The current presidential election season may be the most unconventional race yet. Aside from consistently asinine comments from Republican front-runner Donald Trump, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson has been attempting to challenge Trump’s current stronghold on the most vocally inappropriate candidate. Over the summer, Carson made several contradictory statements in relation to Black Lives Matter, but recently, he slipped his foot in to his mouth even further with displaced comments about the police while speaking with a predominately Caucasian Republican audience. An identity crisis is defined as a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a person’s sense of identity becomes insecure, typically due to a change in their expected aims or role in society. As Carson has traded his surgical scrubs for a politician’s suit, his comments have become increasingly contradictory.
While speaking last week in New Hampshire, Carson boasted of spending his childhood hopping over fences running away from police, “back in the days before they would shoot you,” he joked. “Throwing rocks at cars, I really liked that. Sometimes, the police would come, always in unmarked cars. And, they’d be chasing us across the field, and they would think they trapped us,” he said. Carson then recanted the statement, “I’m just kidding! You know they wouldn’t do that.” Carson laughed, and the predominantly White audience laughed along with him.
Carson’s recent comments are baffling, especially after he has openly criticized the #Blacklivesmatter movement calling it “silly” and “divisive.” He has applauded the efforts of law enforcement and praised publicly them while speaking against leaders protesting police brutality. “I really have a tremendous amount of respect for the police because they put their lives on the line every day for us, and they are the very last people that we should be targeting,” Carson said. He added jabs at leaders of the #Blacklivesmatter movement saying “we shouldn’t go out and try to eliminate them. We don’t go out and try to kill them. We need in this society to really grow up and stop allowing ourselves to be divided.”
Carson’s humble Detroit roots are already a contradiction to his ultra-conservative views, but his recent statements acknowledging his personal experiences as a victim of racial profiling are almost troubling in relation to his opposition to police brutality. His recent jokes with an audience that couldn’t have shared in his experience looks like the signs of a burgeoning identity crisis. If so, as the race progresses and the temperature during debates increases, we should see a waffling Carson begin to unravel.
