“Be color-blind/Don’t be so shallow,” urged En Vogue in “Free Your Mind,” and the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb has somewhat the same advice for Republican-presidential-nomination-process aficionados regarding Ben Carson. Cobb, who’s also a professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote in a Tuesday post that even though it’s “tempting” to think of Carson as the new Herman Cain, ultimately it’s superficial. He suggested that if you look past skin color, you’ll see that Carson’s “radically paranoid” worldview makes him much more analogous to another 2012 GOP candidate, Michele Bachmann.
Cobb blasted Carson’s “sweaty-palmed fixation on government power” as well as his “fear that President Obama has made himself into an American Caesar” and sarcastically praised Carson for “mov[ing] the country one step closer to that moment when we will be measured not by the color of our skin but by the content of our conspiracy theories.”
From Cobb’s post (bolding added):
It’s tempting to see Ben Carson—neurosurgeon, notable black success, conservative pundit, and coquettish potential Presidential candidate—as this election’s Herman Cain: the black conservative whose mere presence inoculates other Republicans from charges of racism as they attack Obama. The ability to provide that kind of racial cover may be part of the reason for Carson’s prominence in the party, but it’s not its overriding rationale...To the broad public, Carson’s crackpottery—his argument that the sexual behavior of prisoners proves that homosexuality is a choice, his contention that Obamacare is the biggest travesty to befall the nation since slavery, his theory that Obama may declare martial law and cancel the 2016 elections—disqualifies him from being taken seriously. But, for the small segment of the population that he is concerned with, those statements are assurances that they are not monochromatically white. Carson is a black representative and standard-bearer, not for conservatives but for paranoid Americans...
…Carson’s Booker T. Washington-esque prescriptions of personal virtue as a cure for poverty are almost identical to the arguments that Obama himself deploys when talking to black audiences. Nor do these admonishments encompass the entirety of Carson’s thinking on matters of race. [His] National Prayer Breakfast speech became the basis for his book “One Nation,” in which he criticizes racial profiling…
…[A]t the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, Carson urged congressional Republicans to create an alternate plan to insure health benefits for poor people before dismantling Obamacare. He is not among those who feel that the government has no role in insuring that the poor have access to health care.
Yet if Carson is only moderately conservative, he’s radically paranoid. His rhetoric betrays a sweaty-palmed fixation on government power, and a fear that President Obama has made himself into an American Caesar. Those fears are most clearly manifested in his tendency toward hyperbolic comparison. From his somewhat nuanced take, in “One Nation,” on Trayvon Martin’s death, Carson goes on to argue that the liberal disdain for black conservatives is as pernicious as Jim Crow. At the Values Voter Summit in 2013, he compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery…
The most relevant comparison for Carson isn’t to Cain but to Michele Bachmann, the last Presidential aspirant who, despite membership in a group with a history as targets of discrimination, came to represent the twitchy ideals of American panic. Carson has…moved the country one step closer to that moment when we will be measured not by the color of our skin but by the content of our conspiracy theories.
