You have to wonder if there is some kind of test of tone deafness that Donald Trump has used on his cabinet picks.
Not the musical kind of tone deafness that makes people sing in a monotone. The kind that makes them say things that leave entire rooms full of people shaking their heads in disbelief.
The latest ridiculously offensive statement came from none other than brain surgeon Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
The good Doctor was addressing staff at HUD. Apparently he wanted to make people feel positive about the good old American Dream. He was speaking like a happy cheerleader, talking about how people have been coming to the U.S. in search of freedom and prosperity.
Then he said this, and heads started to spin:
“There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less.”
Ben Carson literally just said slaves were immigrants that came here in search of the American dream. THEY WERE KIDNAPPED, BEN.
— Mat Molina (@realMatMolina) March 6, 2017
Yes. Ben Carson referred to slaves as “immigrants.” As if they talked it over with their families, packed their bags and happily stepped into the neck and ankle chains.
And he went on. He added even more twisted, pretzel logic to his speech. He said:
“But they, too, had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
Of all the offensive, unacceptable comments from the Trump administration, this one takes the cake.
Pretending that these poor people, kidnapped or captured in war, went into a life of cruelty and slavery because they were hoping that their descendants would have a better life. That’s just plain sick.
The Trump Administration has filled its ranks with people who have absolutely no idea of what they are doing. It’s bad enough that we have a Secretary of Education who claims that black colleges and universities were created because their creators wanted “school choice.”
Add in a Secretary of House and Urban Development, an agency that focuses on providing decent housing to poor people, who believes that slaves were filling out forms in the jungle so they could immigrate to the U.S., and you have a whole team of idiots in charge.
Ben Carson may have an M.D., but I can show him thousands of American ten year-olds who understand that when slavery was taking place here, the “new world” was a place of famine, disease, war, constant struggle and abject poverty.
There was no line of African men and women lining up to hop onto those slave ships, Dr. Carson. Nobody came here in chains because they wanted their great grandchildren to live in the not-yet -created United States.
Good Lord. It’s beyond belief.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXvNHbE-yek
Featured image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
