Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a smart woman and is admired around the world. She is accomplished and an excellent representation of the best of what America stands for.
So when she talks people, even liberals, tend to actually listen.
Which is so rare these days – to have people actually listen to one another rather than shout at each other.
She went on “Fox & Friends” yesterday morning to push her new book, “Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom.”
She does not shy away from America’s past – the good and the bad – which includes slavery and the Civil War.
Co-host Brian Kilmeade asked her straight away,
“I want to talk about where your book starts, and that’s our constitution. As an African-American woman, do you see yourself in this constitution? Do you think that, when we look at nine of our first twelve presidents as slave owners, should we start taking their statues down and say, we’re embarrassed by you?”
“In a word, No,” Rice said before continuing,
“I am a firm believer in ‘keep your history before you. So I don’t actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners. I want us to have to look at those names, and realize what they did, and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history.”
Rice is Senior Fellow at the Stanford School of Business, then gave the liberals an important history lesson,
“When you start wiping out your history; sanitizing your history to make you feel better? It’s a bad thing.”
She noted that her ancestors were originally counted as three-fifths of a man, and recounted what her father went through just trying to register to vote in Birmingham, Alabama in 1952.
https://youtu.be/kXgcc4c2MKw
She retold a story from 2005 when she stood in the Ben Franklin Room of the State Department and was administered an oath of office by “a Jewish woman Supreme Court justice, that’s the story of America,” she said before concluding with,
“George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other slave owners were people of their times. What we should celebrate is that from the Jeffersons and the Washingtons as slave owners…look at where we are now.”