A Testimony to Racial Limbo

How will Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration fare when she testifies on Thursday at the 9/11 hearings? The weight of the evidence, after all, is likely to point toward inattention, incompetence or malfeasance. And high as the stakes are for the national security advisor, there is more up for grabs here than assessing 9/11 blame and the state of Rice’s political fortunes.

What roils beneath the surface is the question of blackness in politics -- how Rice’s success or failure will affect the nation’s attitude toward putting African Americans in high places. (“Blackness,” not race, is the issue. “White” is a race too, but no one’s asking if the president’s blunders are setting his people back.)

Traditional political categories make it difficult to think about what blacks like Rice (or Colin Powell or Clarence Thomas) represent without becoming confused. Are they blacks, or are they Republicans? People gave their lives, slaves and sharecroppers persevered and settled for their reward in the sweet by and by, praying for the day when blacks might attain positions like national security advisor, secretary of State, Supreme Court justice. Few, likely, thought to wonder how the anointed might actually execute those offices or what routes they might take to achieve them. (Perhaps this failure of imagination is the point where white ideas about black achievement converge with blacks’ ideas about themselves.)

The notion of powerful right-wing black Republicans infuriates many African Americans. Their anger springs from a belief that there is a legitimate black point of view and an illegitimate black point of view -- witness their regular invocation of “Uncle Tom” and their certainty that there are “policies that hurt the community,” as if what is poison for some is poison for all.

But was the long quest for black freedom waged to get “the” black voice heard, or to allow for individual blacks to pursue their individual destinies and get their individual voices heard? Judging from the disdain heaped on Rice by mainstream voices in black periodicals and on websites, the answer must be the former.

But that’s the damnable thing about freedom; people do all sorts of things you’d really, really rather they didn’t. Solidarity, schmolidarity. The black left now radiates glee at the prospect of the apostate Rice’s dramatic, prime-time demise. Better a white White House than one with the wrong kind of blacks in it. For them, the nation has yet to anoint a black -- a “real” black, one with rhythm and paid-up NAACP dues -- to one of the top spots.

It could be argued that, 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, blacks are waging an internal Civil War over their own souls and how their hard-won freedom is to proceed. Examples are plentiful. Because of his nasty portrayal of women in his lyrics and videos, the rapper Nelly was forced to cancel an appearance at the historically black Spelman College. America’s largest black antiabortion group plans to protest the NAACP’s recently announced pro-choice stance.

But perhaps it is white Republicans, not the black community, who have the biggest ax to grind where blacks like Rice are concerned. Rice is so “assimilated” (a code word for non-black-identified), that she is all but useless to the party that sought to use her to kill two birds with one stone. She is as tin-eared and clueless with black folks as her fourth-generation, New England-bred millionaire boss. Her recent speeches to the National Assn. of Black Journalists (“We need to be humble about singing freedom’s praises”), and public musings that segregation would have faded away on its own, make her a consistent but unappealing ambassador between the races. She won’t be winning over for W. any of those vote-aholic black grannies. So, for political purposes, it’s as if there never was a black national security advisor.

Malcolm X’s chickens have come home to roost in the oddest coops. Blacks in the White House get little love from their homies. The black leadership disavows those who should be its most celebrated members. Whites get nothing but grief for letting blacks into their club.

But something good might come from Thursday’s testimony. Rice may be the first truly free black person in our history. She faces the nation as an individual, allowed to accede, despite her race and gender, to the highest level of her own incompetence.