Condoleezza Rice, Are You Black Enough?

Condoleezza Rice was once the U.S. Secretary of State in the administration of Republican President George W. Bush. She left the position as one of the most bloodthirsty Secretaries of State of the 20th and 21st centuries.

 In the musical docu-tragi-comedy Courting Condi and the documentary American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi, British filmmaker Sebastian Doggart slams Rice as a war criminal who signed off on the CIA’s torture programs against Iraqi citizens during Bush’s Iraq War.

As a result, Rice was forced to withdraw as commencement speaker at Rutgers University in May 2014 after students and faculty protested that she was not only a war criminal, but also a human rights violator and author of genocide practices in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

They especially noted her authorization of the CIA to persecute Iraqis by, for example, pulling out their fingernails with pliers, putting towels over their mouths and faces and pouring water over the towels, and attaching car battery cables to their penises or vaginas, then turning on the car’s motor.

They argued that a person who lied 56 times to the American public about why the U.S. should attack Iraq and caused over 800,000 macabre deaths is not pure or innocent enough to inspire future leaders of America.

Evidently, even the sweetest kitten in a child’s arms can spark feelings too deep for tears Rice, as war criminal, can never feel.

However, what interests us now is not Rice the war criminal, but the naïve comments she made recently on the television show Fox and Friends, hosted by white right-winger Brian Kilmeade. After criticizing democrats for playing the race card during the midterm elections, she responded to a question about what it means “not to be black enough.”

“First of all,” Rice answered with a mantra she has used numerous times before, “does it mean that you’re not acting black if you speak well and you’re interested in progress? What are we doing to our kids when we tell them that their ethnic identity has to make them unsuccessful? That, to me, is really a racist thing to say. And I’ve been asked many times myself, and I say, ‘Look, I’ve been black all my life. You don’t have to tell me how to be black.’”

Yes, we do have to tell you how to be black, Condi! Because if an angry and hurt Rice thinks she’s black enough, when she’s not, she might believe it because she still doesn’t understand what it means “not to be black enough.” So let’s see whether, for the umpteenth time, we can give her some clues.

First, being black is not limited to DNA. It might not even be limited to skin color, because some whites with white DNA act blacker than many blacks with black DNA. Consequently, blackness does not consist of one or two elements, but of an assortment of pieces mixed and merged into a delightful whole, like the ingredients in chocolate cake.

A black person, a truly black person, spends time in the black community, knowing and loving her people. A truly black person feels as comfortable speaking hip hop as she does talking standard English. In fact, she immerses herself so much in black culture that when black America cries, she cries; when black America hurts, she hurts; when black America raises her voice in anger, she raises her voice in anger too.

Thus, a person is black, not because she thinks she is black, but because she is black.

What does it mean, then, “not to be black enough”? Well, she says to her beautician, “I am so unbeautiful that I want long strands of blonde straight hair woven onto my black nappy head, because that’s what white men like.”

She insists, “I went to college to learn about Plato and Jefferson, about Reagan and Vanity Fair magazine. I did not go to read the philosophy of Franz Fanon, enjoy the poetry of Nikki Giovanni or dine on neck bones, chitlins’ and brown rice for dinner.”

“Not being black enough” is similar to that fable about the black goat which lived like a white goat. One night, he and the white goat wandered into a Klan rally, thinking they could get some food. The Klansmen tied the white goat to a tree, but grabbed the black goat’s ears and hind legs, and kicked him and beat him and crucified him on a flaming cross.

Then, they cut the goat down, shot him between the eyes, cut up his body, roasted his skin, bones and organs over an open fire, and ate him as a midnight snack, while drinking milk they had squeezed brutally from the teats of the white goat.

True, the definitions are not as specific as they should be. But given the limited space, they do, hopefully, provide a nostalgic glimpse into the world of true blackness. On the other hand, they imply something horrifying about Rice.

In the past, Rice has expressed her admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr. So we can understand why she has not equaled him in nobility of character and transcendence of achievement.

Whereas King gained his fame through martyrdom, by fighting oppression and by advancing the cause of justice for the black world, to this day Rice continues to be Rice in the white right-wing world where terrorism, atrocities and the slaughter of minorities are as common as acne.

She doesn’t seem to be one of us, but another’s thing. A mask, an unknown, an airbrush of something amusing. Someone as pathetic as a brown-stained diaper.

Yet, the stigma of being “not black enough” leads to a stockpile of unfortunate consequences. Your achievements are ignored, your intellect is belittled, your abilities, however exquisite they may be, tumble in the dryer of harsh criticism.

Perhaps that’s why Bill Fletcher, Jr. former president of TransAfrica Forum denounced Rice as “very cold and distant and only black by accident.” And why The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wondered, “How did [Rice] come to a worldview so radically different from that of most black Americans?”

That’s why acclaimed actor and social activist Harry Belafonte reviled Rice and other blacks in the Bush administration as “black tyrants.”

Hence, though we cannot say without a shadow of doubt Rice is not black enough, we can conclude this point confidently: Rice, who knows so much about the white world, understands so little about the black world. And, therefore, she seems “not black enough.”