Dr. Ben Carson, a Detroit native and brilliant medical mind, has emerged as a new voice in conservative politics.

So it's not surprising that someone wants him to run for Michigan's open Senate seat in 2014. Pretty much anyone with Michigan ties and a modicum of political ambition/notoriety has been suggested as a possible successor to the retiring Sen. Carl Levin.

In terms of resume and charisma, Dr. Carson would make a formidable candidate -- assuming he wants to move to leave medicine, move back to Michigan, establish residency and launch a campaign.

Detroit News editorial page editor Nolan Finley speculated on just such a prospect this morning. As a political conservative, Finley would no doubt welcome Dr. Carson's entry into a race that's expected to be a tough one for the GOP. Snatching this Senate seat after Levin's 36-year tenure would be huge for Republicans. But Finley is worried that some people might not like Ben Carson as a Senate candidate.

Leaving Detroit for Yale, Carson eventually found his way to John Hopkins, where he became one of the world's most preeminent neurosurgeons, gaining international acclaim in 1987 for performing the first separation of twins conjoined at the head. He is held as an African-American hero.
 
But some are calling him a token, an Uncle Tom, a traitor to his race. Why?
Plenty of people disagree with Dr. Carson's politics. As is the custom, liberals tend to disagree with conservatives and vice versa. This is what we call politics.  But calling Dr. Carson an Uncle Tom, et al because he doesn't vote the way you want him to, that's crossing a line. Who are these "some people" doing that?
 
Search for "Ben Carson Uncle Tom" on Google and one finds a lot of people talking about others calling Dr. Carson an Uncle Tom but very few people actually doing it. The website Twitchy compiled a list of random people tweeting awful things about Carson, including the Tom charge, and that seems to be the primary source of this manufactured concern/outrage. Several conservative commentators and websites have copied Twitchy's "tolerance brigade" rhetoric to describe what we're supposed to assume is a broad-based attack.
 
One can also find idiots on the internet who think Martin Luther King was an Uncle Tom and, if you dig deep into the bowels of digital media, morons who fret (WARNING: link not suitable for decent human beings) about whether or not Lynard Skynard are (excuse the expression, it's not mine) "nigger lovers." Throw out almost any topic, especially one tied to race, and ten people with a stupid opinion with pop up. But these opinions are not evidence of a larger societal view.  Even in Nolan Finley and Michele Malkin wish that were so, there is no evidence of a larger smear campaign from liberals or black leaders against Dr. Carson.
 
Finley's pearl-clutching over the entirely hypothetical Ben Carson candidacy goes beyond typical strawman tactics to basically suggest that black voters are easily led automatons of the Democratic Party.
Carson said at the prayer breakfast that "in this country, one of the founding principles was freedom of thought and freedom of expression."
 
Blacks have never fully enjoyed that freedom, first because of slavery, then Jim Crow, and now due to self-imposed sanctions on what African Americans can think and say politically and still keep their street cred.
 
If he got in the Michigan Senate race as a conservative Republican, Carson would test whether blacks are willing to extend to an African-American icon the freedom to think for himself.
There's no question that African-American voters have been, since the time of FDR, a critical and solid piece of the Democratic Party's coalition. Perhaps an African-American candidate such as Dr. Carson might alter dynamic. Perhaps it wouldn't. It's a legitimate question to ponder.
 
But where Finley runs off the rails is the suggestion that African-American support for the Democrats is somehow akin to Jim Crow restrictions, that blacks are denied their right to consider a Republican candidate by some nefarious, unnamed force. It's a fundamentally dehumanizing notion backed up by not a wit of evidence. What's more, given the number of African-Americans who were willing to face down Bull Connor's firehouses, Klan thugs at southern Greyhound stations, and the police riot on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, black Americans are really the last group anyone should assume is culturally predisposed against speaking their minds out of fear.
 
Recent history tells us that when Republicans try, they can win African-American votes. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (a conservative's conservative) won 48% of black votes when running for reelection. Rudy Giulani only received 5% of the black vote when he was elected New York's mayor in 1993. When he ran for reelection, he won 20% of African-Americans. Are these flukey exceptions that prove this rule about blacks generally being unable to stray from the Democratic fold? Not according to Huckabee, who says his party has "done a pathetic job of reaching out to people of color."
 
But let's flip that script. Southern white evangelicals are almost as solidly Republican and African-Americans are solidly Democratic. Let's imagine if a prominent white evangelical, say Joel Olsteen, were to run for Senate in Texas as a Democrat. No one would wonder if that would "test" evangelicals' willingness to extend to Olsteen "the freedom to think for himself." 
 
Let's defer to Occam's Razor: Barring tangible evidence to the contrary, black voters tend to vote Democratic because (you know) they tend to agree with Democrats more than Republicans. Just like white, southern evangelicals tend to vote Republican because they tend to agree with Republicans more than Democrats.
 
Conservatives and Republicans might have a better chance of breaking the Democrats hold on minority voters if they stopped insulting them with crude assumptions about their current voting habits. 
 
Nolan Finley clearly isn't some the cross-burning, Lester Maddox-loving racist. There are thankfully few of those guys left. At the same time, there is little redeemable about major daily newspaper columnist suggesting that African-American voters are less capable of making up their own minds like grown-ups.
 
What is in Finley's heart (or anyone else's for that matter) is ultimately irrelevant, but we would all be better off if he stopped spreading easily disprovable race-based stereotypes.