Uncle Ben Carson

I’m a Black person in America who grew up “hood adjacent.”

Meaning I lived a Huxtable-ish lifestyle, but down the street and nigh a few corner stores away was Pookie n’em. #CodeSwitchIsLife

In fact, I’m pretty sure my father’s childhood nickname is Bookie. Pronounced /boo` key/. Like Pookie. With a b, though. This is a man with a graduate level education who holds The Doors’ 1967 eponymous album in high esteem and yet he is affectionately called Bookie by many a negro.

Norf Philly’s trillest.

I preambled to say this:

Black folk don’t trust Black Republicans.

We don’t, man.

We trust them less than we trust anyone who looks like Mitt Romney and sounds like Donald Trump. It’s a birthright. Some people inherit pounds and pounds of wigs or beanie baby stockpiles or summer estates in Martha’s Vineyard. Black folks inherit a palpable distrust for any melanin-infused individual who regales you with tales of adoration of the GOP.

And here’s the thing. I’m a registered Independent. Shhhhhhhhhh! It’s not as if I dislike conservatism. In fact, there was a brief stint in my life when I didn’t completely hate Atlas Shrugged. Dagny was making sense until she wasn’t. Nonetheless, I just don’t trust the mofos.

Black Republicans always want to come up to you whilst you’re decked in all tailored errthing and tell you to pull up your pants. Or better yet, they gush about their wannabe bestie Ann Coulter’s latest “incisive” take on Mexican immigrants all over your social media timelines.

I went to Cornell. We don’t claim her.

We claim Bill Maher. We claim Keith Olbermann. We claim Toni Morrison. We claim Kurt Vonnegut. We claim bae Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg — only she can fall asleep at every single State of the Union address and no one dare admonish her.

We claim Alpha Phi Alpha.

When asked about Ann Coulter… we pull a Mariah Carey.

Enter world renowned pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson.

Having grown up attending a black-owned private school that treated every day like Kujichagulia, Ben Carson was right up there with Jesus and Thurgood Marshall as far as I was concerned.

He was that ninja.

In my mind, Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Whitney M. Young, Shaq, and he all attended literati salons at the Russian Tea Ballroom to talk shit about lessers.

The usual.

So, how do you think I felt, when I discovered the following:

He. speaks. so. e f f i n g. slowly.
He’s nurturing a bromance with a man who, despite being worth billions, refuses to invest in a proper hair piece and an accompanying castor oil treatment for his foregone edges.
He’s running for president… as a REPUBLICANT.

I can’t trust this ninja.

Anyone who speaks slower than Chris Christie waddles simply doesn’t want to be trusted.

But something happened:

Carson began carving chinks into my deep disappointment via his overwhelming…

Blackness.

And I don’t mean “marching on Calvary” or chanting #BlackLivesMatter “for a cause” Blackness. That’s dope Blackness. I mean that “yooooooo dis ninja black as hell” Blackness.

For one let’s study him and his wife. I mean it’s shocking she’s Black, right?

Kanye told us that, “When he get on, he leave your ass for a white girl.”

Well Kanye, Dr. Carson has a refreshingly ‘regular’ looking Black wife. And they seem lovely.

Just look at those photos:

Looking just like the Deacon and Deaconess of one of y'all Baptist churches.

My family has similar photos and guess where they were taken?

Church.

Granted I’m nowhere near as religious as Carson. I’ve transcended into that hipster territory of spiritual, but goddammit I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m endeared.

It gets better.

“Black Jesus and Ben Carson” commissioned by Ben Carson for Ben Carson.

Carson has a painting of himself in his scrubs and medical coat with Black Jesus adorned in Lisa Raye all-white fashions casually anointing him like an OG.

It. Don’t. Get. No. Blacker. Than. This.

It just doesn’t.

It is so unapologetically Black. It feels like home. If home were your grandmom’s house with the plastic on the Victorian love seats and a photo of Black Jesus in the downstairs bathroom.

At this point Carson has managed to evolve from MLK Jr. to Don Lemon and somehow back to that fake bougie uncle you only sorta fxck with, but he grills ribs real good?

Basically Ben Carson is Uncle Denzel’s older brother who went to Yale, but never let the hood leave his heart.