Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is a guest columnist.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
He Wears the Mask
Last week, Carson came under attack for comparing advocates of same-sex marriage with advocates of bestiality and the North American Man/Boy Love Association. He then cast himself as a victim of political correctness, besieged by white liberals — “the most racist people there are” — who could not countenance his heterodoxy and wanted to keep him on the “plantation.” The plantation metaphor refers to a popular theory on the right. It holds that the 95 percent of African-Americans who voted for a Democratic president are not normal Americans voting their beliefs, but slaves. A corollary to the plantation theory is the legend of the Conservative Black Hope, a lonesome outsider, willing to stare down the party of Obamacare and stand up for the party of voter ID. Does it matter that this abolitionist truth-teller serves at the leisure of an audience that is overwhelmingly white? Not really. Blacks are brainwashed slaves; you can’t expect them to know what’s in their interest. Benjamin Carson is that Conservative Black Hope of the moment. His rise began with a meandering speech that mixed policy, humor and victimization in February at the National Prayer Breakfast, mere feet from the president of the United States, who was forced to take his medicine in a way that Clint Eastwood could only dream of. When Sean Hannity interviewed Carson about his speech he dispensed with the policy and simply dubbed the segment “Lecturing Obama.” Since the dawn of the Obama era, conservatives have been on the lookout for such a man. In 2004 they dispatched Alan Keyes cross-country to take up the mantle of the Conservative Black Hope and deliver an early knockout to Obama. Keyes had never lived in Illinois and his voters barely knew him, and voted accordingly. But it did not matter who he was. What mattered was their plan. “We needed to find another Harvard-educated African-American who had some experience on the national political scene,” said Steven J. Rauschenberger, a Republican who was then a member of the Illinois State Senate. “We need that because the Democrats have made an icon out of Barack Obama.” Having seen their icon thrashed in 2004, in 2009 conservatives looked to Michael Steele, the first African-American to head the Republican National Convention, to face off with the first black president. But Steele had an on-again off-again relationship with the party line, and was thus ill suited to be a Conservative Black Hope, even if the hip-hop Republican often talked like one. In 2010, Allen West, a congressman from Florida, arrived promising to lead black people off the Obama plantation like a “modern-day Harriet Tubman.” More like Harriet Miers; West was defeated in the very next election. In 2012, Herman Cain took up the cape and cowl, proclaiming that the first black president had “never been part of the black experience in America” and insisting that Obama was “not a strong black man.” But Cain was not a strong presidential candidate, and the wait for the Conservative Black Hope continued. Things were looking up at the Conservative Political Action Committee this year when a black Republican, K. Carl Smith, ran a session for attendees who were “tired of being called a racist.” Among those answering in the affirmative was a man who proceeded to defend slavery. Not all black conservatives see it as their job to tell white racists that they embody the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. It is certainly possible to oppose Obamacare in good conscience. No one knows this more than Ben Carson. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he may have been the most celebrated figure in the black communities of Baltimore. Carson responded to that adulation by regularly giving his time to talk to young people, who needed to know that there was so much more beyond the streets. I was one of those young people. I don’t doubt that Carson was a conservative even then. I knew plenty of black people who loved their community and hated welfare. But white conservatives were never interested in them, and they were never as interested in Ben Carson as they are right now. When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House. And then he put on the mask.
