Defamation of an Icon
In a decision made by the Detroit Public School Board of Education this week, Carson High School of Medicine and Science will be receiving a name change. The board decided to rid the school of its namesake, Dr. Ben Carson. According to Chalkbeat Detroit, board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo asked the board to renew the name change process at Carson so that, “We don’t have a direct affiliation with that mindset, especially as it related to people with challenges, housing needs, etc.” My response to that statement would simply be, who the hell had more challenges than Dr. Ben Carson?
Strength
Ben Carson grew up as he described it, “Desperately poor” in Southwest Detroit where he and his younger brother were raised by a single mother. Carson was a poor student with behavioral issues until his mother righted the ship. Despite working several jobs just to raise enough money to live in poverty, his mother took Ben and his brother to the public library where he was required to read two books and write two reports on those books every week. His mother would pretend to read and grade the reports, hiding the fact that she was illiterate due to growing up in the poor and rural south. Due to his mother’s intervention, Carson went on to excel in academics. Carson points to the influence that reading and his faith had on him and how it allowed him to form an identity and a sense of personal agency. Ben went on to graduate from Southwest High School and went on to Yale for undergrad. From Yale, he went on to receive a medical degree from the University of Michigan and then completed his residency in neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.
Neurosurgeons, along with physicists, are the most intelligent among us as measured by IQ. Of all occupations within all fields, neurosurgeons measure in the highest average IQ strata, hence the expression, “It’s not brain surgery.” Not only was Carson “A” neurosurgeon, he was “The” neurosurgeon, being named the Director and Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. For those who don’t know, Johns Hopkins is arguably the best medical center in the country and one of the best in the world. What makes this even more remarkable is the fact that he rose to this position by the age of 33, making him the youngest doctor ever to be named Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery in the country.
Dr. Ben Carson went on to become a pioneer in the field, not because of the fact that he was a black minority, but because of his trail-blazing accomplishments. Dr. Carson conducted a 28-hour procedure that became the first successful separation of conjoined twins. Additionally, according to Britannica his list of accomplishments include, “He conducted the first successful neurosurgical procedure on a fetus inside the womb, developing new methods to treat brain-stem tumors, and revitalizing hemispherectomy techniques for controlling seizures.” He went on to write over 100 neurosurgical publications and went on to pass along his knowledge as a professor at Johns Hopkins. In 2008, Dr. Ben Carson was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor we have in this country.
Through all of the success and accolades, he did not forget his roots. Along with his wife of 47 years, they created the Carson Scholars Fund in 1996. The organization issues 500 scholarships annually including more than 10,500 to date. Also, they’ve established more than 250 “Reading Rooms” across 23 states and Washington D.C.
In an article I recently put together entitled The Merchant of Hemp, I discuss the idea of feminine strength and its foundational role in society. His mother, Sonya Carson, was the epitome of this idea and was a woman of immeasurable strength.
Along with his philanthropic endeavors, Carson went on to throw his hat into the political ring. He went on to run as a candidate in the Republican primary in 2016 and despite losing his presidential bid, he joined the republican administration being named the director of HUD during the Trump administration.
It is for this reason, and no other, that Carson is viewed as a pariah by his hometown school district and his name is being stricken from the building. What is curious to me is how a man of his impact can be written off so callously. All that he represents and has accomplished can be completely disregarded, all because of his political leanings. So, what is Dr. Ben Carson’s political outlook?
Maverick
An intellectual hero of mine, Thomas Sowell, is a man of a similar background as Carson. A black man of rural southern roots who gained his footing through reading when he moved to Harlem as a boy. Sowell’s genius is in his pragmatism, analyzing through the lens of evidence, data, and critical thinking. Sowell, as a libertarian-conservative shares a similar political outlook as Carson, and like Carson, he is critical of the government’s relationship with the black community.
Below, is an article Sowell contributed to the Mercury News regarding the effects of the federal government’s social policy on his race.
“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood 100 years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.
Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.
Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”
Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the great proliferation of black political and other “leaders” that resulted from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.
The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law enforcement policies. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning.
That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal nonjudgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.
If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about. Liberals should heed the title of Jason Riley’s insightful new book, ”Please Stop Helping Us.”
Hactivism
Thomas Sowell was asked, “What do you say to people that call you a sell-out?” as compared to leaders such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. His paraphrased response was this, “Go out to the parking lot and look at the car I drive then compare that to what Jesse Jackson drives and you tell me who’s the sell-out.” When asked if Jesse Jackson is “Good for African Americans?” his response was, “No he’s good for himself. What will serve his interests is to keep people paranoid, dependent upon him, and dependent on the government. What will serve their interests is typically just the opposite.”
While we’re removing the names of great men such as Dr. Ben Carson, we are simultaneously erecting statues of George Floyd. I need not remind everyone of Derek Chauvin’s actions that resulted in George Floyd’s death as it was an inexcusable event and one that resulted in Chauvin being rightfully imprisoned. However, I am admittedly critical of the activism that followed. I do not intend to judge, degrade, and speak ill of the dead, however, I do find it curious that we are being forced to emulate a man that did nothing for his people, or the country more broadly, during his lifetime. Floyd was arrested 8 times and served time for an aggravated robbery in which he put a gun to the head of a pregnant woman. In the same month that Floyd died, he visited the hospital five different times with chest pains brought on by fentanyl use. Again, I do not intend to disparage or cast judgment and no one deserved to die in the manner that he did, but one could reasonably ask why Floyd is being presented as a role model. I’ll speculate.
The racial activism of 2020 was an incredibly lucrative venture for those pulling the levers. In order for a message to sink in and take hold, there must be a symbol. Floyd was that symbol. Though he was presented as a symbol of oppression, I believe it goes deeper than that. George Floyd represented a victim, which he was. However, when you present him as a hero to be revered and worshipped, the purpose of doing so is to demoralize or to “cause someone or a group of people to lose confidence or hope.” When you create an idol in the minds of children and that idol is not a figure to look up to but is instead a victim, you’re telling children they too are victims. If someone adopts and accepts that they are victims, they will never form an identity and learn to persevere, because after all, what is the point in doing so if no success can be achieved? Convincing people that they are oppressed victims has always been an effective method of control by those in power. If you can convince a group of people that they’re victims and you offer the solution, you can gain control over the said group of people. It is the same method employed in every dictatorship ever when seeking power. For the communists, it was the capitalists, for the Nazis it was, “The Jews.” In relation to the black community, those in power point to racism or now in its advanced form, “Structural Racism” as it’s presented in critical race theory. The proposed solution? “Give us a voting block that continues to vote 95% blue no matter how little we do for you and no matter how destructive the results of our policies have been on your community. If you just give us, the federal government, more power and influence, we can make the racism go away.”
The organization Black Lives Matter was much of the same, if not tangibly worse. The organization adopted and proliferated the phrase, “Defund the Police” alongside the democratic party. This, despite all polling data indicating that the overwhelming majority of residents in the black-minority neighborhoods they supposedly advocated for wanted the same level and even an increased police presence to help them from the violent crime that is disproportionately higher in lower socioeconomic areas. According to a USA Today report on polling taken of Detroit Residents, “Amid a jump in violent crime in this and other cities nationwide, Detroit residents report being much more worried about public safety than about police misconduct, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University/Detroit Free Press Poll finds by an overwhelming 9-1, they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer.” “Those surveyed reject by 3-1 the slogan of some progressives to defund the police.” The tangible impact of their activism was skyrocketed rates of murder and violent crime in black-minority neighborhoods. BLM’s activism led to exponentially more victims of death and violent crime than the reported number of deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers which was 10 people in 2019, as reported by The Washington Post. But boy did the organization’s leaders achieve their goals. Patrisse Cullors, the self-professed “Trained Marxist” founder of BLM bought up several multi-million dollar homes while the mother of Breonna Taylor was calling them frauds, saying they didn’t offer any financial assistance for anything including her daughter’s funeral despite the organization raising millions in revenue off of her death. The other beneficiary, the Democratic Party, benefited from a passionate voter turnout just in time for the 2020 elections. Black Lives Matter was never a pro-black organization, it was always a white-liberal institution in blackface.
Exodus
The truth is, those in positions of influence do not want an autonomous and prosperous black community, they much prefer one decimated by social policy that leads to poverty because with poverty, comes dependence, and with dependence comes the ever-expansion of their power and wealth. Help for the black community does not come from the political sphere, the republican or democratic party, and it certainly does not come from white people. When an outside group attempts to influence a culture, it never takes hold and typically makes existing problems worse, this is a lesson of colonialism. The changes that the community is seeking will never be able to come from outside, it can only happen from within the community itself. To imply that black people are in need of a white savior is as insulting as it is infantilizing.
During the era of reconstruction, the iconic Booker T Washington said, “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.” What Washington means is that not out of morality, but rather out of pure self-interest, people will seek products and services from any group of people if it benefits themselves, and purely as an unintended byproduct it will then benefit the minority group. While as a society we’re attempting to throw the baby out with the bath water by riding ourselves of free markets and systems of meritocracy, it is the best method known to man in producing the most widespread wealth and prosperity. No amount of policy, laws passed, or power handed over to the government will erase the ignorance of racist thought. Yes, racism exists in the past, present, and future, however, racism and the legacy of slavery do not define us. This country represents opportunity for minorities all over the world. To use a phrase from author Douglas Murray, “The foot traffic tells the story.” We reside in a country in which minorities from all over the world are desperately trying to enter, literally dying trying to enter, this does not happen in a country defined by oppression. The media and politicians want the idea of the black community to conjure up images of extreme poverty and of being constantly brutalized by police officers, but the reality of the situation does not reflect this. Yes, the black community lives in a disproportionate amount of poverty and faces a disproportionate amount of discrimination, however, the majority of the black population resides in the middle-and-upper classes. There are presently more black millionaires in the United States than there are in the continent of Africa. The alleged “Systems that exist to uphold structural racism” such as that of meritocracy and capitalism, as claimed by critical race theorists, are the very systems that black America, including Ben Carson, has used to their advantage. To have the belief that black minorities cannot succeed in systems of merit, is to me, racist. The black story in America is not defined by victimhood but instead by triumph.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. While many “Allies” in the social justice movement are well intentioned, many are subconsciously motivated by the need to signal their self-perceived superior sense of moral virtue, “Look at what a great person I am.” The black community, or minority communities more broadly, don’t need a white savior, it is degrading and infantilizing to believe that they do. If we as a society authentically care about black prosperity then the solution is simple, get out of their way.
The purpose of labeling people such as Ben Carson, or Thomas Sowell, or Clarence Thomas, a sell-out is so that no one pays attention to what it is that they’re saying because if people did, it could threaten the wealth and power of those in the position of influence. One would think that instead of focusing on defaming the name and legacy of a great man and role model, the Detroit Public School system would focus on the fact that only 7% of their eighth-graders are proficient in reading and only 4% in math. For children of Detroit who suffer from the same challenges that Ben Carson faced, who could possibly be a better role model than a man who came from the same exact background and became one of the most successful people this country has ever seen? It is social justice, not education, that is the priority of the inner-city school system. It is high time that the black community and the country more broadly recognize the ideological capture that is contaminating schools and society before we all go to hell in a handbasket.