Rice (Condi) hits U.S. 'birth defect'

[kskiska]

Source: Washington Times

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national "birth defect" that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country's very founding.

"Black Americans were a founding population," she said. "Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding."

As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."

(snip)

Race has become an issue in this year's presidential campaign, which prompted a much-discussed speech last week by Sen. Barack Obama, one of the two remaining contenders for the Democratic nomination.

Miss Rice declined to comment on the campaign, saying only that it was "important" that Mr. Obama "gave it for a whole host of reasons."

Read more: http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080328/FOREIGN/746301768/1001

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Just wow! Freeps' minds are exploding!

[leftofcool]

1. Just re-enforces the RW

wiew that for Dems this election is about race and not issues. Thanks Condo-lies-a

[bdamomma]

9. don't you wish we could all grown up and get beyond

the race thing.

[gratuitous]

2. Good thing Jeremiah Wright didn't say that

So we won't have to listen to an endless parade of white people march by on our teevee screen telling us all they know about being black in America.

[Gman]

3. Amen

[Demeter]

4. Thank Goddess Condi's NOT a Mother!

For one thing, stupidity may be congenital; for another, any mother of a disabled child would make hers an orphan.

[pattmarty]

13. I wouldn't go as far as to say she's not a "mother".

:sarcasm:

[DCKit]

5. Spin this into "Condeleeza Rice Suports Barack Obaba"

and we've got a winner.

The Republics will consider this as "biting the hand...." How dare she! She's not even one of "THEM" anymore.

[Melinda]

7. No, spin this into Condi runs for VP on the McCain ticket

That's what the posturing is all about.

[Orsino]

8. But hasn't she just sandbagged herself...

...by acknowledging the existence of racial inequalities in our Republican paradise? Aren't her words an implicit call for action, however casually delivered?

Well, perhaps it's just a posture, as you say, that would disappear after the Inauguration.

[bdamomma]

10. exactly.

but you know Obama has it all over Condi.

[merh]

24. LOL - then she just did the stupidest thing ever

You see there will always be white folks that believe the racial problems have been solved and any discussion of race is, well, just racist. They don't try to appreciate the disadvantage that still exist for blacks in this nation.

Before the pastorbation, I would have felt comfortable saying that a majority of conservatives feel that way. Sadly, from some of the posts made on DU as of late, I now have to say that position transcends party lines.

And Condi's use of "birth defect" is an insult to blacks, imho. Most of the blacks I know don't view being born black as a defect and they shouldn't. They are proud of their race and they want folks to stop viewing it as some birth defect to be a black.

[NYC]

29. I read that to mean

a birth defect in the Declaration of Independence and/or the Constitution. The country was born with a birth defect, that defect being the inequality.

[merh]

30. that's how she may have intended it

or politically meant it to read, but imho, it was a poor choice of words that can back fire on her which won't bother me - the idea of her as VP is scarey

[ChazII]

31. I read the remarks

the same way you did.

[dysfunctional press]

32. she wasn't saying that being born black is a defect...

she was saying that the mindset that blacks weren't seen as equals by many of the founders was a "birth defect" for/of the new nation that had been "born".

[greiner3]

6. Condi an Obama supporter?

I heard that she was bush's love child!

[CBGLuthier]

11. did not get much of a head start?

Did Not Get Much of a Head Start!! That's how she describes post civil war america for "her people".

I wonder if she has had a chance to read this book

http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385506252

Wall Street Journal bureau chief Blackmon gives a groundbreaking and disturbing account of a sordid chapter in American history—the lease (essentially the sale) of convicts to commercial interests between the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Usually, the criminal offense was loosely defined vagrancy or even changing employers without permission. The initial sentence was brutal enough; the actual penalty, reserved almost exclusively for black men, was a form of slavery in one of hundreds of forced labor camps operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small time entrepreneurs and provincial farmers. Into this history, Blackmon weaves the story of Green Cottenham, who was charged with riding a freight train without a ticket, in 1908 and was sentenced to three months of hard labor for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. Cottenham's sentence was extended an additional three months and six days because he was unable to pay fines then leveraged on criminals. Blackmon's book reveals in devastating detail the legal and commercial forces that created this neoslavery along with deeply moving and totally appalling personal testimonies of survivors. Every incident in this book is true, he writes; one wishes it were not so. (Mar.)


I heard the author on NPR the other day. He said this period may have actually been worse than slavery as at least slave owners had an economic investment in keeping their slaves alive. These men were worked until they dropped.


Not much of a head start indeed.

[saigon68]

12. Anything to make $$$ for their Corporate Masters

[Ilsa]

14. Condi: "What? I'm Black? Why didn't someone tell me?" nt

[kenny blankenship]

15. How DARE she criticize America! Saying that the USA has a "birth defect"

is like saying there was something wrong with the Founding Fathers' sperm!

Goddammit, there was nothing wrong with George Washington's sperm. He just didn't have any (white) children. Maybe he was thinking about the environment.

[ensho]

16. agree, why the neo cons chose to say 'birth defect' is interesting

you can't have birth defect without woman. birth defect/woman, joined forever.

so what is she really saying???

[awoke_in_2003]

17. Sorry, wrong founding father. nt

[Doctor_J]

18. Shouldn't posts from the Moonie Times be marked as such?

Why in the world would someone who calls him/herself a Dem read that crap?

[Posteritatis]

35. I try to read a little bit of everything

Full range from Indymedia to Free Republic when I can. Merely exposing oneself to information doesn't automatically taint you, regardless of what a lot of really unsavory types have claimed over the years.

Besides, I'm probably better off than people who don't look at stuff just because they don't agree with it only to get all astonished when something comes out of left (well, right) field.

[Seabiscuit]

19. What in the hell? Birth defect? I can just hear the RW talk/radio shows going nuts over this. nt

[asteroid2003QQ47]

20. Head start on the looting and genocide, Condie?

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Condo deems the victims of the "sea pirates" not worthy of mention, she is scum.

[Supersedeas]

21. Strange, with bunker mentality and with so many crisises overseas, Condi can comment on Obama

[goforit]

22. Condi snubs her own race...a birth defect????...Where the hell did she get this?

[Hekate]

23. No. What she said is that the US was born with a birth defect, and that was slavery...

She and Obama are both playing off the metaphor that refers to America being "born".

Lincoln himself used the birth image in his Gettysburg Address ("...brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty...").

Obama referred to slavery as America's "original sin," which is a birth reference from the Bible.

So Condi is simply extending the metaphor in another direction by saying that the fact that the institution of slavery was intertwined with our nation's founding was a "birth defect," not that African Americans are in any way defective.

In a sense, they are all right, imo.

Hekate

[KamaAina]

25. "Miss Rice"?

What century is it at Moonie Times headquarters? Is there some kind of "Daylight Savings Decades" in effect over there? :eyes:

The irony: Sexism creeps into a serious discussion about racism.

[fshrink]

26. I'm sure Lakotas would have been for an abortion.

[ecstatic]

27. Am I the only one who thinks Rice got it right, for the first time in her career?

:shrug: She basically agrees with Obama's speech!

[goclark]

28. I'm not sure what the hell she meant

And I'm not sure she knew what she was saying.

I would like to believe that she cares about the RACE issue in America but I have not seen any efforts that she has made to be supportive of African Americans.

I am Black and I was shocked that she fell asleep at the African American church in LA after Katrina. I was also disappointed that she made no effort to sit with anyone from the church during the service.
Seems like a little thing, but she appeared to be above it all ~ maybe it was jet lag.

I am aware of her dating an African American football player but it seemed more an escort than a romance.

And, during the Katrina nightmare she went shopping for shoes in New York while victims were still being discovered in the raging waters.

I have not known her to speak out on behalf of African American causes or reach out to anyone other than the Bush clan.

But maybe she has experienced a new birth. :crazy:

[Faygo Kid]

33. I agree with you. She got this one right. Surprised at the postings here.

It's why Lincoln talked about "a new birth of freedom," redefining the nation. Of course, it still continues; the 100 years after slavery were no picnic for blacks in this country, either, and we still have a long way to go.

All you need to do is look at some of the posts here, like we need to "grow up" and get beyond "the race thing," or the posters who think she was talking about being born black as a birth defect, not what she actually meant, which is that it was the nation that was born with the birth defect of slavery.

Pretty remarkable; most DUers usually "get it" better than they seem to have done here.

She's right on this subject. If a Dem said what she said, the right wing yahoo machine would go bonkers. You can hear crickets from the right about her saying it, as expected.

She's still a war criminal, though.

[Oak2004]

34. No you're not

I am wondering if this means Condi actually has a few functioning brain cells not yet controlled by the Neocon Borg.