WTC: Special

Black elites and racial politics: Are US war strategists, Colin Powell and Condie Rice, beyond race?

As US retribution for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington builds up to wide-scale conflict, the military and policy-making skills of two Black Americans are crucial.

National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell are the highest ranking blacks in American history, and their expertise is central to President George Bush's "war on world terrorism"

They can endorse the tracking and killing of America's enemies. But can the Black strategists in America's war room respond to mounting criticism from civil rights leaders and be a force for good, at home as well as abroad?

Colin L. Powel and President George W. Bush

Colin L. Powell, the nation's top foreign policy strategist, made it clear the day after the attacks that "we're building a strong coalition to go after these perpetrators, but more broadly, to go after terrorism wherever we find it in the world. It's a scourge, not only against the United States, but against civilisation, and it must be brought to an end".

Powell, who was sworn in to the Bush cabinet team 20 January 2001, is the first African American to hold the office. This follows an illustrious career as soldier and military bureaucrat. At 52, under the presidency of George Bush, the elder, he was the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him America's highest-ranking soldier.

Born of working class immigrant Jamaican parents in Harlem, New York, the fabled, but declining Black Mecca for black Americans, Powell rose to world fame in 1990 as a major architect of the US military campaign to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Condeleeza Rice

Condoleeza Rice, age 46, worked all night keeping the lines of contact open between the absent President George Bush and his top cabinet officers as the news of the September 11 events filtered into her underground bunker in Washington.

Her influence with President Bush is pervasive. She is, say insiders, "the first woman Bush speaks to every morning after his wife".

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and the daughter of a striving evangelical pastor and his wife, remembers the pain of segregation and the loss of girl friends killed in the racist bombing of a Black church. Her rise to national prominence was due to a combination of talent and resourcefulness, often in the face of prejudice. She is the youngest person, and the only black and woman to ever hold her post.

Ms Rice, who at 38 became provost of California's prestigious Stanford University, also served under Mr Bush senior as a national security expert on Soviet and East European issues. She built her reputation as an advocate of policies to dismantle President Bill Clinton's internationalism and redefine US security in terms of its national interests. She gained greater stature when she advised President Bush to prepare for a long and costly campaign and to reserve America's right to act unilaterally, if necessary.

Powell and Rice's presence in the command rooms of the White House, where for centuries blacks were only welcome as servants, is not without controversy, however. They are the widely respected new symbols of the American political establishment. They are idolised by the Bush families and have worked to support both Bush Republican presidencies and their largely right-wing cabinets.But this is an anomaly that sets them apart in a nation where most blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic Party supporters.

Civil rights leader and one-time presidential candidate, The Rev Jesse Jackson, has implied that Secretary Powell, though a beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement for which many black lives were lost, has failed to publicly condemn the roll back of affirmative action policies beneficial to black and poor people.

The Rev Al Sharpton of New York, a veteran civil rights activist and master of political protest, has expressed his disdain for the new power-wielding Black bourgeoisie, the "stuffy, conservative, upper-class blacks who tilt their head a little and talk out of the right side of their mouth". He says: "The sickness of our day is that most of us have lost our dream" and "some blacks feel they can afford to be less political on behalf of blacks".

Criticism of the appointment and performance in public affairs of Secretary Powell and security advisor Rice has come from educators as well. Academics Barbara Ransby, of the Afro-American Studies and History Department, University of Illinois, Chicago and her colleague Cheryl Harris, law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, have pinpointed the origins of black discontent in their article "Uncle Tom's Cabinet?" published by In These Times, an Internet magazine.

Subtitled "a few black faces at the top won't quell the outrage at the bottom", the co-authors say: "It is a sad, ironic testimony to the current complexities of racial politics in America that African-Americans like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice can attain unprecedented career advances in tandem with the sweeping disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters [in the Gore v. Bush 2001 elections]."

Influential leaders on the black political scene have suggested that "racial politics" is part of a time-honoured tradition in America's melting pot society. Blacks aim to establish the same secure claim to power and political leadership with links "back in the community" that has been used to advantage by Protestant whites and ethnic groups to advance in the nation's political, social and economic life.

Therefore, in the search for answers to our question: Are US blacks in the halls of power beyond race, more questions arise. Are blacks in high-level positions to be black first and government or corporate officials second? Or, to paraphrase Dr W E B Du Bois, the black scholar and pre-eminent sociologist of the 20th century, can they be "both a Negro and an American"? Neither activists nor educators have as yet provided satisfactory answers to this African American Dilemma.

Nevertheless, it is apparent that while sharing in the national loss and mourning at the terrible, momentous events of September 11, what beleaguered Black Americans want and continue to seek is the loyalty and commitment of Black power elites to combat the twin towers of poverty and inequality, domestic and international.

As African Descendants whose ancestors have known terror beyond reckoning, the new Black strategists in the White House would do well to heed the moral wisdom of the revered Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr Martin Luther King Jr. who said: "Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation."