Bailey is a former columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and a 2014 Harvard University Nieman Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @ijbailey.

If Ben Carson’s political career is built on anything, it’s his inspirational story. For two decades he’s been selling books and drawing crowds with his “you control your own destiny” message, convincing millions that hard work and determination can lead a black child out of poverty and on to professional notoriety and success.

For years, that was me, too.


Whenever I spoke in public I would talk about how I was born into destitution in rural South Carolina to a woman who married at 13 and to a man who beat her like clockwork every weekend for most of my young life. I would talk about how my oldest brother went to prison for murder when I was nine years old (and a few other brothers eventually followed him there) and how the ill-equipped high school my 10 siblings and I attended wasn’t desegregated for more than four decades after Brown v. Board of Education.

Despite the overwhelming odds stacked against me, I would tell my audience, through my hard work and perseverance, I graduated from one of the top liberal arts schools in the country, Davidson College, and went on to become a successful columnist and published author and was eventually invited to spend a year studying at Harvard. I’ve rubbed shoulders with governors and multi-millionaires, interviewed Barack Obama.

And then I stopped telling that story.

It felt great to narrate, but I started to notice that my audience members, far from becoming more sympathetic, began hurling my tale as an indictment of those still mired in the muck of the kind of struggle I experienced. “You made it; why can’t they?” people would say to me as they thanked me for my “inspiring” words. “You worked hard and have been rewarded. Why aren’t they doing the same?” The story was doing precisely the opposite of what I wanted. It hardened, rather than softened hearts.

My intentions had been good: I thought this version of my story could inspire kids who grew up like me, as well as convince the frustrated adults in their lives not to give up on them. But I was also giving everyone the wrong impression. Which is why, today, I tell a very different version of my tale—a less self-aggrandizing, more honest account that includes my perseverance, but also all the undeserved help I got along the way. Today, I can freely admit that I’m not a self-made man; without handouts, the kind that Carson eschews, I wouldn’t be where I am today. They didn’t make me lazy; they kept me alive.

When Ben Carson gets up in front of a national audience and talks about how he, against all odds, rose out of poverty and struggle to become a world renowned neurosurgeon and candidate for president, I can’t help hearing notes of the myth of origins that I spouted for so long.

I’m no brain surgeon, but my and Carson’s backgrounds aren’t dissimilar. Education was vital to his rise, as it was to mine, along with a strong-willed mother who would not relent, would not allow my siblings and I to be less than our best, who abhorred excuse-making and beat into us the value of hard work and character. Carson’s description of his mother echoes my description of mine.

And I can imagine that Carson, like me, would not be where he is today without a little help from the U.S. government. Because no one, not even Ben Carson, makes it on their own.

***

I’ll never forget the day when I was young—maybe I was 13 or 14 years old—when my mother put a small coupon book of food stamps in one of my hands and a list in the other and sent me to IGA, the grocery store in the center of our small hometown. IGA was only about a mile away, but it was one of the longest walks of my life. It felt as though I was carrying the shame of an entire race on my back. Yes, more white Americans are currently on welfare and use food stamps than black Americans. But I was walking to that grocery store during the Reagan era of black “welfare queens,” wondering if leaders in Washington thought that about my mother, a woman who worked 12-hour shifts as a fork lift operator at a nearby Georgia Pacific plant and only stopped because of a domestic violence induced disability.

I did the shopping like every other person that day in IGA. But I lurked around the front waiting for a cashier’s line to disappear before paying for the Captain Crunch cereal, milk, eggs and a few other things. I didn’t want anyone to see me with those food stamps. When I finally approached the register, I had difficulty ripping a few of the coupons from the book, and as I handed it to the cashier to do it for me, the line filled up. I imagined the people behind me shaking their heads in disgust at the sight of another black family on the dole, unable and unwilling to take care of themselves.

Carson has told a similar story many times, in his autobiography, Gifted Hands, and in other settings, of having been ashamed of using food stamps. I get the sense, though, that on some level he understands his story has been misused—because he knows government help didn’t cripple his desire to be great—even as he mostly sticks to script.

In May of 2014, he said this on ABC’s “The View”: “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.”

When speaking to Politico a year later, he tried to answer critics who believed his storytelling was hypocritical: “Many people are critical of me because they say, ‘Carson wants to get rid of all the safety nets and welfare programs even though he must have benefited from them.’ This is a blatant lie. I have no desire to get rid of safety nets for people who need them. I have a strong desire to get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people.”

The truth is, no one wants to create dependency. And shaming people from receiving the help they need can have unintended consequences. I know women who worked multiple low-wage, long-hour jobs to make sure they were never branded with the insult of having had to rely on government assistance. They were proud to have never used an EBT card, the modern version of the food stamp coupon book. But that meant they had to leave their kids alone for most of the day and night for years at a time—and without parental supervision, a good number of those kids ended up dropping out of school and got involved in drug wars on the streets that killed them.

That’s why today I insist upon telling people that my achievements aren’t mine alone. I’m happy to say much of my success was built upon receiving handouts, not just handups, the kind alluded to in the Biblical “teach a man to fish” story Carson often mentions. I needed to be taught to fish. But the sustenance provided by fish caught by someone else gave me the stamina to be able to pay attention and learn, and rise out of poverty.

I worked hard and made good decisions, sure. But I was also lucky and received unearned gifts in ways too numerous to count, some from my family and teachers, some from my church, some from my biological makeup—I’ve never had a taste for potentially addictive drugs and was born with a grit-fueled personality—and some from my government.

My family needed and used food stamps and the Women, Infants and Children program. I ate government cheese, the kind that came in a long, rectangular box, and it was good, particularly if you sliced it just so to go atop slices of bread and stuck them in the over for a few minutes.

I got free lunches at school and free lunches during the summer. I received Pell grants at Davidson. I’ve already benefited from Social Security because of the survivor benefits we received after my father died.

Today, while I have siblings in jail, I also have a brother who is an air traffic controller, owns a fitness center and is opening up a school in Washington, D.C.; a sister who is a stage actor and IT professional; a brother who manages his daughters’ entertainment careers; a brother who helped build some of the trucks used in the “Transformers” movies; another who has started a non-profit.

I shudder to think where we’d all be without outside intervention, given that even the help we received couldn’t protect us from all that we were forced to overcome to achieve a bit of success and maintain our sanity in an unfair, unequal world.

This is what I tell the audiences today.

I imagine, though, that some of the crowds I speak before would rather hear from Carson than me because he has distilled his story down into a long line of tall tales that suggest hard work and right living alone will lead anyone to success, no matter the obstacles they face. I, on the other hand, am more prone to begin the retelling of my story by declaring that welfare programs helped save me. Food stamps and government cheese and free lunches and Pell grants didn’t make me lazy—or dependent; I worked throughout high school and college while playing sports. They kept me from starving and made it possible for my parents to make ends meet.

Isn’t it funny how Mitt Romney and Donald Trump could receive “small loans” from their wealthy parents; Ted Cruz and his wife can benefit from a government health care subsidy larger than the ones families on Medicaid receive; billionaire hedge fund managers can take advantage of the absurd carried interest tax loophole; rich families can eagerly accept a government subsidy for buying a million-dollar home; and none of them feel ashamed—or are shamed? Yet a poor person accepting government assistance to buy eggs and bread and the occasional cheap grocery store steak is forced to wear the Scarlet F on his chest?

It took me a long time to recognize that upside down reality. Maybe that’s why I’m no longer ashamed of having received handouts, only that I’m ashamed of having been ashamed. I just wish Carson—and his followers—could understand that, too.