"For black men like us, the feeling of having something to lose, beyond honor and face, is foreign."

"We grew up in communities — New York, Baltimore, Chicago — where the Code of the Streets was the first code we learned. Respect and reputation are everything there. These values are often denigrated by people who have never been punched in the face. But when you live around violence there is no opting out. A reputation for meeting violence with violence is a shield. That protection increases when you are part of a crew with that same mind-set. This is obviously not a public health solution, but within its context, the Code is logical."

Ben Carson "Wears the Mask."

A mask he put on quite recently, says Ta-Nehisi Coates.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he may have been the most celebrated figure in the black communities of Baltimore. Carson responded to that adulation by regularly giving his time to talk to young people, who needed to know that there was so much more beyond the streets.

I was one of those young people. I don’t doubt that Carson was a conservative even then. I knew plenty of black people who loved their community and hated welfare. But white conservatives were never interested in them, and they were never as interested in Ben Carson as they are right now. When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House. And then he put on the mask.

The use of the word "mask" here is inflammatory, and it will bring traffic to this NYT op-ed, but I think it's a big distraction from the point Coates is trying to make.

"And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take."

Writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a column called "The Good, Racist People."

My question is: How did some people get to be considered the "good" people in the first place? It's that question that fires my antagonism to liberals. They think they are good.