25 October 2005

(Recounts triumphs of African-Americans and others)

By Michael Jay Friedman
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- Speaking in separate interviews with The New York Times and U.S. television reporters, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice criticized those who engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations," whether toward African-Americans who fought for their civil rights in 1960s Alabama, or people today who strive to attain freedom and democracy in their own nations.

Accompanied by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Rice traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, for an October 22 ceremony recounting the May 1963 bombing of an African-American church that killed four schoolgirls, including the secretary’s childhood friend, Denise McNair.

Rice described contemporary Birmingham as a "thoroughly modern city… light-years away" from 1963 both in racial attitudes and technological achievement.  However, she added, those gains were hard won and reflected the struggle to improve an imperfect democracy. "The march of democracy doesn’t get finished at the time that you finish the constitution," she said, "but rather it’s a long evolution."

Given that Americans continue to strive to improve their democratic institutions, the secretary suggested, others should not interpret the United States' promotion of democracy as "lecturing… that we are somehow saying that America has it all right and now you have to get it right."

But the secretary also stressed that change is possible.  Birmingham -- once home to Bull Connor, the police chief who infamously unleashed snarling police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators -- now has a female African-American chief of police, Annetta Nunn.

Rice criticized the mindset that holds that certain people -- whether African-Americans in the past or Middle Easterners today -- are unworthy of achieving or incapable of sustaining free and democratic governments.

In the past, she noted, some opponents of the U.S. civil rights movement argued that African Americans were not ready for freedom and lacked the maturity to exercise it responsibly. She identified a similar mindset – what President Bush has called "'the soft bigotry of low expectations'" – in those who excuse minority academic underachievement. Speaking of predominantly black students at her former elementary school, the secretary asked, "how dare anybody think that they should not be reading at third grade level when they are in third grade?”

As a scholar of Russian history, Rice said she encountered similarly patronizing attitudes toward the Russian people. The secretary also recounted discussions with Portuguese and Salvadoran diplomats who witnessed their nations' embrace of democracy after "what seemed either hopeless situations or violent situations or tyranny that was not possible to overcome."

These examples, Rice asserted, offer perspective on the situation facing Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians and others who struggle today to achieve freedom and to establish democratic institutions. Echoing Rice’s remarks, Foreign Secretary Straw dismissed an attitude he characterized as demeaning to Arabs.

The secretary said that while democratic nations might disagree on particular policies, their shared values help to ensure friendly relations.

Rice suggested that education is the key to strengthening democracy, as it empowers individuals to improve their status through hard work and merit. Offering her personal experiences as a measure of the United States' progress, the nation's first black female secretary of state observed that neither race nor gender much affect reactions to her today.

For information on the U.S. civil rights movement, see Civil Rights in the United States.