Ben Carson speaks with a quiet air of understated authority. This is perfect for the high-stakes setting of a 10-hour brain surgery, where a cool head and clear commands are the order of the day. It’s less than perfect for the febrile world of partisan politics, as he discovered during the boisterous Republican primary of 2016, and definitely unsuited to the background music piped into a Washington hotel lounge where listeners have to lean in to hear his carefully chosen words.
Until, that is, he starts talking about how the Democrats are putting race and racism at the heart of their 2020 election campaign. Claims that America is foundationally racist and that African Americans can be free only if they are paid reparations for slavery bring forth a loud, uninhibited guffaw.
“It’s ridiculous,” he splutters once the laughing fit has subsided. “You know, this is a country where people can come from virtually any socioeconomic level and rise to the top more easily than they can anyplace else … regardless of race.
“So does that mean there are some people who aren’t afflicted by racism? No, it doesn’t mean that at all, but it does mean that racism is not something that can stop you unless you want it to.”
He should know. This is the man whose rags-to-riches story was turned into a TV movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr. He credits the “stand on your own two feet” philosophy of his mother and her deep-rooted belief in the transformative power of books for his rise from a childhood of “dire poverty” in Detroit to a scholarship at Yale University and a career that took him to the pinnacle of American medicine as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
That it all came against extraordinary odds goes without saying. In places such as Detroit, fewer than 1 in 20 children born into poverty reach the top quintile of income earners, according to Stanford economists. The chances of becoming a groundbreaking surgeon awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom are even slimmer.
Four years ago, Carson came close to another pinnacle: the top of American politics. That same inspirational story of an against-the-odds triumph made him briefly the front-runner to win the Republican nomination for president. Today, Carson is the most senior African American in Trumpworld, serving as housing and urban development secretary.
No wonder Democrats’ plans for affirmative action and state-funded assistance to address inequality get short shrift. Nothing garners more scorn from Carson than the issue of reparations and the idea that racism’s endemic and foundational status in a country built on slavery requires compensating today’s generations for historic wrongs.
Sen. Cory Booker, one of the 2020 Democratic candidates, has introduced a bill to examine the potential effects of reparations. Other candidates, such as Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Julián Castro, have all expressed greater or smaller degrees of support, bringing the issue into the mainstream of Democratic debate.
For Carson, it is an unworkable solution to a misunderstood problem.
“How much do I get? You know, my DNA analysis is 77% sub-Saharan African, 20% European, 3% Asian,” he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner, his quiet patience turning to quiet exasperation. “So how do we divide this up? And how do we do that for all the various people? Where does it stop? Does it stop with this generation? Or what happens to the generation before them? It just doesn’t make any sense.”
None of that is to say that slavery did not leave a lasting effect on America. It is just that, for Carson, overcoming the challenges of poverty and limited opportunity can often involve the sort of discipline instilled in him by his mother, who was one of 24 children and only managed a third-grade education. In one early episode recounted in his memoir, Gifted Hands, Carson describes being grounded until he learned his multiplication tables. Shortly afterwards, he and his brother were ordered to watch less television and read two library books a week.
He said, “There were hundreds of years of being subjugated, told that you’re inferior, believing potentially that you’re inferior, fighting those feelings, and competing with a lot of other immigrants who came here and did not have to face that. So, there is no question that black people in this country start out in a deeper hole. No question. But having said that, over that long period of time, a lot of that hole has been filled in. You can dwell on how deep the hole was or you can dwell on how to get out of it.”
He dismisses reparations as a pseudo-badge of honor rather than a workable plan.
“It’s a talking point. It’s a political point,” he said. “You know, you can get some people to say, ‘Rah, rah, rah, we love this guy.’ That’s that kind of thing.”
Of the 2020 Democrats, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has perhaps the most clearly defined set of affirmative policies. His Douglass Plan for Black America, named for the 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, includes a $25 billion investment in historically black colleges and universities, a commitment to triple the number of entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds in a decade, and a promise to direct a quarter of federal contracting dollars to small businesses from underserved communities.
Yet the danger in such policies, said Carson, is that they stoke resentment in other communities that feel they are missing out, in effect promoting racism rather than tackling it.
“I actually believe in something I call ‘compassionate action,’ which means we’ve always given a hand up to those who are disadvantaged,” he said. “It shouldn’t have anything to do with the color of your skin. It should have to do with the circumstance from which you came.”
Such a perspective does not always fly in Democratic politics. In 2016, Bernie Sanders was targeted by Black Lives Matter supporters for a policy platform that took a universalist approach to poverty. His decision to explain racial injustice as a symptom of economic inequality might have been in tune with traditional labor-liberal positions, but it put him at a disadvantage against Hillary Clinton, who dominated among black Democratic voters last time around.
Today, her approach has percolated through a 2020 field overtaken by identity politics. But that, according to Carson, is a strategy that recognizes its failure to win supporters through evidence and reason, replacing it with the politics of coalition building.
“The only way they can win is to create coalitions, a coalition of women who feel they’re being stepped on, blacks who feel they are being stepped on, Hispanics who feel they are being stepped on, gays who feel they are being stepped on,” he said. “If you can be like the savior of all these little coalitions, then you can cobble together something that wins even when your ideals are bankrupt.”
To work, he said, it requires a sense of victimhood and a culture of blame. Those were notions drummed out of him by a mother who brought up two sons by herself after expelling their father from the family home when she discovered he was a bigamist.
“She came from just the worst circumstances, had just a horrible life, but never became a victim and refused to let us see ourselves as victims,” he said. Skin color, he added, was never going to be a reason to feel like a victim.
“She said that if you walk into an auditorium full of racist, bigoted people, you don’t have a problem. … They have the problem because they are going to cringe and wonder if you’re going to sit next to them, whereas you can go and sit anywhere you want,” he said with another easy guffaw.
The result is an outlook that emphasizes the individual and sees barriers as a chance for self-improvement.
“So, my political philosophy is that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you,” he said. “Does that mean there are no problems in the environment? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. But it means that you get to decide how you’re going to react to those problems, and you can allow them to be the excuse for your failure or you can let them be the hurdle that strengthens you.”
“Unfortunately, in our society today, we have a lot of voices trying to convince people that somebody else controls their life, that somebody else has caused their problems, and that somebody else can solve their problems,” he added.
It’s a classic conservative position. But his skin color and proximity to President Trump make him a frequent target of African American condemnation, voices that accuse him of being a race traitor. This year, he has defended Trump against charges of racism for his characterization of Baltimore as a “rat and rodent infested mess” — Carson said direct language is sometimes needed to provoke action and compared the city instead to a cancer patient — and the president’s use of the term “lynching” to describe impeachment.
“I would probably do it differently,” he said gently of the president’s provocative tweets before pointing out that in 1998, Joe Biden said the impeachment of Bill Clinton could be seen as a “partisan lynching.”
But he sounded hurt by the idea that attacks from the Left could eat into his legacy. His memoir describing a tough childhood is a set text in schools across Baltimore, the city where he made his name, but last year, stories surfaced that his political positions were creating a backlash.
The principal of one elementary school removed a portrait of Carson in surgical scrubs — “The person who has the most to do with your success is you,” read its motivational message — and pastors lined up to tell reporters that he was no longer the hero he once was.
Carson said the portrait has since been restored to its rightful position and the principal has apologized. “But it’s frustrating,” he lamented.
Trump administration policies that address criminal justice reform or create jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, reducing unemployment within the black community to historic lows, are not seen as the right kinds of policies.
“It’s hard because, as you probably know, the Left doesn’t like the debate. They like to shut down debate because they don’t necessarily want to hear, or they don’t want other people to hear, the other side. It makes it much easier for them to propagandize,” he said.
Instead, successful black Americans who have made it by themselves may populate TV sitcoms, movies, and advertisements, where they serve as awkward counterexamples to the policies being pushed by the Left.
“I’m the walking embodiment of what they don’t want people to see. They don’t want people to know that you can come from where I came from and that you can get through this and that you don’t have to be bitter, and that you can still do good for other people. It’s completely antithetical to the sermon they preach.”
Carson is optimistic that Trump’s message is starting to get through to black voters and claims plenty of African Americans tell him they admire what he is doing. “But they always have the caveat: ‘Don’t tell anybody I said that,’” he added.
Carson told his story almost four years to the day since he led polling for the Republican primary. His name is back in the newspapers as a reminder that, this time around, current Democratic front-runners still have a long way to go to clinch the nomination. He described how Trump sometimes joshes with him about their shared campaign experience.
“Well, as the president says to me often, ‘Ben, aren’t you glad you didn’t win?’” he said.
“Absolutely, because for the Left, the only thing worse than Satan is a black conservative,” he continued. “If you’re black, you have to think this way. If you don’t, you’re just like Satan incarnate.”
Rob Crilly is a White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner.
