The Dilemma of Ben Carson
You maybe had to grow up in Baltimore at a certain time to understand the extraordinary arc of the Ben Carson story.
In that wonderful, troubled and quirky city, he was both legend and myth. His name was spoken in the same breath as Travis “Booty” Winky, “Little Willie” Adams, Bernard “Pretty” Purdy, Howard Rollins (A Soldier’s Story), Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones) and Edgar Allen Poe’s ghost as part of the city’s real and imagined folklore. You don’t know some of those people, but people from Baltimore do, and they are all important to what makes the city what it is, as was Dr. Carson.
You would also have to understand the role of Johns Hopkins in a city where most Black people across several generations were born at either all-black Provident Hospital, or Jewish but black-friendly Sinai. At the height of Ben Carson’s fame, Hopkins was as mysterious and impenetrable as it is now ubiquitous, so his sterling achievements as a neurosurgeon separating conjoined twins (at the head no less) at that vaunted hospital, added extra height to his pedestal.
But unlike our other legends, he had no street cred. Nobody knew his mama or had a “that day I stole his lunch money” story. He was born in Detroit. A Baltimore hero but not a Baltimorean. He didn’t hand out nickels at the barber shop like Wes Unseld, work at the car dealership in the off season like Johnny Unitas, or sell barbecue like Boog Powell. He was elevated to a much higher space, on classroom walls, in history books, in school assemblies where kids wore toy stethoscopes and recited “I am Ben Carson” speeches in career day plays. Maybe that happened outside of Baltimore too, but he was ours and it meant more.
So how do you square the fact that a man who is wax figure famous, and whose feats of medical derring-do merited a “Ripley’s Believe or Not” comic strip, is now being called “Uncle Ben” and is the butt of jokes for ignoring medical both science and catching a case of the ‘Rona, all in service to a reality show host turned defeated one-term president?
Like many of our heroes, Ben Carson has lived longer than his legend allows. No drug fueled flame out at 27. No tragic killing at the hands of racists. For years we did not hear his voice, see the rest of his life. In many of his pictures, he was still masked for surgery, not even a whole face much less a whole person. But then we got to see him publicly as a candidate — the halting speech, the sleepy eyes, the SNL parody, the rumors of trouble at Hopkins, the malpractice suits. Then we saw him as a sycophant, and we were disappointed. Deeply.
He was human, and fallible, and more importantly, on the wrong side of history. For all we know, Ben Carson had some successes at HUD. But probably not. People who know say definitely not. But how would the masses know? The last four years have been all about Donald Trump. We can only assume failure by association.
He is not even that old, relatively, as some of our living historical figures are— just older, and, in fairness, deserving of the second and third acts that the less legendary get to explore. He is allowed to fail, to switch gears, to make mistakes, to be normal.
But that’s hard to do when you’re played in a movie by Cuba Gooding, Jr., and on the Black History Month poster next to MLK, Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver and the Super Soaker guy, for an operation you did decades ago, in a profession where you are still an icon but no longer a unicorn.
So, the hopes and prayers for Dr. Carson that the Black community has been sending up on social media and morning radio are legitimate, even if they come with a touch of schadenfreude. They are prayers for not just health, but restoration of his reputation, and maybe the hiring of a good PR person. You can’t just dismiss outright the hope that he once instilled, and in some elementary schools probably still does. He could step out from quarantine, declare it was “All a dream”, and my bet is that people would welcome him back to the fold. Back to his place as “October” on the Budweiser black hero calendar. Back to Baltimore. Maybe.
