Is it safe to say that most black people in a high respected position will choose to please the other side of the spectrum rather than their own? As harsh as this might sound, I could empathize with them because pretty soon I’m going to enter a field that is predominantly white. However, I will point out that some of these people go too far, Ben Carson, for instance. When it was plastered all over the news that Carson would be running for president, I suppose I felt happy. I was on his bandwagon because after all he was “the man with the gifted hands”. Despite his credibility/track record, a lot of people are displeased with him. In fact, people go so far as to call him a disgrace to society. What did Ben Carson do? His crime was voluntarily choosing to say that the Black Lives Matter movement was silly. He not negatively blasted the movement once or twice, but on numerous occasions.

Yet I still have to ask myself whether Carson is playing it smart. Just think about it for a second. Who makes up most of the population in the USA? Even Richard Delgado (1984) stated, “When I began teaching law, a number of well-meaning senior colleagues advised me to “play things straight…establish a reputation,” (pg.167). Delgado (1984), is not only educated but he knows that law which means that I wouldn’t associate him as being a troublemaker. The realization that just by giving his input on the Civil Rights would land him in hot water and cause him to be unfavorable in his work environment, led to a choice which was a no brainer. He had to become a people pleaser by becoming elegant and then turn into someone “wild”. Elegance is associated with good and Caucasian whereas wild is associated with bad and black. Maybe Carson is taking Delgado’s (1984) route, but we won’t know.

As I begin to dwell and absorb the weight of Carson’s comment, the more I realized how wrong he was. Technically speaking, slave revolts transpired because they realized that their lives mattered. If it didn’t matter Caucasians would have had the happiest slaves looking forward to build onto their wealth. If black lives never mattered, then the Civil Rights would have been pointless. Rosa Parks would have willingly given up her seat although she was extremely tired. If black lives didn’t matter, would Carson have been a brain surgeon today? Absolutely not! It is because people before his time realized that blacks could amount to great things and acted on that realization to shape the future.

In reality, all life really is an “escape from one mental and intellectual prison only into a larger, slightly more expansive one,” (Delgado, 1984, p. 485). For every hurdle minorities overcome there are 500 more added to that patch. Treading carefully will eventually lead to stepping on egg shells. Rather than choosing to discuss racism, most people would want to display elegance by diverting from it.

Delgado, R. (1984). The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature (pp. 167-175). Philadelphia: PA: Temple University.

Delgado, R. (1984). The Imperial Scholar Revisited: How to Marginalize Outsider Writing, Ten Years Later. Philadelphia: PA: Temple University.

March 9, 2016