Yes, Ben Carson Really Did Call Enslaved Africans ‘Immigrants’ Who ‘Worked Even Harder for Less’

By Akiba Solomon Mar 06, 2017

Update, March 6, 11:26 p.m. ET:

This evening, on Armstrong Williams’ Sirius XM radio show, Ben Carson clarified that enslaved Africans were "involuntary immigrants" and assailed the media for "disintergrating" into reporting what he said to HUD staff onstage.

At about 10:30 ET, on a Facebook account for "Ben and Candy Carson," a writer who is ostensibly Ben Carson stated the obvious: "The slave narrative and the immigrant narrative are two entirely differnt experiences."

Responses include the Facbook user who "rarely uses the word ‘hate’" describing Carson as "just a coon." Another user reposted an excerpt of Candy Carson’s celebratory memoir,"A Doctor in the House," that tells how Ben sealed off his son B.J.’s umbilical cord with "a roller clip, the kind that is shaped like a bobby pin, only with straight shafts."

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While speaking to the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) staffers forced to report to him now, incoming secretary Ben Carson—a Black man from Detroit—called Africans who were kidnapped, enslaved, forcibly bred, routinely raped, beaten, starved, lynched and killed for reading " immigrants" who worked "even longer harder for less." Here’s the jaw-dropping quote transcribed by USA Today:

"That’s what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity," Carson said. "There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."

And here’s actual video of the  HUD secretary desecrating the legacy of his own ancestors by making them sound like plucky, willing strivers in the project of America instead of the victims of one of the most brutal crimes against humanity in history.

 

 

Please join me in praying that the spirits of Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Henry "Box" Brown, Oney Judge and the millions of other enslaved Africans whose names we don’t know seize this man’s tongue so that he cannot unleash any more of his tomfoolery on the world.