After reading “Gifted Hands” by Dr. Ben Carson as a fifth grader, the book left an incredibly strong impression on me. It narrated how a young Black student overcame the obstacles imposed upon him by the racist, exploitative system of American capitalism and eventually became the first neurosurgeon to ever lead a team in separating twins conjoined in the back of their heads. Despite this, I was not excited to see that Dr. Carson was coming to speak on my college campus nearly a decade later.
Public opinion of Dr. Carson amongst the Black community began to shift around 2015, when he ran for President under the Republican Party. Dr. Carson, a Black leader who is generally met with distrust from his own community, provides an important lesson which contradicts the identity politics-based assertion that “representation” is intrinsically good. Having the same skin color does not mean having the same political interests, so the Black community needs to make a more careful analysis regarding which leaders we lend our support to, and the most effective ways the struggle for racial emancipation should be oriented.
Dr. Carson ran for president under the Republican party in 2015, until he dropped out, endorsed Trump, and was appointed secretary of the office of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. He spent his political career passing austerity measures to sabotage the Black community, criticizing their movements and becoming a talking head for conservative politics.
A particularly surprising tidbit I heard during the speech came after a student asked Dr. Carson on how the mental health crisis in America ought to be addressed. Dr. Carson began talking about mentally distressed unhoused people and how we really need to “take care of them,” but also believes we need to first “figure out” why they are homeless and “fix it” before giving them a house because “with housing first, 90 plus percent of those people end right back out on the street.” Dr. Carson does not provide a source for the figure or describe how anyone who was given a house could suddenly “end up back on the street,” but his desire to “take care” of vulnerable communities during the speech did not seem present while at HUD. During his time as HUD secretary, Dr. Carson made significant budget cuts to programs that help low-income and minority communities, and terminated programs intended to strengthen anti-discrimination measures and address racial segregation in housing. However, the purpose of this article is not to give a sweeping critique of Dr. Carson and his policies, nor the points he made in his speech, but to consider more deeply how Dr. Carson’s case challenges the assumption that shared racial identity translates to shared political interests.
Proponents of identity politics and intersectionality focus on the oppression of specific minority groups, but do so in a way that alienates each struggle from the other. They argue that the struggle for women, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community or any minority groups have entirely separate demands from each other, and if you aren’t a member of a specific community, the most you can do is passively support as an “ally.” Some take this claim to the extreme, arguing in an abstract system of “penalty and privilege” derived from every minute detail of being, which can make one “an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed” based on context. This perspective implies that if one does not belong to an oppressed group, they are automatically categorized as an oppressor who benefits from perpetuating that oppression. This places the emphasis on the individual as the primary agent of oppression.
But the primary instrument of oppression are systems and institutions, and believing otherwise only fragments the collective struggles of marginalized groups. In reality, there is no inherent motivation within any segment of the working class to uphold the subjugation of another.
Many black “leaders” today, instead of orienting their fight against class society, benefit from it and perpetuate it, meanwhile receiving uncritical support from the Black community because they have the same skin color. Former president Barack Obama, for example, helped bail out the banks after the 2008 recession, deported more immigrants than any preceding president and indiscriminately drone-bombed areas where civilians resided while hunting for terrorists. One only needs to look at Vice President Kamala Harris’ history as Attorney General in California to see how much she has harmed Black people; she spent her career disproportionately prosecuting young black men for low-level drug offenses and arguing against releasing prisoners so California could maintain a source of cheap labor. These leaders refuse to recognize — unlike Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Fred Hampton — that racism is a direct product of class society. If we truly want to liberate the Black community, we cannot rely on leaders willing to betray us in such a fashion.
The capitalist class has employed race as an instrument to prevent the working classes from uniting for centuries, convincing more privileged workers that their interests align with the bosses simply because they are the same race, despite the bosses being the everyone’s common exploiter. Although workers have overcome this tactic many times in history, it has often been successful in preventing unity in the workplace. But the challenges faced by oppressed minority groups in society stem from the inherent contradictions within capitalism rather than stemming from the amount of privilege each individual person has over another. The evidence is that discrimination mainly comes in the form of economic oppression, which is felt disproportionately by the black community, who have been relegated to second class citizens through centuries of oppression of an economic system that relies on discrimination to function. “You can’t have capitalism without racism,” Malcolm X points out.
Anticipating that incremental gains focused solely on race-related justice can rectify these issues while class-based exploitation persists is a frivolous, utopian notion. True liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the overarching structure of class-based society itself. Consequently, the selection of our leaders should not be contingent on factors like the color of their skin, but on their ability to effectively advance the interests of the marginalized and exploited.
SEBASTIAN WARD is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at sebastian.ward@yale.edu.
