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Why the Fuss Over Condi Rice?

By Anne Applebaum
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET

It was an odd moment: Flipping between the BBC, Italy's RAI UNO, German satellite TV, and the Polish evening news last night, I saw the same steely jaw featured on every one, with the same words being translated, presumably (I don't do Italian or German) into different languages: "I grew up in a segregated neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama …" As usual, the world's newspapers—or at least the ones I read, including the lefty Le Monde and the conservative Daily Telegraph—also dutifully reported the appointment of Condoleezza Rice in precisely the same terms as the American press: the first black woman, the symbol of a new Republican "inclusiveness," etc., etc. It was noted, as it was meant to be noted, that she was standing next to a Hispanic man and another woman. It was noted, as it was meant to be noted, that her appointment, along with that of Colin Powell, was among President-elect Bush's first: "ce n'est sans doute pas par hasard," not by chance had this happened, wrote Le Monde, since Bush would, of course, want to reach out to the minority communities who hadn't voted for him.

For a moment a sensation of national pride flickered: I've been an expat for a long time, but it still suddenly seemed quite an achievement, a real triumph over racism, for an American president to appoint a black man and a black woman to run American foreign policy. Then the sensation flickered out. Why is it, in fact, that the appointment of women and minorities to high office is such a big deal in the United States? It isn't necessarily such a big deal everywhere else.

Admittedly, these issues aren't the same everywhere. Several years ago, just about the time apartheid was winding down, a friend attended a conference during which an earnest American asked a South African speaker how many "minorities" there were in the South African government. He meant blacks. Um … the speaker replied, "Whites are the minority in South Africa."

But the case of women, whose not-exactly-minority status is the same the world over, is comparable. In America, every appointment of a woman to high office—Madeleine Albright, Ruth Bader Ginsburg—is still accompanied by a great fanfare of self-congratulation and language about how anybody can achieve anything in the United States. Yet in the past decade alone, a good two-dozen women have served as prime minsters or elected presidents around the world—not counting monarchs—many of them in countries that most Americans would assume to be less "progressive," or at least more male chauvinist, than the United States: They include (click here for a full list) Norway's Gro Harlem Brundtland, Turkey's Tansu Ciller, Poland's Hanna Suchocka, as well as leaders of Bangladesh, France, Lithuania, Latvia, Canada, Burundi, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Guyana, Nicaragua, Switzerland, and New Zealand, among others.

In that same time, supposedly old-fashioned, heavily Catholic Ireland has had not one but two female presidents. Germany's conservative Christian Democrats now have a female leader. Britain, the one nation that Hollywood always feels comfortable vilifying on the grounds of its stuffiness and its imperialist past, had a woman prime minister who so dominated national life throughout the 1980s that her own political party has never recovered from the shock of her exit. For that matter, in the past two decades Jews have held just about every other high Cabinet office in Britain, running the foreign ministry, defense ministry, home office (police and immigration), and treasury. At one point, one British politician famously sniffed that there were "more old Estonians than old Etonians" in Mrs. Thatcher's Cabinet, but other than that, their presence was never much noticed, or their religion held to signify anything in particular.

I leave you, finally, with the case of Poland. Also heavily Catholic—I believe the figure hovers around 99 percent—and also very traditional, Poland is rarely thought of as a country notable for its feminist traditions. Yet at one point this year, Poland, which has already had a female prime minister, had a woman as its chief central banker (the equivalent of the Federal Reserve chairman); a Protestant for a prime minister (until his appointment, I didn't even know there were Polish Protestants); and a Jewish foreign minister. The Jewish foreign minister, Bronislaw Geremek, has since resigned, in the wake of the collapse of the ruling coalition, but this week was elected chairman of his political party, a position that may give him another shot at high office. In the course of a rather tough leadership battle, the issue of his religion did not arise.

Contrast that to Joe Lieberman's appointment as Gore's running mate, widely hailed by Americans as indicative of American tolerance, talked about endlessly as some kind of breakthrough: If we still have to make such a fuss over these things, doesn't that show how far we have to go?

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Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.
Photograph of Condeleezza Rice on the Slate Table of Contents by Rick Wilking/Reuters.
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[Notes from The Fray Editor: The many replies to this article were thoughtful, intelligent, interesting--just what a Fray thread should be. Our new 'checkmark for good messages' system is flooded: they all seem to be great posts, and the checks represent just a sample. Try this thread on race and gender in Britain and the USA. One post comparing the backgrounds of Bush and Rice, here, brought this response: "So what's the solution: are you saying you want to be adopted by the Bush family?" We also liked this post here, a thread about myth-making on race, and John Bales contemplating easy targets and the self-adulation "when Hillary is elected Presidentess". But really we recommend all of them.]


Exactly! The same way everybody was congratulating themselves that no blood was spilt over this narrow election--not "like elsewhere". Why does the U.S. insist on comparing itself to the least stable, most violent, poorest nations in the world? When was the last time blood was spilt about an election, or even a serious constitutional crisis, in places like the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Australia, Canada?

Oh, by the way, pet peeve, which two countries in the world do not use the metric system as their standard measure?
1. USA
2. Myanmar

--Hanns

(To reply, click here.)
[Mike Elgan had the perfect comment here, part of a great thread.]


Before drawing too many conclusions about minority/female figures of authority, reflect on the first Jewish American to serve as Secretary of State. Judah P. Benjamin served from 1861 to 1865, and so ably that his President awarded him the nation's highest civilian honor. The President? Jefferson Davis. The nation? The Confederate States of America.

--Aristophanes

(To reply, click here.)


After all the back-slapping self-congratulations over the appointment of Condoleeza Rice as National Security Advisor for the upcoming Bush administration, someone should be asking themselves: Forget that she's African-American--what kind of person is it that Dubya is trusting in this critical position? My take is that she might have made a wonderful NSA during the 1980's. But this is the dawn of the 21st Century. Yet all evidence is that she is still living back in the 80's--still rattling the Cold War sabre, still thinking about how to win the war that we already won 10 years ago.

She still thinks in terms of a bi-polar world and in my opinion this makes her, whatever her color, very dangerous. Worse, she is intelligent. History has shown over and over again that intelligent but ideologically myopic people in positions of power often precipitate great destruction.

Ms Rice may be, as an intelligent and accomplished black woman, the apparently perfect PC appointment, but she is too dangerous to be trustworthy in any critical foreign policy post.

--William E. Irving

(To reply, or to follow the thread, click here.)

(12/19)

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