The Patriot Post® · Condi Rice Schools ’Em

“I’m not certain seven-year-olds need to learn it,” said Condoleezza Rice to her friends on ABC’s “The View.” The question at hand, which was posed by co-host Whoopi Goldberg, was whether parents should have a say in the education of their children, and what role racist doctrines such as Critical Race Theory should play in that education.

Rice, who grew up in the authentic Jim Crow South of Birmingham, Alabama — as opposed to the fake “Jim Crow 2.0” and “Jim Crow on Steroids” and “Jim Eagle” South of Joe Biden’s fever dreams — no doubt knows a thing or two about race. Her dad was a Republican, she says, because the Jim Crow Democrats refused to register him to vote.

But Rice no doubt also knows a thing or two about hard work and merit. In addition to graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Denver and becoming Stanford University’s first black, first woman, and youngest-ever provost, Rice is also a figure skater, a concert pianist, a Sovietologist, a former national security advisor, and a former secretary of state.

Needless to say, she was able to hold her own intellectually during a guest appearance Wednesday on “The View.” Perhaps lefties Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sunny Hostin figured Rice, having been an educator and having spent plenty of time in Palo Alto, would be somewhat sympathetic to their progressive worldview. Sadly, for them, she wasn’t.

When the conversation came to the Virginia governor’s race, which pits former Democrat governor and Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe against Republican underdog Glenn Youngkin, Goldberg brought up CRT — the issue that has roiled the state, awakened its parents, and tightened up a governor’s race in a state that Joe Biden carried by 10 points. Behar went first, throwing her weight behind the sanctity of “the curriculum” and essentially telling parents that they need to shut up “or they’re gonna have to home-school their kids.”

“Well, they’re actually home-schooling them in increasing numbers,” Rice replied, “and I think that’s a signal.”

Progressives love to invoke “moral authority” whenever it suits them, but here, with Rice, they were playing a dead hand. “I grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama,” she continued. “I couldn’t go to a movie theater or to a restaurant with my parents. I went to segregated schools until we moved to Denver. My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice but they also told me, ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ And that’s the message that I think we ought to be sending to kids.”

From that foundation, Rice hit CRT head-on: “One of the worries that I have about the way we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past — I don’t think that’s very productive — or black people have to feel disempowered by race. I would like black kids to be completely empowered to know that they are beautiful in their blackness, but in order to do that I don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white. … We teach the good and we teach the bad of history, but what we don’t do is make seven- and 10-year-olds feel that they are somehow bad people because of the color of their skin. We’ve been through that, and we don’t need to do that again.”

What a masterful way of putting it: In a civilized country, we don’t guilt-trip one race of children because of the color of their skin.

The mirthless Behar, whose career highlights include co-starring in an off-Broadway performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” could only respond with a weird non sequitur about the Third Reich: “You know, in Germany, they teach the Holocaust to every student. I met a German girl one time, and a school trip is a trip to Auschwitz or Dachau. They learn about their history, and there are not two sides to the story.”

Joy Behar met a German girl one time, she’ll have you know.

“Of course, and we teach slavery to every student,” replied Rice. “We all have to learn about our history, but we also have to recognize that we have to live together, and we’re going to live together better if we don’t make each other feel guilty.”

Rice was also asked about the January 6 Capitol riot, which her hosts kept mistakenly calling an insurrection. “I said at the time January 6 was wrong,” said Rice. “I called it an assault on law and order and an assault on our democratic processes. So, full stop, it was wrong. … I also, on January 6, for the first time since I was the national security advisor on September 11, I cried that day, because I thought, ‘I studied countries that do this. I didn’t think it would happen in my own country.’”

From there, Rice tried to gently counsel her hosts about the need to move on: “I’m one who believes that the American people are now concerned about their, what we call ‘kitchen table issues’ — the price of gasoline, inflation, what’s happening with their kids in school. We do have a lot of issues, and I hope what we will do is move on to the next generation of leadership.”

Here, Rice’s advice is again sound, but it’ll surely fall on deaf ears. The American people have long since begun to lose interest in the events of January 6. But the Democrats?

It’s the only issue they have.