Why I can't join in the applause for Condoleezza Rice's 'grievance' speech
OPINION - It's official. I am the only person in America who didn't love the Condolleezza Rice speech...
I can’t know for sure who it is that Secretary Rice and other conservatives have in mind when they continually accuse unnamed people of harboring “grievance and entitlement,” rather than the good old fashioned American can-do spirit, but I can certainly take a guess.
There is, to be sure, a conservative narrative about America, that nothing that has ever happened in this nation’s history was truly flawed. Even slavery and Jim Crow (not to mention on this Labor Day, the era when children toiled in sweat shops and, with no unions to fight back, the workday was as long as the boss said it was, and employees had no rights employers were bound to respect) were, in their own way, part of the unending march of American exceptionalism.
In that narrative, black Americans who were psychologically and physically brutalized by Jim Crow and segregation, and workers of all races who lacked basic healthcare, decent wages or a dignified retirement, simply used their privations as a springboard to greater self-reliance and Americanness — back in the “good old days” before government came along and turned black and poor Americans into lazy, dependent welfare cheats.
To many on the right, the only things wrong with America are the fact that the New Deal, the Great Society and the 1960s happened, with the heavy hand of government interrupting the free market’s unique forces, which by the way, would have taken care of that Woolworth’s lunch counter problem on their own.
Black conservatives almost to a person, tend to believe it too: that evil, government “welfare,” though utilized mostly by white Americans, became black America’s new enslavement; an excuse to abandon the “good old-fashioned” values of faith, hard work and family, and to wallow in what Rice in her speech, pointedly called dependency and “grievance.”
It was a little depressing hearing Condi Rice, about whom there is a great deal I respect, join in with the “they just want handouts” crowd.
For the record, I don’t believe black Americans should spend their lives wallowing in the past, or using this country’s ugly racial history as an excuse for failure. My parents were immigrants, and the side of the family that did experience slavery (my mother’s) did so in another country, not the U.S. And yes, America is a great country — though I’m not sure why so many of our citizens seem to need constant reinforcement of that fact from politicians and speech makers.
And I get that name-checking segregation as a way of reassuring the right that “all is forgiven,” so it’s safe to whisk away the safety net for those left in the margins of society, is part of the standard script of black conservatism (just like inveighing against “amnesty”  is the price of admission for conservative Latinos). Former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain did it in his autobiography, writing in This is Herman Cain! that when confronted with “white” and “colored” water fountains as a teen, his response was to note that the water in the “colored” fountain tasted just as good.
I get it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport
