Former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson, suggested that slavery should not be a source of shame for America and dismissed the idea of the existence of systemic racism while campaigning for Donald Trump on Thursday.
During an event in Iowa, Carson downplayed the significance of slavery in American history, emphasizing that various societies throughout history have grappled with the issue.
“You look back to the beginnings of this country and our founders; a lot of people are trying to denigrate them now, saying that they were horrible people, maybe because some of them had slaves, and that America is a horrible place because we had slavery,” Carson said.
“People who say stuff like that obviously don’t have a good grasp of world history because every society has had to deal with slavery, and there are more slaves in the world today than there have ever been at any point in time,” he added, before using human trafficking and “sexual slavery” as examples.
He also defended the U.S. by highlighting the Civil War as a unique instance of an uprising against slavery.
“We fought a bloody civil war to get rid of the evil institution, and that’s what we should teach our children,” Carson said. “Our history is nothing to be ashamed of.”
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who gained notoriety in 1987 for separating conjoined twins, served in Trump’s cabinet from 2017 to 2021 after failing to outpoll him in the 2016 presidential race.
While he has acknowledged “there always will be” racism in the world in the past and said he believes Black people can work hard and rise above “ignorant Americans” to escape it, Carson seemingly downplayed its prevalence on Thursday.
“People aspire to come here, even though you have all these people trying to denigrate our nation and say what a horrible place it is and that it’s systematically racist, and all these people are being treated unfairly,” Carson said to a crowd in Davenport, Iowa.
“If that were the case, why are so many people trying to get in here? You know, and when they got here and called their friends and relatives, they would not say, ‘Don’t come here, it’s a horrible place.’ That’s not what’s going on,” Carson extolled.
Meanwhile, the Yale graduate, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President George W. Bush in 2008, has often referred to enslaved people as immigrants.
“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,” Carson said during his first speech to HUD employees in 2017.
He later walked back the comments on Facebook, acknowledging that “the slave narrative and immigrant narrative are two entirely different experiences” and “slaves were ripped from their families and their homes and forced against their will after being sold into slavery by slave traders.”
However, Politico pointed out that the ideology was subscribed to by the highly regarded doctor long before he pivoted into politics. He echoed nearly the same words in his 2000 book, “The Big Picture,” quoting his speech at a United Way conference in Alabama in 1997.
