Photo via Flickr user sam_greene@ymail.com
Ben Carson, the soft-voiced neurosurgeon whose campaign seems particularly hopeless at the moment, may not have much chance at becoming president, but he has a gift for generating controversy. Case in point: During a half-hour interview with Politico's "Off Message," Carson said that Barack Obama was "raised white."
The Republican presidential candidate also spoke about his sleepy demeanor, his Christian faith, and being a bad-tempered child in 1960s Detroit. Carson has often gone back to that childhood by telling his story throughout the campaign trail, so we know by now that he was raised by a single mother who relied on government aid despite working three jobs. This is the real black experience, according to Carson.
"I mean, like most Americans, I was proud that we broke the color barrier when he was elected, but I also recognize that his experience and my experience are night and day. He didn't grow up like how I grew up," Carson told host Glenn Thrush. "He's an 'African' American. He was raised white. Many of his formative years were spent in Indonesia. So for him to claim that he identifies with the experience of Black America, I think, is a bit of a stretch."
That kind of criticism has been repeated throughout Obama's political career. His racial background is a famously complicated subject: a white mother, a Kenyan father, a childhood spent in Indonesia and Hawaii. Carson isn't the first African-American to note that Obama's experience doesn't match that of people whose ancestors were slaves. In 2006, the black writer Stanley Crouch concluded, "When black Americans refer to Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about."
That argument fails to take into account that in America, blackness isn't just focused on cultural lineage—society's mirror is only skin-deep. Obama referenced this fact in a 2007 60 Minutes interview: "I think if you look African-American in this society, you're treated as an African-American."
Questions of who is authentically "black" have divided the African-American community for decades. But blackness contains multitudes, and to reduce it the way Carson does to poverty and broken homes is a gross oversimplification for the 45 million African-American people in the US. It's also sad that he can only define blackness in terms of deprivation.
But it's more important to look at how Carson talks about black people themselves. For one thing, he's got a warped understand of black history. Remember, the following words left Carson's lips in this exact order in all seriousness at one debate: "This country was—declared its independence in 1776. In less than 100 years, it was the number-one economic power in the world. And the reason was because we had an atmosphere that encouraged entrepreneurial risk-taking and capital investment." Either Carson thinks "entrepreneurship" means "owning slaves," or he has a very loose definition of "entrepreneurial risk."
He's no better when it comes to contemporary issues. To him, affirmative action is a scourge that needs to be replaced with something called "compassionate action." (He hasn't quite explained what that is.) Then there's the black-on-black crime conservative bogeyman he's so concerned with—as noted in The Atlantic, that's the fulcrum of a Carson radio ad in heavy rotation:
"FBI crime statistics show 52 percent of murders were committed by African Americans last year... It's a national tragedy. Only one candidate knows firsthand what it takes to overcome poverty and racial violence: Dr. Ben Carson. Growing up on the mean streets of Detroit, he lived it, day in, day out."
Importantly, these ads are airing on conservative radio stations with mostly white listeners. Carson isn't trying to discredit Obama's blackness in order to appeal to black voters, he's selling himself as authentically black to conservative whites, and the resulting process is pretty damn ugly: Blackness, in Carson's campaign rhetoric, is connected with poverty and the perpetration of violence. (African-Americans are also far more likely to be the victims of homicide, but his ad glides over that fact.) But the most famous black man in the country, the president beloved by African-Americans but hated by conservatives? He doesn't count.
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