It’s official. I am one of the only people in America who didn’t love the Condoleezza Rice RNC speech.
Indeed, Rice’s address on the third day of the Republican National Convention Wednesday received a rapturous reception from the assembled delegates, and from pundits. In fact, but for some grousing about a bit of lipstick on her teeth, I’ve heard nothing but praise for the former secretary of state’s presentation.
On the upside, the speech was beautifully written and well delivered (even if the opening lines were a painful reminder of the part Rice played in an administration that missed the blatant signals preceding the 9/11 terror attacks — I think the presidential daily brief was titled, “Bin Laden Determined To Attack the United States?..”) But it was on the subjects of race, segregation, and the new favorite Republican buzzwords, “envy” and “grievance,” that Rice’s words truly left me cold.
The nation’s first black female national security adviser and secretary of state made soaring references to what really is the genius of America: the fact that what “really unites us — is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion – it is an idea — and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things. That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going.” On that, I join the “Amen” chorus.
She revisited her statement that the country overcame the “birth defect of slavery and segregation” — which, when she made it years ago, caused conservatives to erupt in anger. But not this time — this time, they roared in approval.
Toward the end of her speech, Rice told the crowd, and the nation: “on a personal note – a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham – the most segregated big city in America — her parents can’t take her to a movie theater or a restaurant – but they make her believe that even though she can’t have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter — she can be president of the United States and she becomes the Secretary of State.”
Her references to America’s diversity and historic promise certainly resonated inside the Tampa Bay Forum, and she received thunderous applause from the crowd.
Though I was there as an observer, not a participant, I found myself incredibly uncomfortable, standing amid that roaring, overwhelmingly white crowd, as they reveled in hearing a black woman, whose childhood friend was one of the four young girls killed in the infamous firebombing of a Birmingham church in 1963, seem to excuse historic wrongs to further the unending conservative mission of patting America on the back.
She then immediately added this:
“Ours has never been a narrative of grievance and entitlement. We have not believed that I am doing poorly because you are doing well. We have not been envious of one another and jealous of each other’s success. Ours has been a belief in opportunity and a constant battle – long and hard — to extend the benefits of the American dream to all – without regard to circumstances of birth.”
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