CondiGate

You had to bypass your automatic race-loyalty circuits in order to fully appreciate the scenario. Under normal circumstances, the sight of a lone, brilliant and articulate black woman deftly fending off hostile inquiries from a delegation of power-suited white guys would go down as a miniature Great Moment In Negro History. But Condoleezza Rice, the most powerful black woman on the planet, has all but deleted race from the narrative of her personal success and she certainly doesn't need a partisan racial cheering squad when she has George W. Bush holding it down for her.

Rice's appearance before the 9/11 commission on April 8 was the definition of a Catch-22: a public failure on her part would invariably be read as yet another example of black incompetence. And a virtuoso political performance from Rice would be a victory for an administration that has squandered international goodwill, undermined the United Nations, used the horror of September 11th as a political trump card, run the economy into long-term recession and started a war to protect us from non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

For what it matters, Rice was convincing -- even as her testimony was starkly at odds with the historical record, her own previous claims and those of other members of the administration. And the underlying point is this: In the long, tangled history of black people in the United States, we have at last reached the point where black politicians have earned the right to be just as dubious and questionable as their white counterparts.

Given the antagonistic racial history of this country, it would be almost impossible for the presidency -- or presidential scandals -- not to reflect the prevailing currents of racism. By the time Frederick Douglass was appointed to the Santo Domingo Commission -- which gathered information supporting President Ulysses Grant's plan to annex Haiti -- he had become the most influential black political appointee of his era. Nevertheless Douglass had difficulty explaining to his supporters why he was still not invited to official White House functions -- even those regarding Haiti. Later, when Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Douglass as US Marshall for the District of Columbia, Douglass saw the responsibilities of the office curtailed so as to not offend white residents.

Booker T. Washington served as the unofficial advisor on Negro matters to President Theodore Roosevelt, but when Roosevelt made the mistake of having lunch with Washington in the Oval Office, it set off a firestorm of criticism that threatened to undermine Roosevelt's support from Southerners. (Roosevelt later downplayed the meal, saying that he had simply ordered sandwiches and happened to offer one to Washington.)

When the Great Migration began shifting the population balances in Northern cities, Franklin Roosevelt attempted to attract black voters into the Democratic Party by creating a "black cabinet" of advisors. Roosevelt appointed Robert C. Weaver as an aide to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, placed Mary McLeod Bethune at the head of the National Youth Administration's Office of Minority Affairs and created an interagency Department of Negro Affairs.

Still, it was a political scandal that pushed Roosevelt to expand his list of black appointees on the verge of World War II. When Roosevelt's Stephen Early knocked down a black police officer during a dispute in New York, the administration feared it would lose critical black support in the coming election. Within 24 hours of the incident, Roosevelt had appointed Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. as the first black general in the Army, federal judge William H. Hastie the first black civilian aide to the Secretary of War, and Campbell C. Johnson as first black head of the Selective Service.