Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Black Clergy Denounces 'Racially Motivated Attacks' on Condoleezza Rice

The deafening silence is now broken, and it took conservative black clergymen to break it. This statement from Oliver N. E. Kellman, Jr., executive director of the National Faith-based Initiative Coalition (mis-named in the article as "Faith-based Leadership Council"), says it all:
These cartoonists believe that the liberal views of the Washington Post and New York Times somehow provides cover for them to engage in racist attacks upon Dr. Rice and other minority in the Bush Administration...Mr. Danzinger's, Mr. Oliphant's and Mr. Trudeau's racist depictions of Dr. Rice are of the most twisted Ku Kluz Klan/Skinhead Mindset. I am astonished that the NAACP, Rainbow-Push and other traditional civil rights groups did not denounce this type of trash from the very first day it was reported.
I hate to tell you, Dr. Kellman, but I expected exactly this behavior from all these men. I know Garry Trudeau--well, not personally, but his reputation lingered at Yale University when I attended it. This kind of puerile nonsense is par for his course, and in fact something like that was running in a Doonesbury story line in my first year at Yale. As for the others, we now see that liberals never intended to "advance colored people." They intended all along to use them for their own political advancement.

But, to paraphrase Cate Blanchett in The Fellowship of the Ring, something happened that the white liberal establishment did not intend: blacks started to get lives and think independently. From Dr. Rice to Mr. Kellman, these signs of independent thinking are very good to see.