Saturday, May 31, 2014

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.

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