Just watched for the fourth time a David Feherty interview with Condoleezza Rice on the golf network. Born into the still significantly racist South of Birmingham, Alabama in 1954, she became her country’s first female Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009. She is an accomplished classical pianist, a lover of sports and golf in particular, an authority on international affairs, an academic of the first order and presently a director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. To hear her speak is to be overwhelmed by the beauty of both her intellect and spirit.
As is to be expected, she was a Democrat in her formative years but in 1982, urged on by both her father and her real life experiences, she defected to the Republican Party. America’s evolution in the 60s and 70s towards a more just society would seem to have convinced her that the Principles of its founding fathers were not mere empty platitudes but Ideals to which the bulk of the country’s White population, however tentatively, however imperfectly, was genuinely interested in honoring. To Condoleezza the notion of systemic racism, the notion that even those Whites who appear to be sympathetic are unconsciously biased, has been refuted by both history and the arc of her very own life.
When asked by Feherty how she felt about the charges made by various Black figures that both she and Colin Powell were but the simple-minded dupes of White Supremacists, she calmly denounced the “hubris” and “prejudice” of those who not only felt entitled to tell others how they ought to see the world but actually insisted they make Race the defining factor of their perspective.
Certainly aware that racism has not been wholly eradicated from the States, Condoleezza Rice is nevertheless the very epitome of that transcendent “conservative” vision defended here, one energized by Man’s immense capacity as an Intelligent/Moral Being rather than the superficial and divisive biases born of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc.