WE Blog

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Washington Times last week that slavery was the nation’s “birth defect.” She said: “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”

While citing “enormous progress” on race, she said America’s past “makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.”

She also called Barack Obama’s recent speech on race “important.”
“What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them — and that’s our legacy.”