The Condi Rice Version of History

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Sweetness and Light: Condoleezza Rice" from Laura Flanders' new book Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso Books). For more information about the book, visit www.lauraflanders.com.

Condoleezza Rice became George W. Bush's national security adviser, having directed an oil company, managed a multi-million-dollar university and served as a Soviet expert in Washington during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

She was assuming a post in her second Bush administration, the top national security position in the cabinet; but when The New York Times ran a story on the 46-year-old professor, it didn't discuss her views on national security until the twenty-seventh paragraph. The subject cropped up near the end of the Times's long feature, which was dominated by talk of her dress-size, her hair, her hemline, and her place of birth.

Los Angeles attorney, Connie Rice, a second cousin of Rice's, says such coverage is simply sexist: "You don't hear the press asking where Dick Cheney likes to shop."

No Times story so far dwelt on the VP's youth as a white man in pre-civil rights Nebraska, but the Times dedicated fully half of their feature on Rice to her childhood. In that, the paper was hardly alone. Read a dozen features on Condoleezza Rice, and you're likely to read twelve almost identical stories about her family and her childhood and almost nothing about just what's she done since she rose from there to here.

Kiron Skinner, a former dissertation student and friend of Rice's, thinks the fascination with Rice's personal narrative smacks of racism. It's no wonder why U.S. media are interested in Rice's background -- American "trailblazers" are inherently newsworthy, and Rice is certainly one of a kind. But "I think there's a kind of racism going on to keep puzzling about why she's doing what she's doing at this point," says Skinner. "I think she's exactly where she should be, given her background, her education and her experience."

But the public mostly doesn't know about that Rice's experience in politics and business. And that's because somehow it seems to have been decided that the National Security Advisor's professional career makes for less heart-warming spin than her firecracker rise out of "Bombingham."

The daughter of two African-American teachers in the South, Rice was born in 1954, in Birmingham, a city Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was to call "by far the worst big city in race relations in the United States." Children in '50s Birmingham learned to recognize the sign "colored" even before they could read. Their lives depended on it. The town featured white-only schools and white-only cinemas and white-only libraries. The local police commissioner - "Bull" Connor had a habit of driving through black families' neighborhoods in a freaky white metal tank and announcing on the radio when a "nigger family" moved into a "white" part of town. So common were bombings of black homes in one area that it earned the name "Dynamite Hill." (A third of Connor's police force was said to be in the Ku Klux Klan.)

Rice's childhood coincided exactly with the make-or-break years for multi- racial America. In the year she was born, the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ruled public school segregation unconstitutional. A year later, the Montgomery bus boycott led the Court to ban bus segregation too. By the time Rice turned eight, the Birmingham city government had yet to implement either ruling. That spring, in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleagues came to town and subjected themselves to multiple arrests to protest, but local papers studiously kept them off the front page.

To up the ante, thousands of students and high school children organized and took to the streets themselves. Forty years later, still the most famous -- and horrifying -- pictures of the civil rights struggle tend to be pictures of what happened next in Birmingham. When Connor's men loosed dogs and water cannon on the nonviolent demonstrators, the images of children beaten, bitten and washed down the Birmingham's streets were seen around the world. Repulsion at the events in Birmingham helped draw a quarter of a million people to Washington that August. People who'd never heard or seen Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. watched his "I Have a Dream" speech live on all three TV networks. ("He's damn good" President John F. Kennedy is said to have told an aide.)