CREATED EQUAL

The former presidential candidate shares his views on race and racism.

Can’t we all just get along? So Carson, retired surgeon and GOP darling, asks and answers in the affirmative. “Yes, racism still exists,” he writes, “but so does liberty and justice for all.” After sounding his one-love paean to American ideals, the author airs familiar complaints about wokeness, Black Lives Matter, and especially critical race theory, which, he argues, is “one of the ideological pillars of the groups wanting to fundamentally change America.” Carson categorically rejects the claims of critical race theory that America, founded on the backs of enslaved people, remains a racist society. “Since race is genetically determined, it is difficult to understand their claim that it is only a social construct,” Carson adds, though he later seems to allow the social-scientific and biological construct that there’s just one human race made diverse by different features. Although he’s experienced racism, notably from mean children in grade school and White college classmates who couldn’t comprehend that a Black student might be more intellectually accomplished than they, Carson explains it away—in addition to the murder of George Floyd, disparities in non-White income, and “that feeling of white entitlement that occurred so long ago in our nation”—as if it no longer exists. Carson’s narrative eventually resolves the bring-back-morality trope. Since he advocates home schooling above public education on account of critical race theory and other supposed ills, at least he doesn’t hit too hard on prayer in schools. Which isn’t to say that it’s absent, for, as the author proclaims, “Christianity encourages excellence and self-reliance.” For what it’s worth, though he would seem to give his former boss credit for doing more for Black people than any president since Lincoln, he mentions Trump by name only three times in passing.

Predictably unsatisfying given the blame-the-liberals drumbeat.