Condoleezza Rice sits down for interview with Brian Kilmeade of Fox News. (Rob Kim, Getty Images)
Condoleezza Rice criticized racially charged campaign advertising in the South, saying messages that invoked the unrest in Missouri following the shooting death of Michael Brown were “appalling.”
“The idea that you would play such a card and try fear mongering among minorities just because you disagree with Republicans, that they’re somehow all racist … I find it appalling, I find it insulting,” said Rice during a Fox News interview. “As a Republican black woman from the South, I would say really? Is that really the argument you’re going to make in 2014?”
The former secretary of State grew up in segregated Alabama, when riots and police abuse of blacks were common in her hometown of Birmingham. One of the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was a playmate of hers.
Rice was responding on Fox & Friends to Democratic-backed ads that appeared in Georgia, North Carolina and other Southern states with close Senate contests aimed at driving up turnout among black voters. In Georgia, for example, a mailer from the state Democratic Party focused on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., after Brown was killed and the need to vote for a “better, safer future” for children.
Rice acknowledged racial tensions still exist in the United States, but progress has been made in race relations.
She was also asked about a comment by Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the first African American elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction, that he was often told he was “not black enough” as he was growing up.
“What are we doing to our kids if we tell them their ethnic identity has to make them unsuccessful? That to me is a racist thing to say,” she said. “I’ve been asked many times myself and I say, ‘I’ve been black all my life, you don’t have to tell me how to be black.’ “
