"When you rob someone of their incentive to go out there and improve themselves, you are not doing them any favors. When you take somebody and pat them on the head and say, ‘There, there, you poor little thing. … Let me give you housing subsidies, let me give you free health care because you can’t do that.’ What would be much more empowering is to use our intellect and our resources to give those people a way up and out.”

That sounds innocent enough right? He doesn’t want folks to lean on a crutch and not do for themselves. Here’s the red elephant in the room though: He wants to do away with the very system he was raised on by his Mother who was very poor and not nearly as educated as he was fortunate enough to become. Carson also admitted that as a kid he was doing horribly in school because his eyesight was very bad, until government assistance helped them out and provided him with free glasses because his mother couldn’t afford eye care.

These are also his words about receiving food stamps from his book:

“By the time I reached ninth grade, mother had made such strides that she received nothing but food stamps. She couldn’t have provided for us and kept up the house without that subsidy.”

Carson’s excuse as to why his family deserves a pass for being on welfare programs:

“I think there was a time when people were not proud of taking handouts,” he said. “There were more people who did have that drive and determination. You do what you have to do."

So in other words, ALL people receiving government assistance today are lazy money hungry abusers of the program and since he doesn’t personally know anyone who is ashamed of being on assistance, he assumes that they ALL somehow are enjoying abusing government programs and that none of them are actually trying to take the next step forward to better themselves or their children, such as what his Mother did for him.

Typically I don’t get into the political talks on this platform, but sitting back and Dr. Ben Carson’s left me no choice. He and Donald Trump seem to be running a race with their unfair assumptions and views about certain people in this country.

Now of course I’m not saying that people should abuse the welfare system, nor any other program for that matter because that’s just wrong, all I’m saying is that it’s catastrophic to generalize all recipients into one negative stereotype. I’m with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on this one.

Carson isn’t the typical Republican Presidential candidate, he is a former welfare recipient, he came from a home of a single Black mother, he had a really poor upbringing. But yet he’s frontin’ like he came from the opposite side of the tracks, by denying others who are now in the exact same position he was in, those same opportunities he once had. By attempting to detach his upbringing from today’s welfare recipients, he’s indirectly looking down on his very own beloved Mother. In my opinion, that makes Ben Carson somewhat of a fake Republican candidate,  so the ILOSM Old School theme song for this story is “Fake” by Alexander O’Neal…take us out Alex’!