Donnel Jones

An ocassional guilty pleasure is tabloid gossip, especially the devilish anti-idolatarian spite of Matt Drudge when he spits in Hollywood’s direction, as well as the pointless intrigue of self-absorbed nitwits in that town who aspire to political discourse and, yes, even greatness.

Not to be disappointed, I find Front Page of New York Daily News has published Spike Lee’s take down of Condi Rice.

Here’s his only “fact finding” piece of his rant:

“People say, ‘She’s so successful’ and ‘Look at her position as a black woman.’ She is a black woman who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and said that she never experienced a day of racism in her life,” Lee tells the April issue of Stuff magazine.

How is that, Mr. Lee? Ms. Rice said she never experienced racism a day in her life? Then how is this possible?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently visited her hometown of Birmingham, AL, to attend a ceremony that commemorated the deaths of four Black girls killed in the infamous 1963 bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church. . . .

. . .Bronze plaques of the four murdered girls were unveiled at the service, one of whom was Rice’s friend, 11-year-old Denise McNair. Denise, along with Addle Mac Collins, 14, Carole Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14, were attending Sunday school when the bomb detonated.

This terrorist act occurred just a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the high golden point of the American Civil Rights Movement. And Ms. Rice was in the thick of it.

Or, to be fair, could Mr. Lee name his source? But he doesn’t have to. He is unaccountable as he doesn’t hold office. At the same time he is a celebrity, which has a special allure for many Americans. And, he has to “represent” to his own community, not the white one Lee despises, but the Black one that would find him similarly accountable were he sympathetic with Ms. Rice.

Look, I have lots of real problems with unaccountable public officials. And I have too many problems with the current administration while well aware that the Democrat alternative in 2004 was unacceptable. That is small comfort.

However, Condi Rice is no self-loathing black woman. You are free to agree or disagree with her, you can say she doesn’t identify with Afro-centric sub-culture, that she is an assimilationist. All fair and well, but to accuse someone of not having suffered horribly what Ms. Rice suffered as a young girl with the loss of a childhood friend to a terrorist attack, is beyond unkind. It’s outright vicious.

Condi a traitor to her “race”? No, she just hates fascists. Whether white supremacists or Islamists.

Ms. Rice is being morally consistent.