CON-DI-FI-CATION: DIASPORA, TRANSNATIONALISM OR THE LIMITS OF DOMESTIC RACIAL OR FEMINIST DISCOURSES

Titled “Equal Opportunity, and tellingly published in her last major collection of poetry, Our Dead Behind Us,¹ is a poem which anticipated Condoleezza Rice, the current United States Secretary of State and the theme of this paper. On the cover of this particular edition of Lorde’s book, stand three wizened old African women superimposed over another photograph of a vibrant demonstration of South African activists protesting perhaps the racial injustices of apartheid, fists clenched in the black power sign. A whole other though not unrelated text unfolds in these images. The “Equal Opportunity” poem describes a black woman who has made it into the highest echelons of the U.S. military complex and in her role has to assist in the execution of the worst of U.S. policies, in this case the invasion of Grenada. The images the poet selects include the desecration of the island’s nutmeg trees, that is, the island’s spice but also its national resource, a telling symbol of U.S. government’s normal functioning. Its first few verses go as follows:

The rest of the poem presents a few other images of Grenada under siege by the U.S.: the spectre of Cubans in Grenada as a pretext for invasion, the destruction of the lives of the poor Grenadian folk in the process. The poem, “Equal Opportunity” then makes clear distinctions between post-invasion Grenada and the earlier social and economic benefits that the New Jewel Movement had offered their long-suffering people. It closes tellingly with lines which provide me with the perfect entrée into this discussion on the limits of domestic black and feminist discourses within the larger context of U.S. hegemonies.²

Black Women, Leadership And Political Power

About a year or two ago, I was asked to give a lecture to one of the black women’s groups on campus on “the history of black women from slavery to the present time,” in a 30 minute time slot. In a version of what many of us do, I challenged the breadth of such a topic, recommending they take one of the courses that the Africana Studies program offered where that would be discussed for at least one semester. Still, using it as a teaching opportunity, I instead highlighted some key moments and figures along the way, and spent the last few minutes talking about the contemporary which included an assessment of Condoleezza Rice. Several of the black women students who had politely listened to the talk, came to me to say afterwards that they had never really thought of Condoleezza beyond seeing her as someone they admired for occupying such a central position, therefore a role model, someone that they wanted to emulate. And there are other reports that among women in a variety of African countries she is also seen as a type of ideal black woman role who has made it to the top of U.S. state power, by whatever means and therefore that itself also to be admired.

That was then (2003-4), but by the end of 2006, and with the demise of the Bush administration, pursuing a variety of conversations with a range of people, those perceptions seem a bit different.³ The sense I got from a variety of conversations was that the view now is mixed among black youth and adults, wavering between pride at her accomplishments, and dismay at the absence of results which have any benefit to the black community. Conversations with students around a conference in honor of the 25^th anniversary of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College in Atlanta in October, 2006, indicated that she is the kind of woman that Spelman grooms in terms of poise and self-presentation, able to move to positions of leadership smoothly, but that politically she is someone that many could not identify with and/or hope never to become.

One of my daughters directed me to the BET list⁴ of powerful and influential people in which Condoleezza came approximately seventh, among those having wealth, power and recognition. Media commentator, Toure, during the discussion on various people on the list, indicated that Condoleezza had power because she could order him to be killed. Condoleezza with no communication with rank and file people, no identifiable results translatable to black people, lost to Oprah Winfrey, the winner with power, intellect, money, communication – a bankable role model if there ever was one for the succeeding generation.⁵

Thereby arises the major contradiction at the heart of this paper: What happens when members of a subordinated group rises to power within an oppressive system? Who do these people end up representing? How does a U.S. black woman manage the internal/domestic responsibilities while understanding her location in diaspora and the transnational. What happens when a member of a prior subordinated group now ends up being the face of empire? How do class, status and political affiliation affect the nature of one’s participation? How do we begin to subject the rise of black women to leadership positions to the kind of internal critique that is fair but necessary.

This essay therefore responds to these questions by examining the meaning of Condoleezza Rice, a black woman Secretary of State of the U.S. (2005-2008) and therefore the international spokesperson for contemporary American imperialism.

It is interesting to note as well that one can also place Rice among a group of black women who have risen to various positions in state power, between 2005 and 2006, that includes Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, the new president of Liberia, Portia Simpson Miller, Prime Minister of Jamaica, but also, Michelle Jean, recently appointed Governor General of Canada.⁶ Earlier, Valerie Amos, in London became Baronness Amos, appointed by the Blair government to a ceremonial position and title in the House of Lords.⁷

In many ways, Rice is one of these seemingly powerful women. In her case, she has the ear of the president of the world’s super power on most matters, is identified as having home schooled him on international affairs, pronunciation of words and names of foreign leaders. An intimate friend and confidante of the president, she is identified as having amazing chemistry with him, spending innumerable hours with him and consistently creating much of the foreign policy that he articulates.⁸ Bush himself has described her in the oft-quoted phrase as able to “explain to me foreign policy matters in a way I can understand” In one report,

A brief comparison with other black women who have sought to make similar moves toward the center of U.S. state power is worth considering. The variety of congresswomen of integrity and recognition like Barbara Jordan of Texas who distinguished herself during the Watergate hearings, and Barbara Lee, of California, one of the handful of congressmen and congresswomen to vote against the war provide a different model. Condoleezza has indicated in most interviews that ask her about running for president that she would never run for office preferring instead the kind of appointments which she has had.

Perhaps more significant to this discussion is former Congresswoman from Brooklyn, Shirley Chisholm who in 1972, became the first African American and the first woman to run for the U.S. presidency. While she may be forgotten or unknown by a new generation, the Shirley Chisholm example is worth recalling at least to provide some balance to the type of black woman like Rice who now serves as political role model. Congresswoman Chisholm, a member of the Brooklyn Caribbean diaspora community, ran with the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed,” offering a political position of integrity, claiming to navigate power on her terms. She actually ran for that same office that Condoleezza now helps to keep alive and without having to go down on her knees to powerful white men.

A comparison between the two women based on presence and politics suggest that “bought and bossed” is one way of seeing Dr. Rice, given the range of benefits she accrued on various boards as she rose to this position and the unchallenged loyalty she gives to one of the worst presidents in history. While this is a position which has to be carefully nuanced, the fact is that all biographical coverage define Rice as perhaps the most loyal of supporters of the president, on the board of major oil companies, and used to rubbing shoulders with the world’s most powerful men. With an Exxon tanker named after her, The S.S. Condoleezza Rice, her status as handmaiden to multinational corporations and “big oil” has been metaphorically identified. In other words, her name has moved from its personal identity to the corporate as has for example an Oprah Winfrey or Martha Stewart. She is also noted for her ability to offer a quick and professional articulation of the most innane Bush policy position, Rice is now recognized therefore as a major ventriloquizer for U.S. imperialism.

Marked by a fierce loyalty to the president, it is not unusual to hear Rice comparing the War on Iraq with the American Civil War and the liberation of the enslaved Africans. In a recent Essence Magazine, ⁹ with its known black readership, she was asked by the interviewer about the $250 billion cost of the war and the deaths and wounding of so many military and civilian people in the tens and hundreds of thousands, and whether the war was a right thing since she had pitched from the start. Rice responded, with perhaps one of the most incredible political cartwheels ever seen that slavery might have lasted longer in this country if the North had decided to end the fight early. “I’m sure there are people who thought that it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to resist that the emancipation of slaves would hold. I know there were people who said why don’t we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?”(187). By these means, then, she appropriates the liberation of black people from enslavement to make the case for its opposite, the imperialist invasion and destruction of the then sovereign nation of Iraq, and the resulting deaths of numerous U.S. soldiers and hundred of thousands of Iraqi people, the utter destruction of their physical infrastructure of what was once one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

Condi. The Condoleezza Rice Story (indeed all the biographies written as children’s success stories)¹⁰ identifies her as growing up in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950’s and 1960’s, in a family who deliberately stayed outside of civil rights activity and attempted the impossible task of protecting their daughter from the very public and visible racism which surrounded them. In one encounter, Condi is described as being taken by her father to “see” the demonstrations and witnessed it from a distance on her father’s shoulders. And thereby is embedded the first major Condi contradiction. All major interviews such as the televised interview with Oprah Winfrey of February, 2002 begin by locating her first as being born in the place which would become the primary cite of segregation and therefore of intense Civil Rights activity, Alabama would be recognized by black intellectuals like former UN secretary-general Ralph Bunche as the formative place for an understanding of world decolonization struggles and the relationship of the U.S. black situation to human rights internationally. As a result, many of that generation, like Angela Davis, developed an approach which linked their political positions solidly to the struggles of the “wretched.”

The embedding of Condoleezza Rice in the civil rights success narrative, which all of the children’s biographies do, then provides a very deceptive conjunction which is exploitable by Rice and her media construction for an immediate and unearned credential.¹¹ Condi’s family would recommend a different path. The New Yorker article (2001) and other reports by Condi herself indicates a father who when students in his school were going out to march tried to dissuade their involvement. Condi it seems has viewed this experience only from a remote distance and with her parents’ methodology of working the ‘uplift model’ as an early orientation.

So if Birmingham was ground zero for U.S. human rights struggles for African Americans (nicknamed appropriately Bombingham because of white terrorism of African Americans), and those with the ability to assist in that articulation stayed away, history demonstrates this as the exact opposite to the path that Martin Luther King, Jr. took in Birmingham. Daddy Rice suggested the use of another strategy to climb up the ladder of white acceptance, and this is the model of accommodation he passed on to his daughter

This classic rejection of ‘waiting’ and a public demonstration of marching thus allowed U.S. African Americans to shift outside of the stagnant temporality of accomodationist politics.¹³ Instead, it speeded up the momentum to a point where waiting was equivalent to maintaining an injustice in the classic liberal approach. Eric Williams, former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and historian, recognized this issue of timing as well and is reported to have said in response to a request that he withdraw an essay on racism in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands because it was not timely, “I consider that each and every moment of each day and every day is a fit and proper time to attack racial discrimination and I said so.” ¹⁴

Another articulation of King’s position taken from “Love, Law and Civil Disobedience” is also worth citing. Here, King identifies three methods for dealing with oppression: “acquiescence, the method of surrender that is, the individuals will somehow adjust themselves to oppression, they adjust themselves to discrimination or to segregation or colonialism or what have you.” The other method is rising up against the oppressor with corroding hatred and physical violence. King instead advocated a third way, actually a middle ground approach in the eyes of other more militant activists, that of Gandhian non-violence. Still he talks with admiration about the student movement:

Still in spite of it all, given the known position of her family and having only been a beneficiary of these struggles, Condoleezza is never above using civil rights to her convenience, for example comparing enslaved U.S. African Americans to the Iraqi people under Saddam. Thus, she justifies in a classic reversal of the terms of U.S. invasion and occupation, illegal in international law, one of the most violent forms of attempted colonization and resource extraction available today, making a sovereign nation a U.S. colony and the site for the proposed largest U.S. base in the Middle East. Listen to the active contradiction in the rest of the interview: “I know there were people who said, 'Why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?'”

Some of the harshest critiques of this position though have come understandably from those who were active in the civil rights movement as children in that period. George E. Curry in “Condoleezza Rice Pimps the Civil Rights Movement”¹⁶offers the view held by those African Americans who see Rice’s position as an exploitation of U.S. civil rights for the benefit of imperialism, indicating that there was no way that one could be shielded from the open segregation and overt apartheid of Alabama. Rosa Parks classic action of refusing to acquiesce to the “sit at the back of the bus” rule of segregated Alabama and that important year long boycott of Alabama transportation systems epitomizes the struggle for dignity for black subjects of that period. So while Rice recalls the bombing of the church with the little girls in Alabama on a Sunday morning, for emotive reasons, and because one of them, Denise McNair, was a friend, and because it fits the terrorism narrative, she rarely transfers to the Iraqi condition the fact that all of black South lived under a form of race-based state terrorism which was shifted only by an affirmative response: the hard sacrifices of the people who made it known that they could live no longer under that racist strangle hold. The fact is that it was Martin Luther King, Jr. like Mandela, the freedom fighter who was identified by many in the government as the “menace to the state”, the communist, the terrorist meaning assigned by the U.S. government to those who overtly challenged the state’s racism and were demonized for it.

Significantly, the then demonizing of black leadership and simultaneously of communism as I have shown in my work on Claudia Jones,¹⁷ was a precursor to the U.S. construction of the “war on terrorism” in our time. The current media valorizing of Martin Luther King, Jr. selects out a dream version of King that masks all of this history of Civil Rights/Black Power as a natural response to U.S. denial of black human rights and the terrorism of white supremacy which Rice well knows.

Still, Condoleezza’s comments to Katie Couric in her September 2006 “60 Minutes” interview that John Rice, a Presbyterian minister and guidance counselor was not a “march in the streets” type of preacher is telling for historically there has been always a ministry of accommodation and a ministry of resistance. So Rice indicates that her father “saw no reason to put children at risk,” she told The Washington Post. Thus, “he would never put his own children at risk” means that he was one of those people who soundly criticized Martin Luther King Jr. at that time for the strategy of nonviolent protest and blamed him for the self-generating activities of those children in the youth movement who marched sometimes in opposition to their own parents.

According to Curry, these are the same people who benefited from these struggles: “Many Black middle-class families refused to confront America’s version of apartheid, yet when the doors of opportunity flung open, they were the first to march through them, riding on the back of poor people who were unafraid to take risks.” As a result, Condoleezza can talk passionately about the horrors of that era yet seemingly feel no shame that her parents did not support King’s strategies. It helps us to understand why Rice feels so comfortable defending George W. Bush, arguably the worst president on civil rights in more than 50 years.¹⁸

One of the answers may be that Rice comes from a long line of accommodationists that she describes well who as far back as the time of enslavement, actually collaborated with the slave masters. (See Chapter 2 of Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story). According to Constance Rice, a first cousin of Condoleezza the slaves in their family ancestry were primarily house slaves, not field slaves, which strategically gave them more opportunity to access some privilege. One of them, Julia Rice, is described as having children with the master and acting consistently in his interest in protecting the master’s plantation and its resources from outsiders such as the Union Army (46-47). Thus producing a lineage who saw their interests as tied to that of the plantation owners, and the ability to navigate those systems for the reward of social mobility.

The granddaddy Rice story which Condoleezza happily told at the Republican National Convention prior to George Bush’s presidency is of a grandfather who converted to Presbyterianism to get “book learning” resonates here, not so much for the applaudable quest for an education, which many desired and worked for at times illegally, but for the willingness to sell out one’s principles for gain. Still, John Rice, Jr., Condoleezza’s father is in my view worth further examination. From the available biographical information, while he did not participate in civil rights activity, publicly, he is described as carrying a gun to protect the neighborhood during the era of white racist terrorism. And, at the University of Denver he is described as creating the conditions for Black Studies and a climate for African-American intellectualism and later in life, working with Condi to set up an urban inner city youth project. Still, while there are varied responses to racism and oppression by those oppressed as the Martin Luther King, Jr., three-options identified earlier, he seemed to fall on the side of acquiescence and accommodation. The oft-repeated mantra of being twice as good as white people at whatever it is they do is a well-known product of racism which actually enshrines white mediocrity. This he clearly passed on to his daughter who would become an expert on Soviet history and Russian language, but also one who ends up at times being twice as brutal in decision making as well, particularly when it applies to the lives of “minorities and women” as Stanford alumni and student have charged.

Condoleezza’s transnational politics is one aligned with the classic transnational corporate model of the multinational corporations. She serves in the interests of big business, has been on the boards of directors of Chevron, TransAmerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, (1991) J. P. Morgan, Charles Schwab (1999. Antonia Felix reports:

These oil connections raised some eyebrows and as a result she would resign from the board in 2001 after being named the National Security advisor in Bush II administration, as the work with Chevron oil projects represented one of the largest overseas U.S. energy investments. And, Chevron had developed a reputation, having been the subject of a lawsuit involving human rights abuses in Nigeria. The corporation was charged with aiding Nigeria’s military police in crushing public demonstrations against exploitation of the nation’s delta region and of the variety of environmental abuses that oil companies waged as they extracted with the complicity of the Nigerian government, the country’s oil resources. One can think back with a chill to the time of the activities of the Ogoni people and the execution of writer Ken Saro Wiwa.

From all accounts, Condoleezza’s rise to power is marked by a smooth “ordered from upper echelons” trajectory facilitated by U.S. policy operators like George Schultz and Brent Scrowcroft who precisely needed such a positioned black figure. At Stanford University, she was hired in the political science department as a target of opportunity hire, an affirmative action position, according to Sylvia Wynter who I talked with twice on this. In a relatively short time she moved magically through the ranks being named provost by the time she was thirty-eight. Clearly it seems, Condoleezza was “made in Washington, D.C.,” designed by and for the right wing, constructed in the space of the Colorado policy think thank which trained her to be precisely who she is today, a polished academic who crosses over into the world of making policy. Condoleezza has both a biological lineage that is conservative but also a political and academic lineage that is also solidly conservative as well.

According to Stanford graduates who look back with sadness at the dismantling of the programs they fought for, it was under her watch that both Black Studies and Women’s Studies initiatives were terminated. Condoleezza became known as someone who balanced Stanford budget deficits by cutting programs and departments ruthlessly, the provost who denied you tenure if you did not meet her strict academic standards. The Stanford protest statement identifies as well that under her watch (1993-1999) the African and African American Studies Program was denied departmental status and instead all ethnic studies programs were merged into a Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) center. She also fired a popular and long standing Mexican Director of Chicana Studies and “colonized” all ethnic organizations into a single building, leaving the Black Student Union in a decrepit building because they had the foresight not to move. At the same time, fifteen (15) women faculty members filed a discrimination suit with the Department of Labor as the percentage of women on Stanford faculty dropped to at least half of the national average. But through it all, Dr. Rice balanced the budget for Stanford, making it the first time that this wealthy institution with massive endowments showed a neatly balanced budget, though at the expense of “minority” concerns.

CON-DI-FI-CA-TION: Race, Gender And the Conservative Intellectual in Power

“Condification” is my definition for this process of the conservative black and or female intellectual in power. It offers a language, to identify the process of intellectuals from oppressed groups, who enter the seats of power and then operate with calmness for the benefit of oppression, in this case American imperialism. The term ‘condification’ which I have coined, finding no other words to describe this phenomenon, is beautifully already prepared by the name. Cond-i-fi-cation carries within it the ‘con’ of conservatism; the ‘con’ of being conned along with the resonance of commodification. It also suggests the Fanonian self-alienating psychology of ‘conditioning’ and ‘confusion’ which is the ultimate product of racism as it is of colonialism,²⁰ that is, being conditioned to work in the interest of a repressive state and against one’s own larger interest. Being ‘condified” then refers to the public positioning of black conservatism and the normalizing of same while supporting amazingly offensive policies and politics, but masquerading them when convenient under a black umbrella. Being condied or condified is ultimately being extremely colonized.

Sylvia Wynter’s take on Condoleezza is instructive, seeing her up close at Stanford as she describes her as “a black Margaret Thatcher”:

As in Stuart Hall’s definition of “Thatcherism”²² condification is the public presentation in the body of a woman, in this case, a black woman, of a range of policies that end up dismantling long and hard fought for rights and then defending these with an amazing level of aggressiveness. Hall himself in “The Meaning of New Times” defines Thatcherism this way;

Thatcherism’s project can be understood as operating on the ground of longer, deeper, more profound movements of change which appear to be going its way but which, in reality, it has been only occasionally and fleetingly, in command over the past decade. We can see Thatcherism as, in fact, an attempt to hegemonize these deeper tendencies within its project of ‘regressive modernization’, to appropriate them to a reactionary political agenda and to harness to them the interests and fortunes of specific and limited social interests.

If Thatcherism is for Hall an attempt only partially successful “to harness and bend to its political project circumstances which were not of its making,” (224), then “being condied” is also being subjected to a certain maintenance of dominance under a cover of “sweetness” that is, “con-dol-cee-za” the original meaning of the name as given by her mother Angelena Rice “with sweetness.” Thus, cordiality and super-professionalism camouflage an appropriation of movements conveniently as they simultaneously reject their larger historical implications.

Condification marks the limit in my view but can also be seen as the ultimate manifestation of a domestic black and/or feminist bourgeois discourse. At the same time, it becomes an affront to black feminist positions as expressed in their earliest and therefore most radical formation.²³ Elaine Brown reads Condoleezza Rice as follows:

The intent here is not to make Condification an ideology or an “ism” (that is, a body of thought or ideology which comes through the implementation of policies and the articulation of a particular set of ideological principles) which give a definition such as “Thatcherism” legs. Indeed one of the critiques of Hall’s “Thatcherism” is that it attempted to raise a particular kind of practice to being an overarching ideology which many shared. Eric Evans in Thatcher and Thatcherism suggests that

Instead, I want to see “condification” as a tendency, a project perhaps, a behavioral process which marks the rise of a certain neo-colonial elite in the U.S. imperial context, operating for the benefit of the dominant state and its rulers.

Aime Cesaire describes U.S. imperialism as the only imperialism that you cannot recover from in tact.²⁵ In that context, within the framework of U.S. imperialist desires and practices, he calls this the “American hour” in which violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder,” operates. So how does the intellectual navigate the contemporary globalized economies dominated by multinational corporations with a new “international division of labor,” a global poor and urban “underclasses . . . left behind on every significant dimension of social opportunity.” (Hall 225)

Within this context, the role of the intellectual within the academy requires additional internal scrutiny.²⁶ Some see the complicit intellectual as indeed part of the problem. One student in Toronto even called it the “academic industrial complex.” Many of us see micro versions of the same process in home institutions.

Several other attempts have been made over the years to identify the nature of intellectual work in/for black communities. DuBois’ himself had reversed his own formulation, finding in the end that he had not accounted sufficiently for the selfishness of the ‘talented tenth’. Still his double consciousness model lingers here as well. According to Wynter, “ . . . He [DuBois] is really saying that to be an “American” and a “Man” he has to be anti-Negro; and, therefore, he’s struggling because he doesn’t want to give up being an “American.” But I want to argue that to be an “American” is perhaps to be the fullest embodiment of this conception of the human, “Man” (in which we now realize ourselves). But his point was the tension between the two, and the struggle to be not ‘anti-Negro.’ That is where the idea of “consciousness” comes in.”

Another internal U.S. approach to the Condoleezza factor may be the Zora Neale Hurston’s formulation of the ‘pet negro system.’ Here she describes a certain mutual benefit to dominating white society as to the co-opted black intellectual or creative figure. Hurston wryly articulates it, appropriating the manner of the preacher as follows:

Numerous examples of this abound as far as Condoleezza and the Bush family. Bob Woodward in Bush at War reports that after her parents died, George and Laura Bush became in effect Condi’s family: she spent her vacations with them and was almost part of the household (p.34).²⁸ The “like one of the family” option for black subjects we know has an entirely other domestic interpretation and history which echoes the Julia Rice model identified earlier.

According to Patricia Hill Collins as well, “African American women intellectuals are nurtured in this larger black women’s community. While the economic, political , and ideological dimensions of Black women’s oppression lead directly to the suppression of the Black feminist intellectual tradition, these same conditions simultaneously foster the continuation of Afrocentric culture and the creation of the outsider-within stance essential to Black women’s activism . . . leading to a generalized black woman culture of resistance. Out of the dialectic of oppression and activism come the experiences of African-American women generally that stimulate the ideas of Black Women intellectuals.” (12) Hill Collins’s construction of a generalized and uniform black community seems directly challenged here.

Condoleezza functions fully inside, antithetically to this generalized resistance mode, accepting an ‘equal opportunity to oppress model’ that Lorde identified, as she entertains for the big house, playing the piano for the Bush family, weekending in Kennebunkport as she coached the president-to-be, staying in the small house in the family compound in Crawford, Texas during her vacations and a range of visits there, functioning as the professor-as-homeschooler to an untrained and unprepared new president, describing her charge to Oprah as a smart and intelligent man, in much the way as nannies raising the children of the family describe their products. Indeed one of the criticisms raised of Dr. Rice as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State is that she has functioned as the person who flattered the president most, operated with a fierce loyalty which the president demanded and as a result has not been able to have a balanced and objective view of very dangerous world situations. In what has now been described as one of the world’s most colossal foreign policy mistakes, the invasion of Iraq and the Iraq War seemed not to have the benefit of studied foreign policy analysis or deep knowledge of the history and culture of that area of the world.

The more insidious reading of this process of condification is Rice’s performing of a myriad of other service functions, for an imperialist agenda, participating intellectually in the construction of the Vulcan ideology which led to the Bush Doctrine.²⁹ The Vulcans was the name given by Rice to an extreme right wing foreign policy group which included policy advisors from the former Bush administration and the bridge to the present Bush. Vulcans include George Bush Sr., Richard Armitage, Robert Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz (now disgraced head of the World Bank), Robert Blackwill and Richard Perle.

An essay by Elane Sciolino titled “Bush's Foreign Policy Tutor: An Academic in the Public Eye”³⁰ describes this advance role Dr. Rice played in the Bush’s nuclear policy speech.

The article further indicates that “she takes a dim view of American military intervention, particularly for humanitarian reasons, but declines to specify the circumstances in which the use of force would be justified. She proposes technology to build armed forces that are “lighter and more lethal.”

The conservative intellectual with power, is well represented here. The point is that all the assumptions we have about intellectual activity assume some sort of progressive ideological commitment. What happens when the ideological position is not in the interest of any progressive agenda, is its opposite and that same energetic type of intellectual activity is used for the benefit of a dominating state?

Condification provides the language. In this case, it refers to the intellectual who enters the centers of power and instead uses her intellectual skills for the benefit of the dominant in order to prove to the rest of that community that one can make it at the top. Related examples have already been provided by neo-colonial elites in Africa and the Caribbean. To be “condied” then is to be subject to that sweet and sour home grown approach to destruction by one of one’s formerly identifiable racial, ethnic, class or gendered community. In this context the actual practice of black and/or women scholars who occupy leadership roles have to be similarly interrogated. With Condoleezza being the most representative of that group, one of the nominees for Time Magazine’s 2006 “person of the year,” the face of U.S. foreign policy in the rest of the world, the urgency of serious internal analysis remains unmatched by a non-existing critique. We already know that our contemporary (twenty-first century) political realities make it clear that one cannot assume that by virtue of any generic subject location that one’s contribution is automatically radical because it comes from a member of a subordinated group. Condoleezza is the ultimate proof of this assertion. The nature of the construction of power elites who function as spokespeople for subordinated communities in myriad locations around the world similarly resonate.

The tremendous silence among the academic community and in particular black feminist intellectuals about the actions of Condoleezza Rice, we have already concluded, is remarkable. The public mythic construction of Condoleezza as “the [exceptionally] smart Black woman,” which is a major tenet of sexist racism is much in line with Hurston’s “pet system” model. This construction of exceptionalism then becomes a typical singling out for special attention one member of a subordinated group in order to make the others seem all without talent. Condoleezza, with normal academic credentials, herself admits in one interview that coming from Stanford she is used to intellectuals producing many more books than she had in the same time frame. In her first eight years at Stanford, she is identified as publishing fifteen articles and subsequently her dissertation, Uncertain Allegiance. The Soviet Army and the Czechoslovak Army (Princeton University Press, 1984) followed by an edited collection, The Gorbachev Era co-edited with Alexander Dallin (Stanford Alumni Press, 1986) and a jointly authored Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. A Study in Stagecraft (Harvard University Press, 1995) with Philip Zelikow, average output for an academic at her level.

So in a world in which “everything Black has been negatively marked, and everything white has been positively marked” how does the black subject position herself or himself. One unfortunate model in Wynter’s analysis is Fanon-defined Black “self-alienation,” which is significant as it suggests that the black alienated subject carries a consciousness that does not function in his best interest . . . indeed it has to negate everything black in order to be that ideal representation of the human. To reclaim the self then, “there has to be a war against that self-immolating “consciousness” which Black Studies in its initial incarnation was.

It makes sense therefore that it is under Rice’s leadership that Black Studies would be dismantled from a model which had developed via St. Clair Drake with a diaspora orientation, of “black folks here and there.” Again in Wynter’s on the ground witnessing of this process as it unfolded is importantly recalled here:

Condoleezza describes herself as a Europeanist, in the sense that she focuses on Europe, discussing it within its own terms. So it is not surprising that Africana Studies come in for such erasure from this machinery. Ironically, in today’s world not having the kind of information which those in Africana Studies develops represents a huge knowledge gap, indeed a lack of knowledge of most of the world. Being a Europeanist and being an Africanist are not symmetrical in relation to the functioning of the academy nor in the size of the field to be studied. And the latter position continues to remain as the embattled position even for the legendary Melville Herskovits of Northwestern University. According to Condi. The Condoleezza Rice Story, when Dr. Rice was appointed national security advisor,

This means only that she was uninformed as she indicates in her own self-description about the rest of the world, having earlier seen African Studies as not critical to her intellectual roundness in terms of knowledge, the kind of information that one gets in an Africana Studies program and other related “ethnic studies programs” which attempt to account for lives outside of the European world. Brent Scowcroft, Rice’s mentor is also identified as not thinking that she was rounded enough in terms of world knowledge for the Secretary of State position. Indeed Rice we know was a Soviet expert, a field which with the dismantling of the Soviet Union has become a dead field.

Generally, these are the people who become high administrators and then make decisions about whether to continue and/or fund Africana Studies programs around the country. Wynter interestingly does not blame Rice wholly for the demise of Black Studies at Stanford. She indicates that “Stanford had long decided that they didn’t really want it; they would keep it, but it could be like an “add-on.” So I think the process had happened even before she became the provost: I didn’t really see her as doing any more than the others had done. I think that’s fair. (Greg Thomas interview with Sylvia Wynter in Proud Flesh e-journal)³¹

Wynter may be being amazingly collegial in this assessment. Still, for the black Stanford alumni who, while students, had struggled to make Black Studies ³² a permanent feature of their university’s experience, as provost Rice did nothing to make it stick. Rice herself suggests that some of the decisions she made at Stanford were perhaps too hard. And importantly, one of her students Jendayi Frazier, an Africanist active in the African Studies Association who would be hired in Denver’s graduate school of International Studies and with training at the University of Nairobi, would become the Africa policy expert, appointed to the National Security Council as its Africa expert. And Cindy Courville, one of the collective of scholars who worked with Stanlie James on the Theorizing Black Feminisms³³ project is the assistant to Frazier. In other words, these assistants are not people who are unaware of Africana Studies and or black feminist positions.

The issue of American feminism in its general sense is perhaps the easiest lens with which to approach this issue as critiqued earlier by Elaine Brown. In the particular State Department case, the rise of people like Madeline Albright and later Condoleezza Rice was seen as women challenging the fraternity of men in leadership of the state department. Madeline Albright’s well-known statement to Henry Kissinger was “Henry it is no longer a fraternity.” “Throughout her career, Madeline has been committed to the advancement of women in the field, and she considered her cabinet appointment a victory for all women.” (309-310). If Albright was seen as challenging the location of women in subordinate roles, one of the principles of U.S. bourgeois feminism, [that is, the equal opportunity to oppress position with which I began citing Lorde], then, Condoleezza turned out to be the most fitting representative of black and female success by the model of the dominant society – highly accomodationist, conservative, smart but not for the benefit of the larger black communities.³⁴ Foreign service which had in the 1970’s only 4.8% women, by 1997 had 18 percent and a 1997 survey indicated that for women surveyed, the qualities that they thought they needed to make it in the field seemed to be a summary of Condoleezza’s with 74% suggesting that, gaining international experience, working harder than male colleagues, exceeding performance expectations, and above all “developing a style with which male colleagues are comfortable was important.” (311)

Thus in her speech to the American Baptist convention, Condoleezza says to applause from a group of largely white men that once she finishes her term it will be 12 years since a white man was Secretary State. The rhetorical question we can ask in response is: Has this made our world any better? From all accounts it seems worse to those on the receiving end of the destruction of their lives. And intellectuals in power operating for the benefit of an oppressive state have some responsibility for participating in this process, leading it at times.

Elaine Brown in her Proudflesh (The Damned Issue, Issue 2) interview following the publication of The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (2002), takes it even further as she identifies both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in “New Age House Negroes” and “New Age House Negresses.” (We can also recall Harry Belafonte’s challenge to Powell as operating as a house slave in the processing of the war before the United Nations and his subsequent identification of highly placed black people the Bush administration was operating as ‘tyrants’). The link between Fanon, Les damnés de la terre and the logic of condemnation or election is fascinating in this context, a point which Greg Thomas makes well in his Brown interview. For Brown, on one side as for Wynter on the other, advancing a bourgeois feminist position occupies the same pole as an effaced blackness. In other words, how do we account for the “damned” or the wretched who remain the sizable population of black communities wherever they are as selected beneficiary black people reap the rewards of struggle.

For Wynter, explaining her larger position in “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,”³⁵ it was what feminism was destined to become as it was installed. Wynter clarifies an oft-repeated charge: “It is not that I am against feminism: I’m appalled at what it became. Originally, there was nothing wrong with my seeing myself as a feminist; I thought it was adding to how we were going to understand this world. If you think about the origins of the modern world, because gender was always there, how did we institute ourselves as humans; why was gender a function of that?” (Proud Flesh interview).

Diaspora, Transnationalism and U.S. Internal Colonialism

Every colonized person who today accepts a governmental post must know clearly that he will sooner or later be called upon to sponsor a policy of repression, of massacres, of collective murders in one of the regions of . . . the [French]empire” “Franz Fanon, Letter to the Youth of Africa,” p. 118 ³⁶

In “Towards African Diaspora Citizenship,”³⁷ I identified as constitutive, the long history of forced migration which displaced African peoples globally, via trans-atlantic slavery. The result of all these processes of free and forced migration was the appearance of Africans in the Americas, in Europe and in Asia and the simultaneous re-creation of socio-cultural practices in these various locations, making them essentially a global people. Africans moved from a range of political formations from the pre-colonial nations, empires and other smaller ethnic political structures. This logic of diaspora is what in some contexts drives some understanding of related formations and varied geographical conditions. Still, one of the key features is that the majority of these groups, exploited for centuries, remained consistently debased in their new locations. U.S. African Americans are prominently located as one of these groups.

Following enslavement in the Americas, the most glaring of inequities continued as colonialism in which Africans as colonial subjects were powerless, until formal political independence some three hundred years later, to fully represent their people’s rights both in Africa and the Americas. Post-independence nation-states have often been neo-colonial systems which were therefore not reliable protectors of rights because within them were already imposed race- and class-based hierarchies which subordinated sometimes majority populations. In many countries, these African peoples remained/remain disenfranchised under various colonialisms (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Arab and Asian), without the means to return to their native lands and subject to horrendous conditions violating every tenet of human rights and with no other legitimate recourse but to fight for those rights. In the U.S. in particular, conditions of abuse of labor, of the denial of rights, and beatings, maimings and other forms of physical brutality accompanied the processes of colonialism that succeeded plantation slavery.³⁸

The intent of Pan Africanism was to make itself a practical and achievable reality, that is, beyond the theoretical and political articulations. A great deal of work has gone into identifying the contours of the African Diaspora and important work continues in a variety of areas, led by conferences which explore a range of angles. It is here that the relevance of St. Clair Drake who developed Stanford’s Black Studies Program becomes relevant to the Condification discussion.

Drake’s “Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism,”³⁹ offers a thoughtful overview of the ways that diaspora and panafricanism as concepts interact, function concurrently and provides research agendas for the future. This was a project which at Stanford perhaps could have provided an imaginative research agenda and even an African Diaspora “Think Thank” along the lines of other versions at Stanford if well supported at the institutional level.⁴⁰ Since then, a growing number of publications of conference proceedings, encyclopedia and individual books in the area⁴¹ are creating a dynamic library of African Diaspora Studies.

In our definition as developed for the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, a few elements are essential to African diaspora: (a) the dispersal of a people from the continent of Africa to various locations around the world; (b) the notion of a homeland; (c) some type of dialectic relationship with this homeland either imaginatively or in practice; (d) the transformation or re-elaboration of those communities abroad based on social, geographical and political realties; (e) but the maintenance of some clear connections – cultural, economic, demographic and political.

What remains to be worked out still is the identifying of those communities where they exist and the reclamation of rights in individual nation-states as well as the re-connections to a larger global reality. One of the things that Katrina revealed again, is the frailty of black citizenship rights in individual nation-states that should be protecting them. Black people worldwide descended again into Hurston’s ‘infinity of conscious pain’ as participants and as witnesses of an epic, slave-ship-like cycle of degradation.

Current trends in the development of transnational citizenship rights indicate that given the developments in communication and a range of other processes of globalization in the contemporary era, the need is precisely for states to work collaboratively to ensure their advancement of their well-being and the rights of their citizens in different locations. Since the African Diaspora is already a pre-existing demographic and cultural globalization, all it takes now is to activate its various economic and political components into some effective political and economic structure.

The distinction between diaspora and transnationalism is one which in my view is not absolute but indeed both concepts overlap . . . both driven by migration. the distinction being that transnationalism according to Goulbourne in the Caribbean Transnational Experience⁴² involves connections between people, institutions which cross nation-state boundaries . . . it may involve transnational citizenship, easy flow of capital and exploitation of resources in spite of barriers erected by the nation-state . . . a kind of economic transnationalism which undermines the sovereignty of nation-states themselves. In the political sphere, a series of regional movements may also be transnational. Diaspora on the other hand has to do with the creation of an imagined and actual community in a range of locations with the main ingredient being some dialectical relationship between homeland and being in exile.

In many ways, the U.S. project as developed in the Caribbean, was the building of a version of imperialism on the wane of European imperialism. Monica Jardine and this writer in a piece called “Imperial Geographies and Caribbean Nationalism: At the Border between “A Dying Colonialism and U.S. Hegemony,”⁴³ address this particular conjunction. The more recent attempts in the Middle East via Iraq has been the attempt to create a series of what Greg Thomas calls “future super-colonies.” The result is that at the end of 2006, with over 600,000 Iraqi people killed, worsening health and a country totally destroyed, the Iraqis and their neighbors have refused to consign their country to the U.S. imperial project.

Recent activity on the Diaspora at the political level, is perhaps the most important practical application of years of scholarship on African Diaspora and the political activism of Pan-Africanism as identified by St. Clair Drake. The African Union’s decision after appropriate deliberations to account for the dispersed African populations in the tradition legacy of Pan Africanism, has voted that the Diaspora would be its sixth region and various plans are in place to activate some of those features of diaspora exchange that are practical highlights. The earlier identified inabilities of a Rice to be equipped intellectually to deal with these new developments resonates strongly as the U.S. remains unaccounted for seriously in these developments. Brazil recently hosted the Congress of African Diaspora Intellectuals (CIAD II in July, 2006) and Trinidad has already hosted a Caribbean meeting on the African Diaspora sponsored by the African Union. Yet in visits to Brazil and in the Caribbean as in the U.S., Rice is not above using race and Jim Crow history, to legitimate herself and thereby the policies of U.S. imperialism. Beyond that, and after those encounters, we see no visible recognition of the Afro-Brazilian, the Caribbean experience, the African experience in U.S. foreign policy under her leadership of the State Department, unless framed within U.S. interests.

My search for policy material that specify U.S. State Department policies on Africa and on the Caribbean for example continue to be unrewarding, except for sporadic stabs at genocide in Darfur.⁴⁴ Repeated speeches instead describe the importance of building what she calls “transformational democracy.” Keep in mind that under the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,”⁴⁵ the PNAC’s position is for an aggressive military as was used in Iraq. “Transformational Democracy” then can also be effected by preemptive military action if appropriate, a short hand for either U.S. style democracy and its ultimate U.S. imperialism.⁴⁶

So on the issue of the diaspora, so far, U.S. African Americans remains outside of these frameworks and some would say this a good thing being often afraid of U.S. “transformational democracy” projects such as the Iraqi debacle. Still this remains a weak spot for this Secretary of State, i.e the inattention to the political movement to operationalize African diaspora on the one hand; the U.S. failed imperial projects in the “Middle East” on the other. Even a smaller project like the inaugural Caribbean Heritage Month celebration in June 2006, seemed to happen without her involvement, that is, no appearance by the Secretary of State at the White House function which this writer attended. The particulars of U.S. attempts at global hegemony may mean that U.S. interests get acted on in this new form if the structure is malleable. In the mean time, the African-descended populations in South America have come up with their own human rights statements meant to identify their relationships to the rest of the African diaspora, their rights as linked to indigenous peoples, and the desire to be educated about the history and contours of their African and African-diaspora experience.

American imperialism, even as it wanes has left African Americans in the unfortunate position within the belly of this beast notwithstanding, fighting its wars, and representing its failed foreign policies. Within the “diaspora” framework, the question of U.S. hegemony itself has to be consistently re-addressed and in a way African-American representation has a choice to either walk out of Durban officially as Colin Powell did rather than deal frontally with racism and imperialism or participate in another diasporic geography that has nothing to do with having the benefit of U.S. power.

Thus, the internal colonialism model as applied to the U.S., raised by thinking African Americans in the U.S., is worth recalling, given the rise of people like Dr. Rice who are clearly functioning as neo-colonial elites in the U.S. The epigrammatically captive experience of the black people of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the levees, without access to any leadership that could represent them is the other side of this neo-colonial construct and there are several others that political scientists can identify which fit the contours of neo-colonialism.

According to Michael C. Dawson in Black Visions. The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies⁴⁷ who uses the ten point program of the Black Panther Party as one of the best articulations of internal colonialism, black people in the U.S. have consistently argued for themselves as a separate nation confined within the borders of the United States, and that black people in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination. Malcolm X characterized the plight of African Americans as that of an internal colony, that is, oppressed and colonized people of the United States who needed to forge links with international communities. The generations of early Pan Africanists coming from the U.S. Anna Julia cooper, W. E. B. DuBois seemed to articulate a similar point. And even earlier Martin Delaney and David Walker would make similar connections. For Walker’s abbreviated Appeal titularly addressed the “colored people of the world” prior to the formation of a diaspora language. For Malcolm X as for a variety of leaders, the links with other colonized peoples would be frontally made, referring to “brothers and sisters in Asia who were colonized by the Europeans, our brothers and sisters in Africa, who were colonized by the Europeans, and in Latin America, the peasants who were colonized by the Europeans.” (Malcolm x, 1995: 276-277)

To this end, at various times in our history, U.S. African Americans have gone to the United Nations to get their rights protected, as recently as the 2000 elections in Florida. And the devastating effects of Katrina and the broken levees revealed that even if a foreign government offered help, unless the U.S. accepted it, then communities in the South, dying form the effects of a horrendous storm and the broken levies could not be reached, bordered in the U.S. Several complaints lodged before the UN by DuBois, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Claudia Jones, have sought to have their dwindling human rights redressed. Claudia Jones in “Self Determination and the Black Belt,” was one of those scholar-activists who raised the question of black self-determination using the model of the southern states as a natural home to the black communities disenfranchised.

Within the internal colonialism model, then, one can see the rise of neo-colonial elite in much the same way as it occurred in other geographical locations where there were colonies. A range of black political figures and moneyed folk, entertainers and the like act out of that position. In the case of the neo-colonial elite, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and a range of other political actors function publicly in the interest of the state, and at the expense of their communities advancement, undoing previous and hard-won gains. Thus, following Hurricane Katrina and the breeching of the levies, perhaps the worst disaster to befall a black people since enslavement, with all the signifiers and their referents attached, Condoleezza, the black woman who has told Oprah in her October, 2002 interview published in O Magazine she can tell George Bush anything, who has his ear and an amazing chemistry with him, acted in a way which caused many to wonder how come the black woman who has the ear of the president did not make her people’s life any better at a critical and history-defining moment, was instead seen shopping in New York City and attending plays.

Hubris. The Inside Story of Spin Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikioff and David Cohn indicates a central role for Dr. Rice (along with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush) in the selling and spinning of the war and the maintenance of the current U.S. position, “using the most drastic and forceful rhetoric in persuading the nation that was necessary.” Woodward’s State of Denial references some interviews which are clearly of flattering of Dr. Rice depending on one’s point of view. For example, the president states that Rice’s job is to bear the brunt of some of the fire . . . to take the edge off a little bit. And she’s good at it” (p.158):

Given to using football metaphors and seeing herself as the administration’s quarterback, when asked about the vision of African Americans stranded on rooftops in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Rice ended up after denying that the range of failed responses by the Bush administration was because of the race of the majority of the victims, reserves her strongest anger for the people who dared to criticize the president’s lack luster response: "But I will tell you what I deeply resented. I resented the notion that the President of the United States, this President of the United States, would somehow decide to let people suffer because they were Black. I found that to be the most corrosive and outrageous claim that anybody could have made, and it was wholly and totally irresponsible." When pushed a bit more by the interviewer she indicated that it was the storm of the century, “it was certainly not because anybody wanted to be negligent or cared less because these were Black Americans. That was a ridiculous lie.” (187). In other words, in the range of things to be angry at in this situation, Dr. Rice is more angry at the attack on the president than on what happened to black Americans.” (Essence interview) And the mis-perception, in her eyes, that the Republicans have blown off African Americans and Africa (actually a response to Kanye West’s ‘George Bush does not like black people’) is a lie as well in her view because Bush has given huge increases in funding to historically black colleges and has tripled his development assistance to Africa, though according to those on the ground, a great deal of that monetary assistance has never been paid.

Still all identifications are that Dr. Rice functions with the utmost professionalism and loyalty and this is perhaps what endears her to many in the conservative community as it alienates her from other communities who see themselves as victimized by the United States. As the president’s troubleshooter, she often has the task of coordinating the various positions of the various departments (Defense, State, other agencies) making sure that the president’s orders are carried out, and then serving as a private counselor to give her private assessment to the president, certainly when he asked, perhaps if he didn’t.” (Woodward, 254) Thus, in response to a question offered by the interviewer for the Essence Magazine interview, based on a conversation with an Ethiopian taxi driver who told the interviewer to ask what she has done for her community and what will she do? Her response came in terms of volunteer work with the UNCF, the Boys and Girls Club and her own work with a Palo Alto summer academy she co-founded, her emphasis being in her words to “underprivileged kids.” (189). That community then in her eyes, is not the larger African-American community, nor the international diaspora community.

As the coordinator and namer of the Vulcans, we are observing the operations of Condification at its highest manifestation. According to reports, Condoleezza chose the name the Vulcans from her hometown mascot, “the Roman god who created thunderbolts and hammered metal into tools for the gods (Felix, 30) I grew up right there in Birmingham with Vulcan,” said Condi. “I remember as a little girl that it was red if there was an accident or green if everything was clear” (30). In this case, the selected Birmingham, Alabama image has all to do with mythical European power, less to do with the wretched. In the multi-leveled Civil Rights iconography on Birmingham, Alabama, this selection is telling.

Within the logic of PNAC and the official “transformational democracy” position of the Bush government, with Condoleezza, a U.S. African American as the primary face of U.S. foreign policy to the world, and given that “global hegemony” is one of the U.S. missions, Condoleezza and the process of condification, is for me the representation of that possibility of a global U.S. hegemony articulated through the most deceptive of ways, the face of a black woman. From all reports, she “thinks of US foreign policy largely in terms of US national and strategic interest” with the U.S. maintaining international leadership.

Her speech before the Baptist Convention in June, 2006, repeatedly identifies that it is the U.S. only that transformational democracy⁴⁸ will bring freedom to the world, help countries in difficulty, maintain a general position of leadership. Repeatedly she invokes the line “President Bush and I” using the language of abolitionism on the issue of human trafficking, and importantly ending with the famous line that “If I served to the end of my time as Secretary of State, it will have been 12 years since a white man was Secretary of the State of the United States of America”⁴⁹ to great applause from a largely white audience. This signals to the critical thinker that either U.S. racism has disappeared (which we know not to be the case) or the dominant white public is assured that their interests are protected regardless of who is in the Secretary of State position Perhaps there is a quiet understanding that those current actors are acting in their best interests.

All the other diaspora communities (including the U.S. subordinated African American communities) as far as my own research reveals are still trying to find themselves, to connect with each other across imposed geographical separations. “Diasporic hegemonies” in its contradictory articulation then functions as a needed cautionary intellectual/conceptual debate, a worthy topic though for preemptive understanding of the ways that academic actors can function for state dominance. The Condoleezza story is still being written, and we are in the middle of the analysis of a woman, (only in her fifties, which by white male power standards is very young since they continue to access and maintain similar positions in their 70’s and ‘80’s). Various foreign policy debacles across the Middle East seemed assignable to her as the nation’s leading foreign policy officer. Though at the height of her professional career, still with many more miles to go and about whom so little analysis has been done, many U.S. African Americans still live in that seemingly false hope (which ended up being lost hope as it pertained to Clarence Thomas) that someone with access to the ear of the president, especially when in the understandings of politics in Washington, D.C. “access means power,” will at some point be able to represent, thereby transforming that access power to something tangibly useful for the African Diaspora.

As we did at the start of this discussion with Audre Lorde’s “Equal Opportunity” poem, the words of Heru, Ghanaian hip hop poet from Miami comments poetically on this silencing of analysis.

Notes and References

1. A version of this paper was presented as the plenary address at the “Diasporic Hegemonies Conference,” University of Toronto, Ontario, Toronto, October 19, 2006. Thanks to conferees and the organizers of the conference for the invitation and for questions and comments at the first public presentation of a very challenging topic. This paper is dedicated to Twayne, a young Jamerican high school friend of my daughter Dalia who opted for the military instead of pursuing higher education, was one of the soldiers who invaded Baghdad, happily returned home after his time was served but who after a short respite was redeployed. As far as we know, he is still in Iraq. What was the process that took Twayne and a range of other black youth from the inner city and its dangers to the much more dangerous Iraq is an overarching impetus for this paper.

2. While this conference took as its theme “Diasporic Hegemonies,” in order to question the various hegemonies which exist in various diaspora, the linking of these two concepts “diaspora” and “hegemony” in this case was always a troubled linkage given the varied meanings of hegemony as the concentration of political power and “diaspora” as a concept which has as its root “scattering” and therefore contradicts the normal usage of “hegemony.” The only way that this works for me in this paper is as a way of addressing U.S. hegemony and the ways in which within the U.S. context, certain members of the African diaspora, like Condoleezza Rice or Clarence Thomas, are able to access state power, which can be used as the Lorde example details against other communities of the African Diaspora without access to the kind of imperial state power that the U.S. wields. Perhaps the best discussion of this “diaspora”, “hegemony” disjunction is Michael Hanchard’s “Racial Consciousness and Afro-Diasporic Experiences: Antonio Gramsci Revonsidered,” in Socialism and Democracy, 7:3(Fall, 1991): 83-106 which describes the asymmetrical relationships between groups and individuals in specific historical contexts” (86). Another issue which came up significantly was the position of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, Canada or the Caribbean erased by the various diaspora created via enslavement. African descended people and East Indians who become part of the modern nation states end up being forced to be part though unwittingly contributors to settler colonialism while simultaneously being victimized by it. A number of collaborative relationships with indigenous peoples, spiritually and for resistance have been created in many of these locations and there have been some mestijae culture produced by these combinations throughout the Americas.

3. In a 2002 survey, then National Security Advisor Rice was viewed favorably by 41% of African American respondents, but another 40% did not know Rice well enough to rate her and her profile remained comparatively obscure. As her role increased, some African American commentators such as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post (2005) began to express doubts concerning Rice's stances and statements on various issues. Other writers have also noted what they perceive to be a distance between Rice and the black community. The Black Commentator found her distant from the African American public. Several have been disturbed about her invoking the civil rights movement to clarify her position on the War on Iraq was “cynical” or “offensive” Bill Fletcher, Jr., the former leader of the TransAfrica Forum, a foreign policy lobbying organization in Washington, D.C., as “very cold and distant and only black by accident.”^[143] In August 2005, American musician, actor, and social activist Harry Belafonte, who serves on the Board of TransAfrica, referred to African Americans in the Bush administration as “black tyrants”. While Condi has been supported by Dorothy Height of the NCNW, there has not been much analysis from the black feminist intellectuals. This is one of the first attempts that I know available.

4. More recently, BET Announces Its Top 25 Most Influential Leaders in the World of Business, Entertainment, Sports and Politics NEW YORK, Sept 20, 2006 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Hip-Hop Mogul Jay-Z, Senator Barak Obama (D-Illinois), Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O'Neal, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and basketball Hall-of-Famer Magic Johnson are among the elite list of African Americans influencing the world in BET's Top 25: MONEY. POWER. RESPECT. Hosted by funny-man Tony Rock, MONEY. POWER. RESPECT was designed to recognize those individuals who are using the combined in a dynamic way. Do you want to know which Black people have the most money, power and respect in today's society? -- Tune in on Friday, September 29, 2006 at 10 p.m. ET/PT. and find out. MONEY. POWER. RESPECT. is undeniably the most compelling list from the "Top 25" series thus far. Aside from the individual's net worth, BET also took into consideration their visibility, impact on society, and most importantly reputation. "With so many powerful black people in the world, narrowing down a comprehensive list of the top 25 was a tough one," said Reginald Hudlin, BET's President of Entertainment. "We set up a system to measure wealth, influence and their approval rating across the nation; and the results were surprising. Depending on what you value most: money, power or respect - you may disagree with the ranking, but you can't contest our roster."

5. It is interesting to note that Condoleezza, at the start of her career as Secretary of State, scored higher than most members of the Bush administration, at times scoring as high as 62% when other members of the administration, including the president scored in the 30^th percentile. And Forbes Magazine for 2004 listed her as the world’s most powerful woman. See Jacqueline Edmonson, Condoleezza Rice. A Biography. (Westport Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 6.

6. This issue will have to be addressed by a new round of scholarship. A forthcoming paper by a young Trinidadian scholar in graduate school at the University of Toronto, Roberta K. Timothy, addresses this issue in part in her “ ‘Third World Women’ of Color and Other Racialized Terms: Black Women Speak.” In Under the Gaze: Recentering Black Feminist Theory in a Canadian Feminist Landscape. Edited by N. Massaquoi & N. Wane. (in press). Inanna Publications & Education Inc., Toronto. Timothy indicates that “there is great support for Michaelle Jean from the African/Black communities and pride at her achievements working within Canadian society. However, the Governor General of Canada has limited political power to influence decision making, implement policies and overall effect change within the parliament and government structures in Canada” p. 9.

7. Valerie Amos ironically with Pratibha Parmar had written, “Challenging Imperialist Feminism,” Feminist Review, 17, July, 1984, pp. 3-19. The Sunday Trinidad Express, Woman Magazine, July 4, 2004, which has a beautiful cover photo and story: “Baroness Valerie Amos Leading the Way” which details the moves that lead to Valerie Amos being named a Baroness: “Amos was created a Labour peer in the House of Lords – acquiring the title Baroness – when the party came to power in 1997” (4). Originally from Guyana, she was the first black woman to hold a British Cabinet post and the first black person to be appointed leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Privy Council, the Monarch’s advisory body. Amos is described as “testing her mettle in women’s and racial equality causes” after undertaking sociology studies and postgraduate cultural studies. Clearly accomplished, Valerie Amos, after a series of positions, was from 1998 to 2001 the “spokesperson on social security, international development and women’s issues in the House of Lords. Tony Blair had also appointed her his special envoy to Africa” (5).

8. All of the biographies have identified this point. See for example Jacqueline Edmonson’s Condoleezza Rice. A Biography, p. 64, which indicates that she made lists of foreign leaders for him and they would go over these repeatedly while doing things like exercising together. See also Antonia Felix. Condi. The Condoleezza Rice Story. (Waterville, Maine: Thorndike Press, 2005), p. 35, 297.

10. Christin Ditchfield, Condoleezza Rice. National Security Advisor. (New York, Toronto London: Franklin Watts. A Division of Scholatic, Inc., 2003); Kevin Cunningham, Condoleezza Rice. U. S. Secretary of State. Chanhassen, (MN.: The Child’s World, 2005) ; Linda R. Wade, Condoleezza Rice. A Real-Life Reader Biography (Bear, Delaware: Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc., 2003); Mary Dodson Wade. Condoleezza Rice. Being the Best (Brookfield, Conn.: The Millbrook Press, 2004); Corinne J. Naden and Rose Blue, Condoleezza Rice. (Chicago, Illinois: Raintree, 2006).

11. Rice taking British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to Alabama has more recently it seems become more reflective of the racial terror of Birmingham: “Despite of my fond memories of Birmingham as a place where I was, as a child, secure, I also remember a place called ‘Bombingham’ – where I witnessed the denial of democracy in America for so many years…It was , after all, the city of Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan, where blacks were haunted by rebel yells and terrorized b nightriders and accused of burning their own homes…Ad of course, it was the city where my friend Denise McNair, and three other little girls, were blown up on a Sunday morning while they were going to Sunday school at the 16^th Street Baptist Church.” Cited “ in Rosa Parks v. Condoleezza Rice” by John Maxwell, The Black Commentator, Issue 164, December 22, 2005.

13. A helpful discussion of this is Michael Hanchard’s “A Notion of Afro-Diasporic Time,” a paper presented at the workshop, “The World the Diaspora Makes: Social Science and the Reinvention of Africa,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 5-7, 1992 (copy provided by author) which uses Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1963) in part as an illustration of this point.

16. The Black Commentator has perhaps offered the most consistent critique of Rice’s various actions. Besides the George Curry article, see also, John Maxwell, “Condoleezza Rice; A Death Trip,” Issue 164, December 22, 2005, J. L. Chestnut, jr., “Condi Rice’s Disdain for the Civil Rights Movement,” Issue 160, November 24, 2005; Norman Otis Richmond, “Letter from a Black Man in Canada: Rosa Parks v. Condoleezza Rice,” Issue 159, November 17, 2005. All articles available on www.blackcomentator.com.

19. The S.S. Condoleezza Rice would be renamed in 2001 as it served as a visible reminder of the Bush’s administration obvious ties to the oil industry and the White House had faced questions about the appropriateness of the tanker’s name. A list of other related activities while Condoleezza Rice was on the board of Chevron were identified in a protest statement distributed at the 2002 Stanford graduation by a student group called the Redwood Action Team. A version of this is available as Appendix 2 of Edmonson’s Condoleezza Rice. A Biography, pp. 115-117.The full document is available athttp://www.stanford.edu/group/rats/condi

22. Stuart Hall is credited with being the definer of Thatcherism, a policy which Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques identified in The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart), 1983 and his “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists.” in Grossberg and Nelson, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. See also his “The Meaning of New Times,” in Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, (Routledge, 1996).

23. See the positions of National Black Feminist Organization and the Combahee River Collective and even the earlier positions from Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper which articulated a radical critique of U.S. dominant positions, not the bourgeois feminist participatory of “equal opportunity” model which is what is deployed in politics and the corporate world and some aspects of the academic world as well. Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought ( New York and Routledge, 1991), for example articulated a standpoint epistemology which was organized around the black woman in the house, the “outsider-within stance” who thereby has a good angle on the master and his operations and therefore can articulate a totally different critique of operations. This kind of analysis as it flattens all black woman into that woman, also turns on the assumption that a black woman position is automatically going to be radical. Clearly this is not the case and did not anticipate the Condoleezza’s and as in DuBois’s repudiation of the “talented tenth” said in the end that he did not account for the selfishness and self-promotion of the black bourgeoisie. To me this is the unfinished business of black feminist thought, which now has to go back in and make fine distinctions in terms of class and politics.

26. Hortense Spillers has a helpful overview ranging from Cruses’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual to the more recent ‘talented tenth’ formation of the now defunct Harvard ‘dream team.’ her “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-date,” boundary 2. An International Journal of Literature and Culture 21:3(Fall, 1994): 65-116.

29. To those familiar with Star Trek, the American futuristic space series which has created its own following, and the way the average would understand this concept, not in the Roman mythology version, “Vulcans” e.g., “Dr. Spock who was half Vulcan and half human are a humanoid species in the fictional Star Trek universe who reside on the planet Vulcan and are noted for their attempt to live by reason and logic, with no interference from emotion. They were one of the founding members of the United Federation of Planets. Some Vulcans have dark brown skin, tightly coiled black hair, and physiognomic features similar to those found in humans of African descent (an evolutionary trait also present on Vulcan). Others share physiognomic features similar to those found in humans of East Asian descent. However, most Vulcans have a vaguely Eurasian appearance. Thanks to Greg Thomas for this point.

32. In Wynter’s words, “Instead of having these “individual studies,” they would have “comparative studies in race and ethnicity.” They wanted Black Studies, which had been way ahead of the game, to become a part of it. But I argued against it; and I lost. Fortunately, I had left when this came up, so I wrote a letter. As I said to them, there is no way in which you are going to set up a program and call it “comparative studies in gender.” So Condoleezza was just part of that. I didn’t see her from my perspective as specifically the one who did that to Black Studies at Stanford.” Wynter is obviously being cautious here for in the end, the Provost is the one who makes that decision and has the responsibility for the intellectual character of the institution.

34. Conscious of the language of “Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” and the assumption via postmodernism that one cannot assume any generic and uniform community, still there is a larger African-descended population which continues to be disenfranchised and which many prior intellectuals and politicians have sought to represent. The question about whether Condoleezza has any black community to which she owes anything came up as a question in the first presentation of this paper in Toronto, October, 2006.

37. Forthcoming in Black Geographies, edited by Katherine McKittrick, this essay which served as a policy paper for AU working out of the Western Hemisphere African Diaspora. Historians of the African Diaspora have continued a process of documenting the ways that this trans-atlantic slave trade disrupted the lives and displaced the peoples of numerous already intact African nations, locating them in the “New world” for the services of plantation systems. Subsequent industrial developments in the Americas (15^th to 19^th centuries) were facilitated through the labor of the enslaved, with slavery only being abolished in the various New World locations in a sliding 19^th century date arrangement based on decisions in the various colonizing centers of power (French, Spanish, English, American, Portuguese) from 1838-1888. But even before that, the trans-Saharan passage and the opening up of the circum- Indian Ocean geography, located a range of African peoples in what is now called the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, but also in the area now defined as the Mediterranean. Harris, for example describes the “pre-Atlantic phase of the slave trade,” as well as earlier migrations across the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, of free and enslaved people from approximately the sixth century.

38. Looking specifically at the U.S., glaring examples of the denial of citizenship rights (Constitutional Rights) to the black population as a whole have been more evident throughout U.S. History: The Fugitive Slave Act, The Dred Scott decision; Plessey vs. Ferguson, and the need for the 13th 14^th and 15^th amendments created for African Americans the ongoing dream of full U.S. citizenship: Thus, “Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the states wherein they reside . . .” and the 15^th Amendment (1870): “ The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It is important to point out, that, as critical race theorists have argued, neither of these amendments have undone the escape hatch of imprisonment by which a technical denial of citizenship and slavery remains in effect, that is, Amendment XIII (Ratified December 6 1865) Section 1. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (U.S. Constitution).

In the final analysis, these various denials of entry, denials of right to vote, deportation, incarceration make the point that nation-state citizenship for black people anywhere in the Diaspora has been a very fragile and mutable condition. The current politics of incarceration and the resulting denial of voting rights (plus the frailty of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act) for large proportions of the U.S. African American population as well as the denaturalization

40. Existing versions at Stanford such as Iranian Studies unit provide means for analyzing contemporary political conditions, though these have a U.S. state department ring to them when presented publicly. It describes itself by indicating that “Iran as a modern nation, is a pivotal in shaping the future of the crucial region of the Muslim Middle East which will be of intense interest to policy makers and analysts. It combines pedagogy, policy analysis, and research on all aspects of Iran’s past, present and future.” The CSRE is described on the website, one of the primary productive links available on the African and African American Studies website, besides a photograph of black faculty at Stanford as follows:

“Since November 1996 when the Faculty Senate of Stanford's Academic Council unanimously approved the establishment of the new undergraduate degree-granting Interdepartmental Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE), students have had the opportunity to major or minor in comparative ethnic studies or focus their course work in a single ethnic studies area. Six majors and minors: Asian American Studies, Comparative Studies, Chicana/o Studies, and Native American Studies in addition to the long existing Programs in African and African American Studies and Jewish Studies are offered as part of CSRE. Together they constitute the undergraduate teaching division of the CCSRE.” (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/AAAS - accessed 12/1/06).

A link to learning expeditions for students to Ghana, Belize, Jamaica, Paris, Harlem shows a series of study groups and a new director Lawrence Bobo, and the St. Clair Drake lecture series, with Manning Marable pictured suggests some revitalizing of African American Studies at Stanford though many of the other links to courses are dead links.

41. A sampling includes the following: Joseph Harris, ed. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora(Howard University Press, 1993); Okpewho et al, eds. The African Diaspora. African Identities and New World Self-Fashionings (Indiana University Press, 1996); Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Crossing Boundaries. Comparative History of Black People in the Diaspora (Indiana University Press; Carole Boyce Davies et al eds. Decolonizing the Academy. African Diaspora Studies (Africa World Press, 2002); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003); Michael Gomez, Reversing Sail. A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge University Press 2003). The forthcoming Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (ABC-CLIO, 2007)

44. Dr. Rice had met with the CARICOM ministers in March, 2006. A study of the speech delivered reveals no new material besides the ongoing language of transformational democracy and issues of trade and economics in September, 2006, foreign ministers “held further discussions with the Secretary of State, in the margins of the United Nations General Assembly.” A recent envoy to CARICOM was named in the appointment of the sitting U.S. ambassador to Guyana, David Robinson. See Caribbean Today, November, 2006, pp. 2 & 5.

45. While Condoleezza was not a member of PNAC, she was involved in the developing of U.S. National Security policy which has to be seen as the implementation of the PNAC position. Major actors like John Bolton (U.S. United Nations Representative) Paul Wolfowitz (Heads of World Bank), Jeb Bush (Governor of Florida and President Bush's brother), Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense), Dick Cheney (Vice President) were signatories to this document and the group that prepared it. Its key elements include Homeland Defense, Large Wars, Constabulary Duties, Transformed U.S. Armed Forces, Usurping the Power of the United Nations and Securing Global Hegemony through controlling the space commons and Cyberspace. PNAC through its The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to support the Iraqi National Congress is reported as meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in order to formulate a plan to “educate” the American populace about the need for war in Iraq.

46. Bush released on September 20^th, 2001 the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” It is an ideological match to PNAC's “Rebuilding America's Defenses” report issued a year earlier. In many places, it uses exactly the same language to describe America's new place in the world. When Condoleezza Rice spoke to the 9-11 commission at one point she indicated: “. . . .no one could have imagined planes being used a weapons. . .” and describes the Aug 6 Presidential Daily Bulletin as “. . . a historical memo, that it was -- it was not based on new threat information.” She also elaborates: “I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.” The title of the memo which Benveniste had her read after numerous protests contradicted that assertion even as Rice challenged California Senator Barbara Boxer to not impugn her credibility.

Introduction

Black Women, Leadership And Political Power

CON-DI-FI-CA-TION: Race, Gender And the Conservative Intellectual in Power

Diaspora, Transnationalism and U.S. Internal Colonialism

Notes and References