Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Huh? The Tea Party Mandingo Fighter Ben Carson Denies Being an Uncle Tom by Uncle Toming on Fox News


Ben Carson, the Tea Party GOP Mandingo, has taken time away from his busy anointing tour as the newest Black Champion for the Right--and also issuing letters of marque, as well as absolution to his white conservative supporters--in order to address the accusation that he is an Uncle Tom.

On Fox News, in classic black conservative talking-point form, Ben Carson channeled the ugly allusion that "he is not on a plantation" and "can think for himself." This is the same internalized racism for the benefit, amusement, and psychological validation of racially chauvinistic Conservative Whiteness that Herman Cain, Jessie Patterson, and other black garbage pale kids conservatives have been channeling for the amusement of their overlords and masters for at least a decade.

The suggestion that black people who choose to support the Democratic Party are "on a plantation" is ugly and indefensible. No other group has its political decision-making maligned in such a way, where a political choice is linked to the charnel and death houses that were plantation life during the slaveocracy in the United States and across the Black Atlantic.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters who have made the political choice to support the Democratic Party are not greeted with the accusation that "they are stuck in a Death Camp" and those who "escape" to the Republican Party are by comparison "liberated." Poor white people who support the Republican Party against their own material self-interest also do not have their capacity for common sense and independent thought maligned as a matter of routine by media and political elites on a national stage.

Such ill-treatment is uniquely reserved for African-Americans. Our citizenship and national belonging are always viewed as contingent and suspect. History's ironies are great: in America there is no more an "American" people than black folks (and our First Nations Brothers and Sisters). We are America. But the "real America" white blood and soil herrenvolk types have a very hard time accepting that fact, as for them, to be "truly" American means to be "free, white, and twenty-one." No other groups need apply. Such attitudes are at the core of symbolic and conservative colorblind racism in the Age of Obama

Ben Carson's tired suggestion that black people who are Democrats are "slaves" on a plantation is part of a racist political imaginary wherein free blacks and others were imagined as child-like, not fit for freedom, and whose race made them incompatible with democracy. African-Americans fought for and took their liberty in a freedom struggle which lasted for centuries. This monumental freedom struggle has served as an inspiration for people around the world.

Ben Carson's success and opportunities stand on the shoulders of those honored ancestors: he smites them, spitting in the face of their legacy, every time he regurgitates the Right-wing talking point that African-Americans are on a "plantation" called the Democratic Party.

Black Conservatives move from holding positions of principled political difference, and crossing over to being human props and mascots for the White Right, when they disparage the political decision-making of other black folks. To the degree that Black Conservatives have any sense of linked fate with other African-Americans--I would suggest that from the post Reagan era forward, such a sense of connection is very much in doubt--they could give a reasonable answer that does not mock other black people's wisdom, common sense, or political values.

For example, Ben Carson and other black conservatives, when prompted for the obligatory "demean other black people and show us how you are 'special'" moment by the Right-wing media could offer the following answer: "The majority of African-Americans, for their own reasons, have made a different choice regarding what political party to support. For my own reasons, I have chosen to be a Republican."

In a political moment when the Tea Party GOP has embraced a range of racially hostile policies and beliefs from Birtherism, to the open racial resentment of Romney's campaign, the naked discussion of Secession and a revitalization of the Neo-Confederacy, and efforts to suppress the votes of African-Americans in a return to Jim and Jane Crow, how any person of color--or sensible conservative--could support such a dying on the death bed demographically and ideologically obsolescent political organization defies explanation or logic to me.

Perhaps Ben Carson and his black conservative brethren are proverbial political kamikazes or dead enders? Regardless, his decision-making process and agency should be respected...even as the policies which he advocates for should be critically interrogated and challenged.

Ultimately, there are many ways to call a black person a "nigger." Some folks are direct, they avoid the silly-talk that is "the n-word." In your face they mutter or aim the slur.

Others using the political correct language of post-civil rights America talk about how black folks have "bad culture" and "could succeed if they only really wanted to and tried hard."

And there are black conservatives, along with their white sponsors and circus masters, who say that black people are "stuck on a plantation." Moreover, these special and anointed black conservatives are apparently uniquely positioned to interpret the drums and what the natives are really saying.

All of these examples are just myriad ways of calling black people "niggers." One can tell black people "to get the bones out their noses" like Rush Limbaugh did some years ago. Or you can have a black conservative say that other African-Americans are stupid children who are political zombies, unfit for democracy. Both proceed from the same fetid waters: to call a black person a "nigger" is to suggest that they are a second class citizen, not an equal, and somehow racially defective as compared to some ideal-type as defined by the White Gaze.

The racial chauvinism of the White Right and the Tea Party GOP makes sense as a function of crude realpolitik: the Republican Party is the party of the Southern Strategy and has embraced white racial resentment as part of its brand-name in the post civil rights era. Anti-black and brown affect is part of a political calculus that has until recently paid Republicans great political dividends.

When black conservatives echo this same logic it is contemptible and tragic. Self-hatred is pathetic. Self-hatred in the service of political attention, fame, or fortune from being the star attraction in a Right-wing human zoo by black and brown conservatives even more so.

27 comments:

CNu said...

Why would he lower himself by mocking his ancestors and recycling hate
speech for the amusement of Fox News' audience which suggest that black
people who are not conservatives are stuck on a "plantation?"


I'm gonna go with he doesn't want his fate linked to oxygen-thieving ignants who account for an overwhelming percentage of contemporary violent crime, or, their non-productive apologists and defenders in the afrodemic, political, media, or other economically non-bootstrapped spheres of bourgeois guilt-mongering...,

chauncey devega said...

What happened to you over the weekend? So good hard working black folks who are the vast majority of the community are to be shunned because of the ign't classes. Got you.


Did someone rob you? Get harassed? What went down to start this Right-wing extreme-esque anti-black tirade?


Did those folks who let you peek into whiteopia implant something in you, dope your drink?


Of all folks, you know I don't defend ign't culture. Why bring your upsetness here? Isn't it better spent elsewhere among the defenders of such things?

Ben Grim said...

If you're working and not being rewarded for your labor, you're a slave. If you're voting Democrat and not receiving anything in return for your vote, you are a slave to the Democratic party. You are indeed on a plantation; doing what the Man wants you to do, voting the way the Man wants you to vote, for a few crumbs that fall off the table. "Off the table". lol... However, I wouldn't be jumping from the Democratic plantation to the Republican one.

"Our Jewish brothers and sisters who have made the political choice to support the Democratic Party are not greeted with the accusation that "they are stuck in a Death Camp""

Entirely different situation. No need for an ethnic metaphor from their history that says that they are getting shafted by the Democratic party. They ain't. We are. Therefore Uncle Tom is quite right to say we who vote Democrat are living on a plantation.

chauncey devega said...

My point is about historical allusions and how some folks history is fair game to be mocked at will. I think we can do better than comparing the death houses and factory plantations which killed millions of black people to a political choice--whether you agree with it or--to support a political party.

"You are indeed on a plantation; doing what the Man wants you to do, voting the way the Man wants you to vote, for a few crumbs that fall off the table. "Off the table".



Really? Nice 1960s radical oeuvre there, accurate, no.

Ben Grim said...

Sometimes you have to smack people upside the head with hyperbole to get them to wake up. The Democratic plantation is not killing us as quick, but it's killing us just as dead.

chauncey devega said...

How? For example?


I think it is far more challenging to state a more plain truth. For a variety of reasons black folks chose to switch parties from the FDR to the 1960s. Let us grant people agency and decision-making power. Then, like all others, we can hold ourselves accountable for the fruits that alliance and loyalty has purchased in the present. No one is in bondage, needed slave passes or freedom papers. Freedom ain't free and it it demands responsibility and accountability.

SBlady said...

I think I did three minutes of that video. Simply cannot stomach Faux News. From what I did hear, it was talking point after talking point."plantations" "victims" He claims that he's been saying this for twenty years as proof that he is not just being a parrot but, it proves nothing, because these have been Republican talking points for twenty years or more. He speaks of plantations while supporting a party that is actively engaged in taking away the vote of blacks, akin to the Jim Crow era. Taking over cities, closing down voting places, implementing specific ID's then closing the only places that make those ID's in black areas. Of course, Megyn is not going to ask him the questions that are relevant to blacks, in terms of these actions. And he is certainly not going to interview on any networks that might ask these questions. So yes, it seems he is a go-along-to-get-along type of person, just for the other side.

chauncey devega said...

I just don't get it. Really. He is so accomplished and could do so much with his talents, reputation, and ability to draw money. Why sully his own good name?

CNu said...

So good hard working black folks who are the vast majority of the
community are to be shunned because of the ign't classes. Got you.



lol, trying to paper over today's infantile tirade with a "good hard working black folks" human shield.


The truth is not in you. Carson is talking about the dysfunction in the inner city and anticipating the acrimony with which he'll be met for having done so.


Sure enough, you call him everything but a child of god. Who exactly do you call yourself defending with your unprovoked gutter-snipe ad hominems?


You seriously need to look in the mirror Dorian Gray. Cause what you're perpetrating with regard to Carson is not a good look.

El Swiss said...

will a black person, or any non ' wasp ' , ever be allowed to be a republican/conservative without being labeled as an uncle tom type?

chauncey devega said...

Your desire to defend negrophobia and to judge black folks by a minority of us all is not a good look Brother Dorian Grey...or maybe Wolfman if we are playing with MGM characters.


If the good doctor did not get in bed with white anti-black conservatism, stopped buck dancing, and simply said hey they do their thing, I do mine, I would have no beef. He is doing the Herman Cain. I call it as I see it.


You have been very upset these last few posts. What is going on? I know you are low on the linked fate index. I get that. To each his own. But you have been crossing dangerously over to defending anti-intellectualism and the money and gold thrown at anti-black black and brown folks. Again, is something else going on? Your paradigm is becoming even more narrow. What's up?


The ign'ts rob your car?

chauncey devega said...

Sure. Don't play the negro best black friend who is better than those other poor negroes on the plantation game. Don't buckdance. State your principles plainly. Don't stand on the necks of those who struggled to prop you up. It ain't hard. I come down hard on these slave drivers because they go out of their way to play to character as "black conservatives. Hate on black folks, interpret the drums, and get paid by being mouth pieces for the White Right. Contemptible. I have no use for race traitors.

CNu said...

Uh..., Ben Carson has been comfortably ensconced in the 1% for some time now - crumb hustling for tea party dollars is about the last thing he will ever need to do, and that's a simple fact.

Same was true of Bill Cosby when he went on his ill-fated Charles Murray crusade to try and shame ignants out of their spiral into increasingly Dickensian moral squalor.



The actual answer to El Swiss's question is No. This is particularly true given the democrat party dependence on a reliable and predictable black voting block that can easily be emotionally swayed to vote against its own interests, much as the GOP has it's little white nationalist base.



Socially conservative black folks who in the majority will never support gay marriage or overcome deep disgust with homosexuality, or, who recognize the existential economic and political threat of 12 million illegal mexicans, or who have become disgusted with the corrupt shenanigans of the incumbent 2nd/3rd line inheritors of the civil rights movement who control local democrat politics - will continue to be marginalized and accused of being race traitors by aspiring crumb-hustlers looking to improve their lot within the democrat party propaganda machine.


The end-game for democrat crumb hustlers is a six-figure berth as a recognized black public intellectual, whose primary task from that point forward is to serve as an arbiter of who is and who is not a race traitor, all the while hewing very closely to a set of democrat party talking points in support of the democrat leadership du jour.

CNu said...

I ride the bus.

I find it highly amusing how quick you are to try and get out ahead of the pack with outlandish mischaracterizations and leading character assassinations.

Everybody's got to have a schtick, but your branding is transparently light on policy prescriptions and over the top on pure gutter-snipe ad hominem.



If it turns out that Carson isn't surreptitiously working out any high-yella sexual neurosis on the side, he's going to be a hard target to take down - strictly on the basis of unsubstantiated shreaks of "race treason".

Ben Grim said...

A black person who joins a patently racist party is, by definition, an Uncle Tom.

CNu said...

No. Because the idiot emotional appeals to "race treason" is all that the democrat cheerleading team can think of to do. It's pathetic.

You won't find any hardhitting takedowns of genuine, anti-black scumbags emanating from this quarter, quite simply because it doesn't possess the analytical and investigative chops to make that happen.

Here's an example of how it's done http://shameproject.com/profile/charles-murray/

Dubious Brother said...

@Ben, we are in a two party system. Are you actively working to build a third? If not, and until then, quit with the suggestion that we are "shafted" by the democrats.


I'd suggest that as a racial group, we are shafted by elites, regularly. But I wouldn't go as far to say the two parties differ in name only, creating a distinction without a difference.


At least there is room in the democratic party (how much depends on where you are in the country) to acknowledge historical wrongs against us and to create and implement policy to correct them. Try that with the Republicans, see how far you get.

Dubious Brother said...

@ El: Yes, when they deal honestly with the class differences that result from unchecked capitalism championed by their party, and demonstrate some of that "compassionate conservatism" requisite to folks running a race with an anvil tied behind their backs. Give me a black Jack Kemp c. 1992---someone who can at least talk the game of incentivizing the development of our Detroits around the country, and recognize folks who are trapped in the underclass as equal partners in their own advancement.


The moment those so-called conservatives, who claim to LOVE history, stop abandoning it when its facts make them uncomfortable as they point to their own complicity in our system white supremacy as its tacit beneficiaries.


The moment one of them speaks up and says, "I'm all for 'personal responsibility', but let's stop looking at poverty as a moral failing, but begin considering it as a systemic problem...".


...all accusations of "tomming" will cease.

Ben Grim said...

I think a coalition of black organizations, from the black church to the NAACP to the Nation of Islam, should come together and file a lawsuit against the Democratic party for malpractice, fraud and misrepresentation (let the lawyers worry about the exact terminology). Use the monetary judgement to finance the establishment of a new truly liberal political party. Sue the Democratic party for fraud and malpractice!!!! That superfluous rightwing party must die!!!

chauncey devega said...

Pitch that to Aaron McGruder for the Boondocks.

g said...

You are as a dime a dozen as those you try to call out .. a sad angry black man playing the liberal game you have been taught to play .. spike lee and cris rock would be proud

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SBlady said...

Money. Greed. There are really only a few reasons. The getting of money, as in being bought or having a door or two opened for you. The keeping of money. I read somewhere that the rhetoric that Republicans practice can only work on those who are afraid to loose something. Might have been here. But, the point is, whether it is poor whites afraid to loose their jobs to blacks and browns or middle class whites who are afraid that they will not reach the 1% if they have to pay a dime more in taxes, pitting class fear against class fear, or race, usually from the pulpit is a very effective tool. And benefiting from as well as bankrolling it all, are the wealthy who are also afraid that the lower class levels might realize who is really screwing them.. The way I see it the only reason to be Republican, these days, is selfishness.

skilletblonde said...

NO!

kaydenpat said...

Preach!


So sorry to see how deranged Ben Carson is. I used to admire the man for his surgical acumen. Wonder when the T'Baggers will spit him out. After all, he's still Black.

chauncey devega said...

His nambla stuff was too much. Sad to see him falling off this way.

Timothy Sullivan said...

Dr. Carson is on a pretty long list of historically significant and
respected black people. You may want to think things through.

http://mbteaparty.us/national-politics/were-not-uncle-toms-we-are-proud-black-conservative-americans-who-believe-in-freedom-and-liberty