Who watched?

The few minutes I saw this morning, I think Kerry started raking her over the coals.

Why are people saying that she is Dubya "woman". :rolleyes:

TTT/Washington Post on Condi
 

My thoughts on Condi are similar to this author's. I'm not a fan of her employer, the administration, or its foreign policy. But I do appreciate the fact that she seems to blow stereotypes out of the water.

Nobody's Archetype

By Eugene Robinson

Tuesday, February 8, 2005; Page A23


I thought that by now we had grown accustomed to seeing Condoleezza Rice on the public stage, after her four years as a wartime president's national security adviser. But her first foreign trip as secretary of state has been compelling to watch, and I think that has to do with race, image, archetype and all the things she is not.

She is not the first black U.S. secretary of state, nor the first woman to hold the office. (And that's a sentence I thought I'd never get to write.) But she is the first black woman, and that brings into play the whole optician's kit of distorting lenses through which African American women are viewed, both at home and around the world. None of those lenses gives us the view we think we should be getting, and so we try another, and another. Someday we'll give up and take her at face value, for better or worse. I don't think much of her foreign policy or the administration she serves, but I have to give her credit for refusing to be anyone other than who she is.

She doesn't fit any of the silly, often repellent stereotypes that black women get tagged with:

There's "Angry Black Woman," personified by Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, the famous-for-being-famous contestant on Donald Trump's "The Apprentice." Unlike Omarosa, Rice doesn't fly off the handle at the slightest provocation or sideways glance. She isn't constantly telling someone off or storming out of the room, or "assuming the position" of hands on hips, neck moving side to side, as the late Isabel Sanford used to do as "Weezy" in the old sitcom "The Jeffersons." When Sen. Barbara Boxer grilled Rice at her confirmation hearings with appropriate, tough questions about Iraq, Rice flashed anger only with her eyes. Her demeanor remained as cold as steel.

There's "Jezebel," perhaps the oldest and most insulting image of all -- think of Josephine Baker in Paris, dancing in her skirt of bananas. The image of the black woman as temptress has always been there in American society, either on the surface or just underneath, and it's certainly there in Europe as well. Like most professional women, Rice declines to flaunt her sexuality in the way she dresses and behaves. But neither does she choose frumpiness. She is always put together, conservatively but with a sense of individual style. I leave further judgment to the fashion columnists.

There's "Earth Mother of Us All," which buys into the idea of black women as uniquely nurturing, patient, forgiving, supportive, long-suffering -- the notion that the black woman was put on Earth to atone for the sins of all the rest of us. (A subset image is "Nubian Queen.") Rice destroys this one. Whatever else you think of her, I can't imagine that, say, Jacques Chirac believes for one minute that she will be any warmer or more nurturing to him than her predecessor Colin Powell was.

There's "Black American Princess," and Rice flirts with this archetype -- the piano lessons in her childhood, the figure skating, the doting parents. But she departs from the script by being drawn to football, not cheerleading, and by refusing to play damsel in distress no matter what the circumstances. She may take care with her fingernails, but she's not about to get upset if she breaks one.

Condoleezza Rice is nothing if not different. She's not a Democrat, though most African American women are. She's certainly not a liberal. She obviously is race-conscious, but she puts that consciousness into a box that's more deeply hidden than the one most of us African Americans use to store race when we're on the job. People see her walking next to President Bush and there are ugly snickers of the Jezebel sort; but when Rice is escorted at social events, it is usually by Gene Washington, the former professional football player, a black man.

She is, in short, sui generis -- just like every black woman in America.

I don't give her a pass on her performance as national security adviser, and I hold her at least partly responsible for the lies the administration told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Boxer was right to hold her feet to the fire. I can't applaud Rice when she pursues policies that I believe make us more vulnerable, not safer.

But I do recognize her achievement in confounding expectations that were long overdue to be confounded. And now maybe we can begin to see black women through a lens that's not colored or distorted, but crystal clear.

Thanks for the article, ST.

Rice, like Powell before her, allows "us" to project onto her what we will. I suppose that's always likely in this country where most who rise tend to carry, to some degree, hopes and aspirations from others about what can be done.

TTT/Oh, Lawd
 

Robert Mugabe is hardly a credible source, but check this out...

HARSH WORDS




Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe launched a stinging attack Friday on U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after she described Zimbabwe as one of the world's last ``outposts of tyranny.''

By listing Zimbabwe alongside the likes of Cuba, North Korea and Iran, Rice was ''echoing her master's voice,'' Mugabe said.

''That girl born out of slave ancestry:eek: should know from the history of slavery and the present situation of blacks in America that the white man is not a friend,'' he said.

It was the first time Mugabe had responded to Rice's comments during her confirmation hearing Jan. 19. He said he had to stop himself from pronouncing Rice as ``lice.''


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Re: TTT/Oh, Lawd
 

I read this article. Interesting.

How do you all think Condy will fair with those world leaders whose culture see women in a "lesser" role?

Epitome,
I really don't think that the Republican is focused on *race*, I think that they are focused on *money* and if you have it, you are in, if you don't, you're out. So I don't think that they really care about black or white - I think that they care about green. That's why you have so many African-Americans now who have money who are Republicans. B/c at the end of the day, the Republican party is all about that trickle down economics. Give it to the rich, and hope that they make moves to let a little trickle down to everybody else.

SC