The Racial Shame of 21st Century America: Slavery of the Mind

Most of us have heard about Ben Carson Sr., a 64 year-old black physician who first achieved national prominence in 1987 by being principal neurosurgeon of the first medical team to successfully separate Siamese twins joined at the skull.  Fast forward to February 7, 2013, at which time Dr. Carson, keynote speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast and positioned on a dais with Barack Obama, says

We’ve already started down the path to solving one of the other big problems, health care. We need to have good health care for everybody. It’s the most important thing that a person can have. Money means nothing, titles mean nothing when you don’t have your health, but we’ve got to figure out efficient ways to do it. We spend a lot of money on health care, twice as much per capita as anybody in else in the world, and yet not very efficient. What can we do?

Here’s my solution. When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record and a health savings account [HSA], to which money can be contributed, pre-tax from the time you are born, to the time you die. When you die, you can pass it on to your family members so that when you’re 85 years old and you’ve got 6 diseases, you’re not trying to spend up everything. You’re happy to pass it on and nobody is talking about death panels. That’s number one. Also –

For the people who are indigent, who don’t have any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we already have this huge pot of money instead of sending it to bureaucracy – let’s put it into HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care and what do you think they’re going to do? They’re going to learn very quickly how to be responsible. When Mr. Jones gets that diabetic foot ulcer, he’s not going to the Emergency Room and blowing a big chunk of it. He’s going to go to the Clinic. He learns that very quickly – gets the same treatment. In the Emergency Room they send him out. In the Clinic they say, now let’s get your diabetes under control so that you’re not back here in three weeks with another problem. That’s how we begin to solve these kinds of problems. It’s much more complex than that, and I don’t have time to go into it all, but we can do all these things because we are smart people.

What do you think?  Does the speech offend your sensibilities?  Well, you obviously are not a United States President.  Dr. Carson wrote that “… within a matter of minutes after the conclusion of the program, I received a call from some of the prayer breakfast organizers saying that theWhite House was upset and requesting that I call the president and apologize for offending him. I said that I did not think that he was offended and that I didn’t think that such a call was warranted.” 

“The White House was upset.”  Hell, I didn’t know a house, even a White House, could be upset.  I thought only a person could be upset.  Maybe Ben should apologize to the House.  Doesn’t the President’s complaining representative have the integrity and temerity simply to say that Obama, himself, was mad?  

The White House representative was playing “silence the opposition while ensuring that the President is not implicated in the silencing” game.  Nothing ruffles Barack and his race mongering friends more than having a black man speak his mind in a public forum when his remarks are at odds with racial orthodoxy—a racial orthodoxy that, among other things, demands that black men unwaveringly support or make excuses about anything that the half-black, child of white privilege President who pretends to be all black says.

On the other hand, Carson, all-black and presumably proud of it, who was raised by a black mother in an impoverished black neighborhood and who fought tooth and nail for everything that he has accomplished, is maligned for speaking his heart.  For instance, in “Ben Carson Was a Role Model for Black Teens Until He Sold Out to the Right” Joshua Dubois (U.S. NEWS  March 16, 2014) cites the doctor’s National Prayer Breakfast speech and then concludes, “For us, Dr. Ben Carson's story has become an American tragedy. We can only pray that he reclaims his narrative in a way that still will offer others hope.”  Just one race-based slip of the tongue and an esteemed man becomes a derided one.

A somewhat related situation occurred after white Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in an interview at Inc. magazine’s convention (May 23, 2014) stated, “I know I'm prejudiced, and I know I'm bigoted in a lot of different ways… “If I see a black kid in a hoodie on my side of the street, I'll move to the other side of the street. If I see a white guy with a shaved head and tattoos (on the side he now is on), I'll move back to the other side of the street. None of us have pure thoughts; we all live in glass houses."  [see "Niggas vs. Black People, " a famous Chris Rock  stand-up comedy routine whose remarks were very similar to Cuban’s.]

When Mark Cuban suffered inevitable character assassination for an honest race-oriented, politically incorrect statement, Stephen A. Smith, a black sports commentator, sprang to his defense: “We want to pounce on him making this statement and alluding that black folks are talking about somebody in a hoodie that happens to be black… He talked about the prejudices that exist in all spectrums by all of us. Are we going to sit here and literally act like we don’t have any prejudices?” 

What next?  You guessed it.  Smith told ESPN’s “First Take” that after his Mark Cuban-supportive remarks had percolated through the communities he started hearing: “Stephen A. Smith is a sellout; Stephen A. Smith is an Uncle Tom; Stephen A. Smith ain’t black; You ain’t one of us.”  The courageous Smith then added: “But when I say I don’t give a damn, I can’t even emphasize, that does it no justice. I don’t care who in the black community disagrees with me. I’m not interested in their disagreement on this particular issue because they are not looking at the bigger picture.”

So there you have it.  The most extraordinary racial shame of America is the shunning and slandering that black people suffer whenever they say something from the heart that is at odds with race-based orthodoxy.  As the United Negro College Fund advised us beginning in 1972, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste."  To that I add: There is no greater slavery than slavery of the mind.

"What numbskull in the White House arranged this?"

How many numbskulls does it take to change a light bulb in the Whitehouse?  The answer: at least two and one always is the President.

Does anyone believe that a person allegedly as “brilliant” as Barack Obama would mindlessly accept a speaking engagement handed to him by a scheduler?  Robert Reich wants us to believe just that. 

In case you forgot, Reich is listed in wickipedia.org as current Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of the University of California, Berkeley and political commentator on television’s Hardball with Chris Matthews and This Week with George Stephanopoulos to name merely two.  He also is said to have been a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and Brandeis University.  In addition, Robert has been an editor for The New Republic, Harvard Business Review, New York Times, and Atlantic magazines.  Finally, Reich served in the presidential administrations of Presidents Ford, Carter and Clinton.

The highly educated and accomplished Reich raised the numbskull issue when opposing the decision to have Barack Obama speak at a Mountain View, California Walmart, asking "What numbskull in the White House arranged this?”.  In doing so, Robert Reich was supporting organized labor who despises Walmart for their worker policies, but he could not be honest enough to blame Obama for the decision.

Now I’m no Robert Reich but I Googled “labor opposes Walmart” today and found 271,000 citations, the first of which was dated 2005.  I then performed the same search of “Robert Reich defends Obama” and got 2,940,000 hits.

I conclude that even Barack Obama should know how organized labor has felt about Walmart.  I further believe that Robert Reich, like most so-called Liberal intellectuals, is not liberal-minded but narrow-minded in his thinking about the President.  The intelligentsia check their IQs at the White House door.  They do not see Obama for who he is or what he does.  They wallow in and promote their fantasies about the Great and Powerful Oz.

Educated and accomplished Liberals never will help America if they remain irrevocably blinded by their biases. They are more interested in defending Obama, right or wrong, than in acknowledging simple truths. Given his double speak proficiency then, I strongly suspect that Robert Reich, like his elitist White House comrades, must have graduated magna cum laude from Numbskull University.

  

Executing a Racial Agenda

Never one to miss an opportunity to interject divisive race talk into a discussion, on May 2, 2014 during a press conference with Angela Merkel, Barack Obama commented on the so-called “botched” execution of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett saying

… in the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence. And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied. And this situation in Oklahoma I think just highlights some of the significant problems there.

So I’ll be discussing with Eric Holder and others, you know — you know, to get me an analysis of what steps have been taken, not just in this particular instance, but more broadly in this area. I think we do have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions around these issues.

Since Obama made “racial bias” his keystone issue, let’s think about the role of race concerning Clayton Lockett’s crime.  Race was a factor in that Lockett was black and Stephanie Neiman, his murdered victim, was white but, of course, black on white violence never qualifies as a race crime, at least not to Barack Obamas of the world.  We also can consider the “brutality” of the botched execution.  According to eye witnesses, Lockett’s foot kicked, his body bucked, his head rolled side-to-side, and his teeth clenched.  He died of an apparent heart attack [the single most common cause of death in the United States] after one of his veins “blew.”

As is always true with executions, there were witnesses present, 12 including one of Lockett’s lawyers.  Does this sound like the kind of situation wherein someone deliberately would  try to torture the convicted murderer?      

What about Clayton Lockett’s murder victim, Stephanie Neiman? According to Mike Hashimoto of dallasnews.com,

On June 3, 1999, Stephanie was driving a friend home in her Chevy pickup and had the misfortune of arriving when three men were there, supposedly attempting to beat a debt out of Bobby Bornt, 23, who lived there with his 9-month-old son.

One man hit Stephanie’s friend with a shotgun and forced her to call Stephanie inside. The men then raped the friend and beat Stephanie, when she refused to give up her truck keys. They bound her with duct tape and drove her to a country road.

Still, she refused to say she wouldn’t call the police on them, so they forced her to her knees and made her watch one gunman dig a grave. When one man shot her, his gun jammed, while Stephanie screamed. The man cleared his weapon and shot her again.

Even though she was still breathing, the man ordered his accomplices to bury her, which they did.

It’s not clear whether it took 43 minutes more for her to die, and we can’t ask her now if she suffered.

Was it torture to bury someone alive?  Is that worse that waterboarding a terrorist?

Barack Obama can excuse his administration for “botching” the security of the Libyan embassy that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.  He also can excuse the fact that his people failed to launch a rescue attempt.  No one was culpable in Benghazi since race was not an issue.  No one lost his/her job.  Victoria Nuland, State Department spokesperson during Benghazi, actually was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and is credited with having a February 2014 diplomatic phone conversation at which time she said, “Fuck the EU.”

If Clayton Lockett had been white, Obama would not have had his keystone racial issue to motivate his desire for an investigation.  He would not have said a single word about the execution.  In fact, Barack even admitted during the aforementioned press conference that in some crimes the “death penalty may be appropriate.”  So this is not really about the death penalty, it simply is about race and political partisanship. 

You see the President in particular and the Democrats in general are panicking about the upcoming general election.  They are apoplectic about possibly losing the Senate.  Take a close look at their rhetoric and you will see that they are trying to “energize their voting base” and nothing does that as well as race talk, no matter how damaging it is to the welfare of America as a whole.