Letter: A flight of political imagination

 

Terre Haute Tribune Star, Jan. 31, 2024

Thomas Egan [see letter: Rice could have been president,” Dec. 18, 2024] seems to think asking American voters if they would vote for a Black woman is racist. His proof? Pure speculation and avoidance. He concocts a scenario in which Republican Condoleezza Rice would have been a shoo-in for president had she been Democratic President Joe Biden’s V.P.

This is a flight of political imagination into the dream world of white conservative power brokers. Egan is floating about in the MAGA bubble. This is a bubble envisioning a past when Black Americans supposedly “knew their place” and, more importantly, stayed there.

With compromised success, Rice negotiates and lives and continues to work in a racist and sexist world. But as a candidate for president in 2024, running under any political label, she would have faced a significant portion of voters taking a different view than Egan’s. Not my kind of president they would say smugly to themselves. Alone and facing a ballot with her name at the top, they would have thought of Rice as another of those articulate, intelligent, “uppity Black women troublemakers.” That’s racism. That’s sexism.

— Gary Daily