Extraordinary, Ordinary People

Condoleezza Rice owes a lot to her parents, and even a little to affirmative action, as her memoir reveals.

Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family | By Condoleezza Rice | Crown Archetype (October 12, 2010) | Hardcover: 352 pages, $27
ISBN: 0307587878

Condoleezza Rice hates the outdoors. She does not fish, make camp or chop wood. She is nonetheless a pioneer, a hero of America’s racial and gender frontiers. Determined and persistent, she has blazed a path through the badlands of American segregation, liberalism and sexism. A twenty-first century Johnny Appleseed, Rice has cleared large swaths of deadwood from American academia and politics, planting the seeds of her own legacy and those of opportunity for future generations. Her story is truly an all-American tale.

The book is as much about Rice’s family as it is her. Those hoping for details about her eight years in the Bush administration and revelations concerning weapons of mass destruction or enhanced interrogation techniques, will be disappointed. Extraordinary, Ordinary People ends abruptly with her father’s death in December of 2000.

What readers will find is an intriguing account of the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. From 1989 to 1991, as Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council, she had a front-row seat to the events in Eastern Europe and the rise of colorful personalities such as Boris Yeltsin and the decline of Mikhail Gorbachev. For hawkish politicos, this section of the book is all too short.

Returning to the book’s central theme, her family, Rice details how her grandparents, the Rices and the Rays, were industrious landowners adept at navigating the tumultuous seas of the Reconstructionist South. To spare themselves and their families the degradation of separate but unequal Jim Crow facilities, the Rices and the Rays refused to use the “colored only” drinking fountains and bathrooms which were, Rice recalls, often putrid. If you were on a long family trip and really had to go, you went, as the French say, en plein air.

Her maternal grandfather, granddaddy Ray, worked in the coal mines of Alabama, and as a result, was determined that his children would receive an education whether they wanted one or not. Twice, once with a son and then with his daughter, grandpa Ray put down his tools, boarded a train and dragged his children back to college after they had quit.

On her father’s side, grandfather John Wesley Rice graduated from Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, as a Presbyterian minister, a career that Rice’s father would also pursue. Grandfather Rice traveled throughout the South founding churches and schools for poor black children, often financed with money from wealthy whites. “White guilt,” said Rice, was “his best ally in funding his schools.”

Rice’s parents were both teachers who, she recalls, were convinced that education was “a kind of armor” that would shield her “against everything – even the deep racism in Birmingham and across America.” Rice believed them and they were right. She enrolled in first grade when she was three-years old, the same year in which she took up piano. She began learning French when she was eight, and at 16, was simultaneously matriculating her senior year in high school and her freshman year at college. On any given day, which started around 4.30 a.m. for the teenage Rice, she practiced figure skating, went to high school and college, and then returned home for a relaxing three-to-four hour stint at the piano.  

Rice describes her academic prowess with such matter of fact language that it does not, as one might expect, sound braggadocious. “You are a Rice,” was the mantra recited by family members, teachers and church leaders. This high level of expectation, Rice notes, helped her develop a strong sense of self-confidence that saw her break through racial and gender barriers.

Rice writes of how she had a particularly close relationship with her father, who had hoped that Rice would be born a boy. From this relationship she developed a life-long love of sports and politics. “My father was a political junky,” she writes, recalling how together they followed the drama of the Cuban missile crisis as well as the twists and turn of the civil rights movement.

These two events made a lasting impression on Rice, shaping her into the iconic conservative she is today. Concerning Cuba, she admits to feeling that Fidel Castro “should be punished until he dies” for threatening the U.S. Concerning civil rights, she writes unapologetically that if the men in her community had been prohibited from arming themselves with guns and forming neighborhood militias, the bombings and burnings perpetrated by the Klu Klux Klan would have been much worse. Rice’s father had little patience with Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent tactics, and she in turn has little use for the American left’s constant push to restrict Second Amendment gun rights. For the Rices, politics were personal. One of the four girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham Baptist Church bombing was Denise McNair, Rice’s schoolmate and friend.

In Extraordinary, Ordinary People Rice also discusses her views on race relations in the United States.  Here her otherwise intellectual narrative goes fuzzy and what emerges in its place is a muddled mixture of emotion and rationalization. Rice eschews terms like “African-American,” preferring instead “black” and “white,” and writes that, “I hate identity politics and the self-satisfied who… cannot see beyond color to the individual.” In a direct contradiction to this she writes that she is a “fierce defender of affirmative action”, especially at university as a means to diversify the faculty.

The problem with her position is that affirmative action is identity politics in practice. Affirmative action is a world view which holds that for a society to be “balanced” and “just” all ethnic and gender groups need be represented in positions of power roughly in proportion to the percentages that those groups are found in the society at large. Failing this diversification, so goes the theory, members of various minorities (such as blacks) will not aspire to these high positions, and what is worse, the “voice” or “experience” of a given group will not be heard by the whole. That Rice was an affirmative action hire as a professor at Stanford University and later went on to become Provost in a similar manner, highlights the inconsistency of her position.

Minor problems aside, Extraordinary, Ordinary People is a warm and enjoyable book, one that moves in a simple, chronological fashion. It is a pity the work had not been released in May or early June. With little flash, flare or mental complexity, it would have made an ideal pool-side read.

Jeff Garner is an American journalist, broadcaster and co-founder and CEO of Catholic Radio International. He can be contacted at jgardner@catholicradiointernational.com

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