Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good op-ed on Dr. Benjamin Carson in The New York Times today. Coates's column places Carson in a lengthening list of aspirants for the title "Conservative Black Hope"; previous contenders have included Alan Keyes, Michael Steele, Allen West, and Herman Cain.
A key aspect of this job is spreading the notion that other African-Americans are going about being African-American all wrong:
Last week, Carson came under attack for comparing advocates of same-sex marriage with advocates of bestiality and the North American Man/Boy Love Association. He then cast himself as a victim of political correctness, besieged by white liberals -- "the most racist people there are" -- who could not countenance his heterodoxy and wanted to keep him on the "plantation."The argument that some people are incorrectly going about the process of being who they are is a big part of the right-wing message. According to this view, the real experts are non-members of a group, or right-wing members who disagree with the shared non-right-wing perspective of the group's majority.
The plantation metaphor refers to a popular theory on the right. It holds that the 95 percent of African-Americans who voted for a Democratic president are not normal Americans voting their beliefs, but slaves. A corollary to the plantation theory is the legend of the Conservative Black Hope, a lonesome outsider, willing to stare down the party of Obamacare and stand up for the party of voter ID. Does it matter that this abolitionist truth-teller serves at the leisure of an audience that is overwhelmingly white? Not really. Blacks are brainwashed slaves; you can't expect them to know what's in their interest.
See, for instance, the more-Jewish-than-thou Christians memorably discussed in the recent New York Times Magazine article "Oy Vey, Christian Soldiers." These Christians bar mitzah their kids, get married under chuppahs, and wear prayer shawls. Many of them are also defenders of the most militant pro-Israel policies -- more so than many Jews in America or Israel.
Or see converts to Catholicism such as Ross Douthat who act as self-appointed Catholic purity cops, while America's cradle Catholics reject many (or all) of the doctrinal items on offer in the Church cafeteria.
A variant on this is the notion that group members think they're left-leaning, but only because they're too ignorant to notice that they're really right-leaning. That was the message of a recent David Brooks column on gay marriage titled "Freedom Loses One," which argued (though not in so many words) that gay people who fight for marriage equality are too stupid to realize that they're fighting for restraints on their autonomy, rather than freedom.
As The New Yorker's Amy Davidson wrote in response to that column,
Perhaps one should be grateful to Brooks for showing conservatives a way to support same-sex marriage while holding on to their smugness...."Smugness" is a word that would seem to apply to a lot of the messages right-wingers send to groups they disagree with: We're right about what you need. It's you people who are complete clueless about what's best for you.
