Condoleezza Rice calls US ‘a country divided’

Mar 5, 2018

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On Sunday, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called out the divisions in the United States, particularly the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

“We are a country divided,” she told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on GPS.

“We are a country that has lost a sense of common purpose. We’ve lost the sense of common narrative, and no country can hold together without that—but particularly one like the United States, in which we’re not united by ethnicity or nationality or religion,” she continued.

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Condoleezza Rice, who is now a Stanford University professor, continued saying that all people, regardless of class, shared the American Dream: “You can come from humble circumstances and do great things.”

But she said that the circumstances of birth and class for many people made it hard to achieve that dream or even hope for it when the divide is so obvious.

“People feel a prisoner of their class,” she said.

Condoleezza Rice went on to explain that, in the past, things hadn’t been so bleak for people’s hopes because there was a feeling that “you could always make it to the top, even if you started at a housing project, maybe you would be the CEO of a company one day.”

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But now, she said, that wasn’t the case.

She then went on to discuss what changes needed to occur in order for people to get that hope in the American Dream back. In particular, she pointed to the need for access to “high quality education” across social and economic classes.

“When I can look at your zip code and I can tell you are going to get a good education, can I really say, ‘It doesn’t matter where you came from, it matters where you’re going?'” Condoleezza Rice asked.