Posted on 11/21/2002 5:51:02 PM PST by syriacus
When I was 16 - an overworked and harried high school senior trying to graduate and get on to college - she was 10. I remember her as the proper, well-behaved daughter of a popular local minister - a light- brown-skinned girl with button teeth, in the Birmingham, Ala., of the mid -'60s. Her childhood was similar to mine: She excelled in school, skipped several grades, attended church and Sunday school, took piano and dance lessons, was always asked to perform when relatives and friends came to visit, and strove to please her parents. Like mine, her parents did what they could to shield her from the meanness of race relations in Alabama at that time.
Decades later, I'm a fairly liberal newspaper columnist, and Condoleezza Rice is national security adviser to a president who seems determined to lead this country into war. Rice's role in George W. Bush's administration has celebrities like Harry Belafonte foaming at the mouth that she's an Uncle Tom while other blacks are wishing out loud that Condoleezza Rice was, well, different.
What do I think? I think she's a smart cookie. That's not a term I normally use. But, when a colleague used it to describe Rice the other day, I thought it fit her perfectly.
I often find myself defending her: "What do you expect?" I say to people perplexed that, while Rice is black, she doesn't think and act like a Democrat. "She's a Republican and a hawk in a right-wing Republican administration. Do you expect her to be soft on military and foreign affairs? Black people have the right to be right-wing hawks if they choose, even to believe in George Bush," I tell them. [snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Unlike some others, I don't think this is all about Rice's ambition. I think she believes what she says, schooled and mentored as she has been by those who embrace a hard-nosed, imperialistic vision of America's role in the world.
That doesn't make her a race traitor, a bad person or someone who's forgotten the lessons we learned as children in Birmingham. In part, that's what the struggle was about - the right to think and act as individuals, her in her way, me in mine
Perhaps she delivered it so well because she helped to craft it. Sheesh.
This is one of the more revealing columns by the gaggle of black columnists who sat down with Rice last week. They simply don't know what to make of her. She cannot be categorized, filed, or duplicated.
She is a danger to the Civil Rights establishment in this country. That's why, in the end, they must oppose her.
Not that it will matter. She will triumph in the end, Hillary notwithstanding.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
I hope you are right.
I wonder if Ms.Mccarthy can justify the people who will be killed right here in this country if we don't go?
And just how does she justify those boys shot today in Kuwait?
I wonder if Ms. McCarthy can name ONE COUNTRY we have invaded and RULED?
And look where it got HER and where this idiot writer is. That should be a lesson to her!
My own guess is "not enough."
True. Here's one of the gentler (yet demeaning) descriptions of Thomas' psyche...based in part on a description of him by McCarthy . I think Mc Carthy was hinting in her column on Rice that Rice is an "as-if" personality, just as Thomas is one.
The Conundrum of Clarence Thomas: An Attempt at a Psychodynamic Understanding
By Alvin Wyman Walker, Ph.D., P.D., P.C. Clinical Psychologist/Psychotherapist
I agree with Sheryl McCarthy who describes Clarence Thomas as follows: [snip], Thomas revealed himself to be a chameleon, a man who will put on whatever face, assume whatever position necessary to please the group he is with."The observation regarding the hollowness of his core, his chameleon-like quality, and his proclivity to assume whatever position necessary to please those with whom he is identified and dependent are important clues to Clarence Thomas' psychodynamic wellsprings. These three characteristics are common to a personality type first described in 1942 by Helene Deutsch. She delineated a group of individuals who lacked a consistent sense of identity and a source of inner direction. She called them as-if personalities because they derived their emotional experience and reactions from others with whom they were completely identified and dependent. The as-if personality adopts characteristics of persons who are particularly important to the individual or characteristics the individual believes would please those signficant others. In adopting these characteristics, the as-if personality does not appear to be acting, but experiences and manifests the assumed traits in a consistent and genuine manner.
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