"Why I Stopped Talking Like Ben Carson"

[DemocratSinceBirth]

I used to tell my life story as a feel-good fairy tale. Now, I realize, I was doing it all wrong.
By Issac J. Bailey
December 13, 2015



If Ben Carson’s political career is built on anything, it’s his inspirational story. For two decades he’s been selling books and drawing crowds with his “you control your own destiny” message, convincing millions that hard work and determination can lead a black child out of poverty and on to professional notoriety and success.
For years, that was me, too.

Whenever I spoke in public I would talk about how I was born into destitution in rural South Carolina to a woman who married at 13 and to a man who beat her like clockwork every weekend for most of my young life. I would talk about how my oldest brother went to prison for murder when I was nine years old (and a few other brothers eventually followed him there) and how the ill-equipped high school my 10 siblings and I attended wasn’t desegregated for more than four decades after Brown v. Board of Education.
Despite the overwhelming odds stacked against me, I would tell my audience, through my hard work and perseverance, I graduated from one of the top liberal arts schools in the country, Davidson College, and went on to become a successful columnist and published author and was eventually invited to spend a year studying at Harvard. I’ve rubbed shoulders with governors and multi-millionaires, interviewed Barack Obama.
And then I stopped telling that story.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/ben-carson-life-story-213433

Posted at the request of 1SBM

[LiberalArkie]

1. Very good, Thank you

[alfie]

2. Excellent article

Everyone needs to read it, wish I could rec it 100 times.

[brer cat]

3. K&R

An important account that should be spread far and wide. Carson's "inspiring" life story is mostly a self-serving myth that does far more harm than good.

Thanks for posting!

[Chitown Kev]

4. Well, the story is inspiring

but the conclusions that Carson has drawn from it is bullshit.

[brer cat]

6. His accomplishments are remarkable,

and I would find his story inspiring if I read it first written by someone else. The excerpts I have read of his account are too self-aggrandizing and moralizing, and I find that I cannot separate the story from the man who has been revealed during this campaign. Perhaps that is my bad, but the candidate of today is all that I can see.

I have personally known several people, including my father, who lived the up-from-abject-poverty life, and they were all democrats as adults. Big surprise, huh?

[Chitown Kev]

7. My stepdad is like that

thing is, usually black people that achieve some sort of success are trying to give a hand up to siblings and other relatives that couldn't make it up and out and they are not about to be all out in the street putting them down like that.

[Number23]

5. This is fabulous. Thanks so much for posting this

An excellent read.

[Kind of Blue]

8. Yes, take the shame out of being ashamed because

No one does has ever achieved success in a vacuum.