As John Waters said on an appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Ben Carson, the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is “the one black guy that’s even worse” than all the awful white men in Donald Trump’s cabinet. He’s always making Eric Cartman-like statements that either make your jaw drop or make you do a facepalm, and now he’s saying that African-American slaves were “immigrants,” and it’s rightly caused a bit of furore over in the States.
Carson: slaves came to ‘a land of dreams and opportunity’
Carson was delivering a speech to Washington’s HUD employees when he made the comments, saying that America is “a land of dreams and opportunity,” into which “other immigrants” arrived “in the bottom of slave ships.” In a very poor choice of words, Carson says that salves “worked even longer” and “even harder for less.”
This hard work was forced upon them at whip-point after they’d been stolen from their home in Africa and taken back to America as property, so some people object to Carson’s comments that slaves “had a dream” that their descendants would be able to “pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.” Their dream was more to be free and not belong to white people, probably, but Carson has chosen a different phrasing.
Carson, who ran against Trump for the Republican candidate spot last election and used to be a brain surgeon, has brought on the ire of iconic actor Samuel L. Jackson, iconic actress Whoopi Goldberg, racially and socially conscious “Selma” and “13th” director Ava DuVernay, and racially and socially conscious organisation NAACP.
Jackson was left speechless
Carson’s remarks left Jackson without words. He tweeted, “Ben Carson....I can’t!” before quoting him on immigrants “in the bottom of SLAVE SHIPS??!!” and adding a very Sam Jackson “MUTHAF*KKA PLEASE!!!” DuVernay responded, saying that the slaves’ “dream” was simply to “not be kidnapped, tortured, raped, forced to mate, work for another’s gain, torn from family + culture.” Was that really too much to ask?
The NAACP simply tweeted, “Immigrants???” Goldberg recommended that Carson watch the famous miniseries “Roots” to get a better understanding of what slaves went through, adding that “most immigrants come here VOLUNTARILY,” and that the slaves instead were “stolen.” Rapper Ice-T called Carson “a MFn Idiot,” and comedian Patton Oswald predicts a shallow and imminent apology.
