Photo : Aaron P. Bernstein ( Getty Images )

As somebody who used to rock a fitted cap almost every time I left my apartment, recently, someone asked me why I had inexplicably stopped.


“Because people treat me differently when I don’t have one on,” I said. “I could wear the exact same outfit and depending upon what’s on my head I’ll be considered either unprofessional, a threat to their safety or a potential business partner.”

Perception is reality.

These are black people problems I know all too well.

To that end, when I was growing up in Tulsa, Okla., I used to see people of all shapes, sizes, and whitenesses (is that a word?) fucking off their afternoons by sitting on their porches. And never, not one time, did I ever think, “Damn. When are bum ass Blake and Garrett gonna get some damn jobs?”


But had they been black, society tells me that their energy would be better served elsewhere. What the hell are black men doing fucking off their afternoons sitting on the porch?

Enter Ben Carson.

On the latest edition of Fox & Friends, our presiding U.S. Housing Secretary, who has a penchant for saying stupid things, introduced another to his robust catalog.

While discussing his recent visit to Baltimore, which included co-signing Trump’s “rat-infested” racism and getting booted from the house of the Lord, the 67-year-old and what’s left of his mustache had this to say:

“When I was in Baltimore a couple of days ago, and just looking at a lot of the squalor there [...] the people are the ones who are suffering when we have squalor there. And I saw so many young men sitting on porches, able-bodied young men. I’m looking for a way now—we are going to be talking about this in Washington—how can we get those young men employed in terms of cleaning up the neighborhoods, in terms of helping to repair some of the structures and gaining some skills to allow them to move up the economic ladder.”

Sooooooooooo because they were chillin’ on the porch they were unemployed? I mean, did he ask them? They couldn’t have just been off work at the time?

As a black man, you would think Carson would be cognizant of how jumping to conclusions endangers us all on a daily basis, but continuously spreading these assumptions to white audiences as gospel is exactly why he’ll never get a plate at the cookout ever again, though I would expect nothing less from the guy Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch believes could cure America’s racial divide.