It’s a tall order for a black politician to become popular with “the de facto largest white identity organization in the United States,” but writer Chauncey DeVega argues that Ben Carson has pulled it off by “betray[ing] the Black Freedom Struggle and assault[ing] the truth in all its forms.” (As you probably assumed, “white identity organization” is DeVega’s description of the Republican party.)
In a Monday Salon article, DeVega opined that if Carson hopes to keep leading the GOP presidential pack, he “will have to escalate his ridiculous claims in order to please and entertain the low information, authoritarian, racially resentful, and reactionary voters who form the Republican Party base.”
Among the “ridiculous claims,” stated DeVega, were Carson’s recent remarks likening abortion to slavery: “Ben Carson and the other conservatives who want to limit women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies have more in common with the whites who ran the slave labor rape and charnel camps of the American South than they do with Abolitionists such as John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Sojourner Truth, or William Lloyd Garrison.” (Italics in original.)
From DeVega’s piece (bolding added):
Misrepresenting the horrors of the American slave regime is a standard talking point for today’s “black conservatives.” It is in keeping with their utter disrespect for The Black Freedom Struggle and role as racial mercenaries who serve as the professional “best black friends” and human chaff for the Republican Party—what is the de facto largest white identity organization in the United States…
…Black and brown people such as Ben Carson who enable white racism are rewarded and praised.
During the opening months of the Republican 2016 primary season, this formula has made [Carson] immensely popular among the racially resentful and overtly racist white voters who are the base of the GOP…
Ben Carson and the anti-women’s choice movement imagine themselves as descendants of the Abolitionists who fought and died to bring down the slave regime in the United States and across the Black Atlantic. Reality, the facts, and history are often not kind to those who are possessed of such heavy and perverse delusions. Ben Carson and the other conservatives who want to limit women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies have more in common with the whites who ran the slave labor rape and charnel camps of the American South than they do with Abolitionists such as John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Sojourner Truth, or William Lloyd Garrison.
Ben Carson is the black conservative ringleader in a 2016 Republican presidential primary that is a spectacle and exercise in absurdist political theater. To continue to lead this pack of political performance artists, Carson will have to escalate his ridiculous claims in order to please and entertain the low information, authoritarian, racially resentful, and reactionary voters who form the Republican Party base.
Ben Carson has betrayed the Black Freedom Struggle and assaulted the truth in all its forms—be they scientific, historically, ethical, or moral—to get this far in the Republican race. The question then becomes, to what depths does he go from here?
