I was watching a program with Condoleeza Rice yesterday, and her image has been at the forefront in the media these days, and as I watched her on the television I began to wonder how she lives with herself. How does she bring into agreement her Blackness and her loyalty to the Bush administration? When she has someone to pull a hot comb through her hair to straighten the kinks out, does she not ever think of the millions of Black people who suffer due to the policies that she upholds? Does she never feel any connection to the pain that Black people feel? Now, as I have said before, Condoleeza Rice is from Birmingham, and came out of the same period as my mother--and not too long after Angela Davis came out of the same area. She was around when the 16th Street Baptist Church got bombed and those little girls got killed. Did she feel nothing?

Now, in an interview she gave recently, she stated that she was not very much influenced by the Civil Rights movement, that during that time period she was running around in pigtails and going to the ice skating rink and having parties, so she was not aware and it had no affect on her. What an odd statement, and odd to consider-- as this is not uncommon of middle class Black children of the time--they could be oblivious--some were, however, including my mother and millions of others, they did not grow up to become neocons and they certainly didn't become mouthpieces for the Bush administration in its total lack of respect for humanity. What happened with her? Is she an extreme example of the effects of assimilation? Thse thoughts plague my mind from time to time as I watch her movements and her body language on television, as I listen to her speak--and I can tell that the words that she speaks are not firmly connected to her self-hood--and I just wonder, is it so easy to wake up in the morning knowing that you have sold your every last ounce of integrity simply to move up into the good graces of the white male power structure? I think it is too terribly past the time to castrate this goddamned phallus.