THEY CAME IN CHAINS, BEN
Trump’s HUD Secretary Carson says slaves came to America as ‘immigrants,’ but ...
Ben Carson (above) in a speech Monday extolled the virtues of America, and simultaneously sugarcoated the ugliest period in U.S. history.
In a new era of alternative facts, his claim that slaves were “immigrants” takes the prize.
“That’s what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity,” Carson said.
Say it with me, Dr. Carson. We are the sons and daughters of slaves.
Not immigrants.
Is that what we’re calling it now? Let’s see if I have this straight. When men and women and children were kidnapped from their villages and separated from their families and packed into rickety ships for months at a time to be traded for tobacco and cotton and cloth and grain, that was immigration?
When people were branded with hot irons like cattle on a ranch so that ownership of one human being by another human being would not be in dispute, that was immigration?
When women were raped for no other reason than that it was Tuesday, or Friday or whenever a property owner felt the urge exert his dominance on another man’s wife or mother or daughter or sister, that was immigration?
That is what the new secretary of housing and urban development, and the token African-American in President Trump’s cabinet, would have us believe.
Ben Carson, in a speech to employees of the agency he is unfortunately taking over, extolled the virtues of America, and simultaneously sugarcoated the ugliest period in U.S. history.
In a new era of alternative facts, this one takes the prize.
“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, greatgranddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
Immigrants? Try finding their names on some roll on Ellis Island. Not the names they were given when they got here, if they were lucky enough to survive the trip. But the names they were given by their parents or the elders in their villages.
Immigrants? Please. Try telling me what country they come from. We come from. Every true immigrant, even the undocumented ones with the targets on their backs, can tell you what country they came from. Mexico. Ireland. Italy. China.
Not us. We have to claim the whole African continent because most of us, whose ancestors “immigrated” to America through the Middle Passage, don’t have a clue where we’re from.
But keep on denying it, Dr. Carson. Keep on pretending that slavery is something that never happened.
Keep whitewashing history to cheat us — yourself, too — out of the victory of making it through, and excelling, despite the odds.
Say it with me, Dr. Carson. We are the sons and daughters of slaves. Not immigrants. But we’re also lawyers and teachers and newspaper reporters and neurosurgeons.
We’re cabinet secretaries and Supreme Court judges and computer programmers and cops.
Those slaves you deny, the ones who broke their backs and took the whip so we could be where we are and who we are, they’d be proud of us.
They’d be proud of you, too. But they’d be shaking their heads.