Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg has anointed himself the arbitrator of who is authentically black. Seemingly coming from a faraway planet, Goldberg writes in a recent column that Dr. Ben Carson is more authentically black than President Obama, largely because Obama had a white mother and was raised in faraway places like Hawaii and Indonesia. In fact, Goldberg claims Dr. Ben Carson’s blackness is never mentioned in the “liberal press” because it can not accept the fact that conservatives have coalesced around a black candidate, making him the front-runner in their primary. In other words, his ascendancy simply does not play into the liberal narrative of conservatives being racists! As Goldberg argues: How strange it must be for people who comfort …
Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg has anointed himself the arbitrator of who is authentically black. Seemingly coming from a faraway planet, Goldberg writes in a recent column that Dr. Ben Carson is more authentically black than President Obama, largely because Obama had a white mother and was raised in faraway places like Hawaii and Indonesia.
In fact, Goldberg claims Dr. Ben Carson’s blackness is never mentioned in the “liberal press” because it can not accept the fact that conservatives have coalesced around a black candidate, making him the front-runner in their primary. In other words, his ascendancy simply does not play into the liberal narrative of conservatives being racists!
How strange it must be for people who comfort themselves with the slander that the GOP is a cult of organized racial hatred that the most popular politician among conservatives is a black man. Better to ignore the elephant in the room than account for such an inconvenient fact. The race card is just too valuable politically and psychologically for liberals who need to believe that their political opponents are evil.
Now who would get the impression that the GOP is a “cult of organized racial hatred” when former front-runner Donald Trump ignited Tea Party passions with such statements as:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
In fact, Dr. Ben Carson himself has stated that the Black Lives Matter movement is “divisive” when really what is divisive is the right-wing cult of individualism that lends credence to the myth that society is colorblind and all blacks can overcome racism simply by “lifting themselves up by their bootstraps.”
As long as structural racism exists in America and the police use the authority vested in them by the state to perpetrate violence against blacks, the remedy is policies which address police misconduct. Saying, as Carson does, that individual autonomy can overcome any obstacle just trivializes the issue.
Society is not colorblind, as much as conservatives would like to pretend it is. Men like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Dr. Ben Carson, though rising to the very pinnacles of society and overcoming odds that would make a Las Vegas gambler perspire, must renounce the very safety net which helped propel them to such dizzying heights as the ticket to admission to the monochromatic conservative country club.
Clarence Thomas benefited from affirmative action policies and Dr. Ben Carson’s mother was on welfare and food stamps and he received free eyeglasses from the state as a youth which helped him achieve academic distinction. Why then try to shred the very social safety net that enabled this advancement? And how do tax cuts for the wealthy serve the cause of racial justice?
Minorities in the Republican party only serve to comfort already somnambulant conservatives by denying that color and ethnicity exists. For example, conservative Governor Bobby Jindal notes somewhat exasperatedly: “I don’t know about you, I’m tired of the hyphenated Americans. We’re not Indian-Americans or African-Americans or Asian-Americans. We’re all Americans.”
To be then a Republican politician and a minority, one must deny his very heritage, therefore denying the obstacles overcome, the uniqueness, and social connectedness that one’s heritage lends one.
Being a politician, even achieving the honor of reaching the highest office in the land, is not worth the price of denying one’s identity.
Besides, conservatives are the ones passing restrictive voter identification laws intended to deny minorities the vote.
Conservatives have gutted the Voting Rights Act and the conservative House leadership refused to consider renewing it.
Conservatives have long used a Southern Strategy in elections to divide us.
Conservatives want to shred the social safety net, while cutting taxes for the wealthy.
Conservatives trumpet state’s rights, which has long been used as a vehicle to suppress minority aspirations.
Goldberg insults African-Americans with his column by assuming they will support Dr. Carson simply because he is black when the conservative policies he espouses are anathema to minority aspirations!
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Original article:
Conservative Whitesplains to President Obama on What It Means to Be ‘Authentically Black’
