly about our attitude to someone as successful as Condoleezza Rice.
Black men may well feel that the people who seem to have power over them are white men and black women. Not only do they have more autonomy but are they conspiring together against the black man?
There is also the implication that just as he gets a hard time from, say, his white boss, he will equally get grief from his black woman indoors.
It isn’t surprising that most African American men do not like Condoleezza Rice, not because of her politics but because of her asexual coldness.
In her book The End Of Blackness‚ Debra Dickerson says: “National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice epitomises the loveless, over-accomplished black woman home alone with her bulging resumé. No one wants her for anything except her mind.
“Like other over-achieving black women, she’s no doubt stood in lonely equality with her white male peers and heard them lament the lack of women with whom to dally.
“To white men she’s not a woman. To black men she’s not a f***able woman; even the vaunted black penis cannot bridge the chasm between them. What black masculinity does to white me, black female competence does to black men.”
Some black commentators have described the relationship between her and George Bush as slave master and his mistress.
Perversely, these commentators think that because they would never want to sleep with her, then their male competitor with a small penis – the white man – would show interest. It tells us more about the teller than the tale.
No, as we have said, there is no sex from Condoleezza. She is somewhere between Bush’s nanny and another one of his drinking chums with a skirt.
It would be easier to deal with Ms Rice as a helpless victim oppressed by a bunch of white bigots. The problem is that she’s just as bigoted as her boss. She isn’t someone’s lackey but was driving foreign policy from the front.
MYTH
According to commentator Bonnie Geer, there is a myth of Condoleezza Rice, written in the New Statesman.
Raised in the black, middle-class enclave of Titusville, Alabama, which was brimming with achievers, Dr Rice simply applied herself.
Her supporters point out that she has not got where she is because of race. But Condi’s career also owes much to the climate created by the civil rights and women’s movements, and the federal government’s push towards affirmative action.
Her initial fellowship at Stanford, where she became a distinguished member of the faculty in the School of Politics, was paid for with university funds reserved for the minority faculty, while her professorship in the Political Science department was created for the customary national search process. These writers can’t understand how someone who benefited from the protest movements in the Sixties should now be opposing measures which helped them up.
The answer is simple: she belongs to a different class and feels she is now free enough to be what she wants to be – and the first thing to go out of the window was her sex.
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