Dr. Benjamin Carson is the Director of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Carson focuses on traumatic brain injuries, brain and spinal cord tumors, achondroplasia, neurological and congenital disorders, craniosynostosis, epilepsy and trigeminal neuralgia. He is also interested in maximizing the intellectual potential of every child.
An internationally renowned physician, Dr. Carson has authored over 100 neurosurgical publications, along with three best-selling books, and has been awarded 38 honorary doctorate degrees and dozens of national merit citations.
Dr. Carson majored in psychology at Yale and graduated from the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He went on to complete both his internship in general surgery and residency in neurological surgery at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. In addition, he served as senior registrar in neurosurgery at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Queen Elizabeth II Medical Center in Western Australia.
Dr. Carson sees patients on Monday afternoons and Fridays at The Johns Hopkins Outpatient Center located in Baltimore.
He's a conservative with conservative views. Having lived through the dark days of Bully Boy Bush, we're not all that surprised to discover conservatives exist. Sadly, others on the left have to grab the vapors.
On Fox News, Carson recently came out as an opponent of marriage equality as he declared, "Marriage is between a man and a woman. It's a well-established, fundamental pillar of society and no group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality -- it doesn't matter what they are, they don’t get to change the definition."
The reaction from Black Agenda Report was disappointing to put it mildly.
Wilmer Leon offered "Dr. Ben Carson: Great Surgeon, Bad Icon" which was a thoughtful column and one worth praising. Sadly, however, it featured an introduction -- not written by Wilmer Leon -- dismissing Carson as one "of the Right's favorite Negroes." No, he is the right and that's really offensive the way Black Agenda Report tokenized someone just because they disagreed with the person. We think Carson's ideas are lunacy but we don't for a moment believe that he's embraced by the right because he's a token. He's embraced by the right because he's one of them. And they've embraced him back for the same reason.
Sadly, a bad intro was the least of the problems with the disgusting crap Auset Marian Lewis offered "Dr. Ben Carson: Send in the Clowns." Here there are multiple premises -- none of which is truly developed -- but the worst is the comparison of Carson to the Samuel L. Jackson character in Django Unchained.
The racist film by Quentin Tarantino works under the premise that KKK Jonah Hill is adorable, that slave owner Leo Di Caprio is understandable and that the most vile person in the history of US slavery is a Black slave played by Samuel L. Jackson who enjoys favors by selling out his own.
Now we're not arguing that's the portrait of a saint. We are questioning, in that line up, a KKK-er ready to attack and kill a freed slave, Leo Di Caprio with a plantation of slaves who are regularly beaten and Jackson who gets a tiny bit of power, the worst offender is Samuel L. Jackson?
Django Unchained is a racist film. Some people have made idiotic and offensive comments praising that trash. The audience does not stand and cheer when, for example, Leo dies but, when it's time for Jackson to suffer, the crowd goes wild.
It's really interesting how the White Tarantino was able to get away with making yet another splatter movie but this time one that indicts for slavery not a White person but a Black slave.
That's why the film's so popular. It plays into the myth that Black people brought slavery on themselves while pretending to be about freedom. It degrades and dehumanizes African-Americans while glorifying the slave owners.
It is the anti-Roots.
The true crime of slavery, in Tarantino's world, was the 'uppity' Black.
So to find some idiot at Black Agenda Report trying to compare Ben Carson to an offensive stereotype of Black people popularized by a White man?
That's just disgusting.
It's also disgusting that everyone wants to be shocked by Carson's words. Their next step?
To demonize him.
Is that because they're too ignorant to fight back against Carson's words?
Carson is arguing against marriage equality because he maintains same-sex relationships are unnatural. Are the writers aghast at the thought that they might have to actually defend same-sex relations?
Same-sex coupling takes place all the time in the animal kingdom. It's taken place historically throughout the world among humans. No, not just in Greece.
We'd refer readers to a book edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe entitled Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (1998). From the back cover:
Among the many myths created about Africa, the myth that homosexuality is absent or incidental is one of the oldest and most enduring. Historians, anthropologists, and many contemporary Africans alike have denied or overlooked African same-sex patterns or claimed that such patterns were introduced by Europeans. Among African Americans questions surrounding sexuality and gender in traditional African societies have become especially contentious.
In fact, same-sex love was and is widespread in Africa. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands documents same-sex patterns in some fifty societies, in every region of the continent. Essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines explore institutionalized marriages between women, same-sex relations between men and boys in colonial work setting, mixed gender roles in east and west Africa, and recent developments in South Africa, where lesbians and gays successfully made the nation the first in the world to constitutionally ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Also included are oral histories, folklore, and translations of early ethnographic reports by German and French observers. The first serious study of the subject, Boy-Wives and Female Husbands is a significant contribution to anthropology, history, and gender studies, offering new often surprising views of African societies, while posing interesting challenges to recent theories on sexuality. An invaluable resource for everyone interested in the continent's history and culture, Boy-Wives and Female Husbands reveals the denials of African homosexualities for what they are -- prejudice and willful ignorance.
So maybe it's time you educated yourselves. Maybe then, when Ben Carson made an ignorant remark, you could confront the ignorance and not be left using ugly stereotypes popularized by racist films?
