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RICE ON RACE

With a Salient phrase in an otherwise wide-ranging interview, the other day, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice takes the cake for the most effective description of the race thing with which we Americans find ourselves permanently saddled: a “birth defect.” That is a most apt description of our national plight.

Here are more excerpts from Rice’s most extraordinary—but right on the mark-- pronouncements on the topic: "Black Americans were a founding population…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 fathers … 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."

Previously, in poetry and prose, I thought I had developed rather clever imagery for this thing that ails us. I have said that white supremacy is in our national “DNA,” and is part of the “warp and woof” of this country. But, Condy’s “birth defect” is much more explicit and to the point of “bad”: DNA.

I am still politically opposed to Condy, not merely because she is a part of the disastrous Bush Administration, but because of her eager complicity—along with Bush, Cheney and the Neocons—in cooking the intelligence that led to the Iraq fiasco.

However, in this instance, I applaud her for supporting Barak Obama’s historic speech on our ethnic ills. She has upon occasion described her own, personal bouts with bigotry, but this is her first pronouncement with regard to the gamey genus that has glommed itself upon all of our generations.