When I was growing up in Detroit, my high school teachers acclaimed Ben Carson as a role model, a man whose success my black classmates and I should strive to emulate. “Gifted Hands,” his 1996 best-selling book, was required reading for students at Northwestern High School who, like myself, wanted to “be somebody.”

But for all of the praise Mr. Carson has garnered for his professional achievements as a brain surgeon, his greatest selling point among conservatives is his refusal to challenge institutional racism.

Like Mr. Carson, I was raised by a single black woman in Detroit who stressed the need for hard work and education. But that is where our similarities end. For Mr. Carson, our hometown is useful only for street cred: It is necessary personal background to prove that it’s possible to make it out of poverty and succeed through the power of one’s own will. But to me, the lesson of Detroit is that a black middle class can rise only by fighting racist policies intended to keep affordable housing and education off limits to minorities.

As Mr. Carson testified this week at Senate hearings on his selection by President-elect Donald Trump to be secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development — an agency with the task of expanding access to stable and affordable housing — I thought about how that history seems to have made no impression on him.