Ben Carson’s Exonerating Racism
Carson is a scientist who disavows evolution, a citizen who professes to be deeply concerned about democracy yet supports a religious litmus test for public office, and a physician who devoted himself to saving the lives of children but indulges the hypertensive claims of the anti-vaccine element. His bifurcated thinking calls to mind James Watson, the Nobel winning co-discoverer of DNA, who spent years mouthing racist and sexist theories of human intelligence. On the stump, Carson seems like an object lesson in what happens when STEM majors don’t take enough courses in the humanities and social sciences.
.. By stating that he believes that Islam is inconsistent with American democracy and that President Obama is a Christian born in the United States, he validates the substance of birtherism, just not this specific instance of it.
.. But Carson appears to mean what he says, and there is a consistent market for his brand of exonerating racism, for bigotries so valid that even a brilliant black man endorses them.