Condoleezza Rice for president!

OPINION:

Condoleeza Rice, former secretary of State, told “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson that yes, America’s history is filled with acts and occasions and instances of racism, but it’s a disservice to truth to therefore say all of America is racist, and all of America’s governing documents are inherently racist.

She brings the exact message the race-tense country needs to hear right now.

Actually, truthfully, truly, she would make a fine presidential candidate one day for the Republican Party — a fine president and commander-in-chief. Better than the race-baiting, social justice warring Kamala Harris the Democrats want for the position, anyway.

“American history was in part shaped at its very beginning by this birth defect of slavery,” Rice said, CBS News reported. “Do I wish that the anti-slave forces had won out? Absolutely. But they didn’t.”

Several Founding Fathers detested slavery, including Samuel Adams and Robert Paine. John Adams, second president of the United States, and his son, John Quincy Adams, never owned slaves. The elder Adams called slavery a “foul contagion in the human character” and “an evil of colossal magnitude,” and he publicly encouraged the abolitionists in their efforts. Roger Sherman, meanwhile, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation and the Articles of Association ending trade with England, called the buying and selling of humans “iniquitous”; he also never owned a slave.

Benjamin Franklin, meanwhile, owned slaves but later in life turned abolitionist and freed them. George Washington owned slaves but later in life called slavery his “only unavoidable subject of regret.” Thomas Jefferson owned slaves but later called it a “moral depravity” and “hideous blot” and fought to abolish it in the territories of the Northwest expansion.

In other words: It’s complicated.

America’s history, like almost all of history, is complicated, complex and rife with conflicts and conflicts of interests and conflicting viewpoints.

But as Rice said: It’s only in America where out of such complicated history and rich diversity that exceptionalism swells.

“I was born in Birmingham, Alabama,” she said. “I was eight before my family could go to a movie theater, to a restaurants. I didn’t have a white classmate until we moved to Denver when I was 12. So yes, I know America’s troubled past and that troubled past continues to have an impact going forward on how we see each other.”

But.

But, she said: “When I hear the talk about structural racism, it really gives me pause, and it gives me pause because it doesn’t tell me what to do. … Can we finally agree that our K-12 education system is really serving poor kids and minority kids very badly?”

She then said something the liberals, the Democrats, the leftists hate to hear: a way out of victimhood.

“I want kids to know about Tulsa,” Rice said. “I also want them to know what that black community did to overcome that horrible massacre. I want them to know about ’63 in Birmingham. But I want them to know that the mayor of Birmingham today is a black man who grew up in a poor community. So I want them to see the forward progress of America as well on these issues. And I want us as a country to do it together because I don’t want this to be black against white — my weaponization of my identity against yours.”

As for structural racism — inherent racism — the type of racist viewpoints critical race theory teaches our nation’s youth, Rice shrugged.

“I don’t know what it means anymore,” she said. 

Still.

Still, she said: “The other problem with [the term structural racism] is it sounds so big and impenetrable, as if we have to jettison the system somehow. And … with having been all over the world and having seen how people deal with difference, I will tell you that America deals with difference better than any other country I’ve ever visited.”

America is still the best.

America is still the most exceptional.

And why?

Because America is the only country that offers choice to so many different people.

Leftists take that choice and ball it into angry victimhood rhetoric they then use to attack anyone who dares threaten their victimhood. Why? Exploitation is good for Democrat; it’s good for politicians; it’s good business for those who want to seize power and hold control without having to actually do the hard work of standing on principles.

It’s the modern equivalent of slavery.

It’s a wallowing in self-pity; a wallowing in self.

It’s the way Democrats and socialists and progressives and Marxists keep the people in turmoil so as to make them easier to control — so as to use them as useful tools to attack the limited government types — so as to score more political wins and ultimately reshape the nation in a way that’s completely counter to what founders imagined. Think Kamala Harris, for instance.

But as Rice pointed out, it doesn’t have to be that way. America can be seen as a nation of evil, or a nation of constantly overcoming evil. The choice is ours to decide.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.