A Message To Obama, Served Cold

Born in crushing poverty to an illiterate single mother dedicated to seeing her children succeed, Carson became the head of the department of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins medical institutions when he was 33. He’s been a black celebrity role model ever since.

Even if you didn’t like the substance of what Carson had to say at the breakfast, his speech made for great political theater. President Obama was seated on the stage, just a few feet away, and he didn’t look like he was having a good time.

Intellectual historians of black America might make a great deal out of the image of a frowning Obama listening as Carson inveighed against a culture of victimology and dependency. It’s too trite to say that the president is the incarnation of W.E.B. DuBois and Carson of Booker T. Washington. After all, DuBois renounced his American citizenship, became a communist and moved to Ghana at the end of his life. Obama, the son of a leftist (if not an actual communist) from Africa, went on to become the president of the United States — a significantly different story, to put it mildly.

But as Mark Twain allegedly said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. The great argument between DuBois and Washington is often boiled down to integration versus self-help. Washington believed that blacks should emphasize education and self-advancement first and worry about integration later. DuBois favored a civil-rights-first strategy combined with reliance on the leadership of technocrats, including what he called the “talented tenth,” or the best African-Americans.

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