Ben Carson Competition

With the GOP nomination only a few weeks away, the competition is getting easier and tougher simultaneously. It is easier in the sense that there are less candidates. From the popular candidates in the beginning that lost their lead to the candidates that never actually had much of a chance, there has been a pretty significant decline in the number of candidates, and thus, competition. It’s easier to compete against a smaller number of people and dedicate resources to that problem than it is to dedicate resources to tackle a large number of candidates and then end up accomplishing absolutely nothing at all. On the other hand, it is also tougher in the sense that the competition has narrowed. With less competitors, the remaining candidates
This was in an era when Jim Crow was still alive in the South. The segregation of basically every aspect of life condemned blacks to lower quality lives overall. Many blacks “could not be hired in the industries: many unions passed rules to exclude them”. Nor could they “work in the same room, enter through the same door, or gaze through the same window”. There were “black and white parks and black and white phone booths” (“A Brief History of Jim Crow”) too. And even worse, “prisons, hospitals, orphanages, schools, and colleges” were all segregated. The whole idea of the segregation of public facilities itself originated from the ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the idea of “separate but equal facilities.” In theory, the complete segregation of facilities seemed like it did in fact uphold the “separate but equal” doctrine. However, “in actuality, public facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those for whites” (“Jim Crow Laws”). Clearly, this situation was terrible. Ben Carson’s parents both originated from “rural Georgia,” where Jim Crow was quite strong. And coupled with the fact that Ben’s father was a “seventh-day Adventist minister” (Henry) and that his mother “dropped out of the school in the third grade” (“Ben Carson Biography”), it was clear that Jim Crow would do absolutely nothing for
He became the “object of ridicule” (“Ben Carson Biography”) to the other classmates and helped develop his uncontrollable temper. Carson once wrote that “once he reached the boiling point, he lost all rational control”. In the seventh grade, he “attacked a much bigger boy with a combination lock after being called ‘dumb’”. This blow tore a three-inch gash in the boy’s head. In the ninth grade, after a boy threw a rock at him, Ben threw a much bigger rock back and “shattered the boy’s glasses and nose”. It reached a crescendo when he nearly stabbed his friend during an argument over which radio station to listen to. Ben took a “camping knife out of his back pocket and lunged at his friend” (Foster), and nearly stabbed him. Though Carson lost all control of himself, the knife miraculously snapped when it hit the victim’s belt buckle. The experience terrified Carson, and he “ran home and locked himself in the bathroom with a Bible and started praying, asking God for help with his temper”. He finally “found solace in a passage of the book of Proverbs that went ‘Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city’”. This line gave Ben the understanding that he made any and all events that “were not to his liking” (“Ben Carson Biography”) his problem, and derived his anger from this. He realized that he got angry for unjustifiable reasons. When he