Ben Carson Responds After Detroit Officials Vote to Remove His Name from High School: 'We Need an Inoculation to Indoctrination'
Imagine believing that public facilities should be named only for perfect people with whom you agree on every point.
If you were able to do that successfully, congratulations; you now know what it feels like to think like a social justice warrior.
The latest target of these folks, who obviously have way too much time on their hands and no clue as to how to effect meaningful social change in this country: Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine in Detroit.
Note the full name of this school; it’s not a magnate school for political studies or even the liberal arts. That makes a difference, or at least in theory it should. The school was named after Carson in the first place because of his contributions to science and medicine, not because he ran Housing and Urban Development under former President Donald Trump.
But that, of course, is the unforgivable sin to the American left: Carson worked in the Trump administration, and Yale-education neurosurgeon’s name is now anathema.
Thus, the school board’s decision to change the same.
So the Black American neurosurgeon who performed the FIRST successful separation of conjured twins that were attached at the back of the head…name is removed from a predominantly Black school because…
you don’t like his politics???https://t.co/eVttO1KOlq
— Black. Conservative. Educator. Free Thinker (@FavoriteTeach11) December 13, 2022
Carson was understandably disappointed with the school board’s decision, though he didn’t seem particularly surprised.
“It’s very sad that we’ve reached the point where political ideology trumps the whole purpose of an educational institution,” Carson said on “Hannity.” “And we’re seeing this wokeness spreading throughout our community to the destruction of our community.
“How does it do any good for us to demonize people with whom we disagree and to teach that to our children at a time when the math scores are down, the reading scores are down [and] academic performance is down?”
“We’re failing [students] by pushing this ideology,” Carson said.
I don’t need to go into just how badly America’s public schools are performing in 2022; regular readers of The Western Journal are already well aware of that. In fact, everyone in the country is pretty much aware of that including, I would presume, the Detroit Public Schools Community District Board of Education.
The board apparently thinks that the way to address those problems is to change the sign on the outside of the school building. (I’m sure they would deny that, but their actions would speak louder than those words.)
I can understand — and in some cases, even agree with — renaming institutions that honor slave owners or Confederate generals, stuff like that. Much of that has been overblown, but I can understand what advocates of such changes are thinking, at least.
But if we insist on perfection in every respect from the people for which we name our public buildings and other infrastructure, we’re quickly going to be left with three options.
The option we seem to be taking now is that we’ll rename everything with each change in administration or popular cultural thought. That’s not efficient, and it makes those involved look like I described them above: as having way too much time on their hands but no clue as to how to effect meaningful social change in this country.
The second option would be to name everything after the only perfect man Jesus. I’d be OK with that, but it would probably get confusing when every child in America graduates from high school with the same name. (There are probably some other problems with this idea, too.)
[firefly_poll]
Finally, the most logical outcome of this kind of thinking would be to stop honoring people’s contributions to humanity by naming things after them. Then we could avoid these arguments about who was worthy of such honors versus who had committed some disqualifying sin.
Don’t worry, though. I’m sure the left will come up with something else just as pointless to argue about. Otherwise, they might be forced to find productive employment, which is probably even more distasteful to committed Marxist thinkers than the idea of a black Republican.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
