Ben Carson falsely suggests African slaves were “immigrants” to the United States | Ben Carson

Ben Carson began his tenure as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development by suggesting that Africans brought to the Americas as slaves during the Middle Passage were “immigrants” who imagined the United States as a “land of dreams and opportunity.”
“That’s what America is about,” Carson said. “A land of dreams and opportunity. Some immigrants came here on the bottoms of slave ships and worked longer, harder, and for less money. But they also knew that someday their sons, daughters, grandchildren, granddaughters, great-grandchildren, and great-great-granddaughters would pursue prosperity and happiness here.” His remarks were made in his first address to the agency’s staff, which he was approved by the Senate to run last week despite a lack of formal knowledge of housing or development policy.

Enslaved Africans were certainly not immigrants, but property of the New World and European corporations, shackled and transported in cramped, disease-infested holds. Slaves had little idea where they were being taken, and less than 10 percent of the tens of millions of Africans transported reached American shores, with the vast majority landing in South America and the Caribbean.
Carson’s comments quickly drew scathing ridicule, with many online mocking the former neurosurgeon.

Mr. Carson’s statements were marked by historical revisionism from the beginning, and the Secretary declared that under Mr. Carson’s leadership he would run the department in a spirit of fairness.

“Favouring no one, giving extra to no one, and being completely fair to everyone. That’s what the founders of this country had in mind,” Carson said of the architects. They largely excluded white, non-land-owning Protestant men from their particular vision of “equity.”
Ignoring the obvious disadvantages experienced by blacks and Native Americans, Carson said of 18th-century America, “People could do whatever they wanted as long as what they wanted didn’t interfere with me or what I wanted to do.”

Carson later corrected his comments in a statement on Facebook, saying “slavery stories and immigrant stories are two very different experiences” and “should never be linked.”

The speech is not the first time Carson has publicly misunderstood slavery. In 2013, he told attendees at a conservative political convention that President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was “really, I think the worst thing that’s happened to this country since slavery. And in a sense, it is slavery.”