Doc shock on ‘opportunity’ for captives

DR. BEN CARSON gave a bizarre diagnosis of race in America Monday, declaring that slaves were “immigrants” who “worked even longer, even harder for less.”

Carson, delivering his first official address as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, rewrote history in front of a roomful of federal workers.

“That’s what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less,” Carson said in remarks broadcast to HUD offices across the country, as well as online. “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.”

There was no audible reaction from the crowd to Carson’s remarks. A senior HUD official who spoke anonymously to the Chicago Tribune said the comments were taken as a “heartfelt introduction to the HUD family.”

“He was making a point about people who came to this country for a better life for their kids,” the official told the newspaper.

Following the speech, a tweet from an account Carson shares with his wife, Candy, said, “You can be an involuntary immigrant.”But Carson followed that up with a statement on Facebook in which he changed his stance.

“The slave narrative and immigrant narrative are two entirely different experiences,” he said.

“The Immigrants made the choice to come to America ... In contrast, slaves were forced here against their will and lost all their opportunities . ... The two experiences should never be intertwined, nor forgotten.”Between 1525 and 1866, 12.5 million Africans were brought to the New World. Of those, 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage. About 388,000 people were shipped directly to North America, according to Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Carson’s baffling interpretation of that violent history was the latest of many gaffes by the Trump administration regarding race. Last month, Trump appeared to not know who the 19th century civil rights leader Frederick Douglass was, calling him someone “who’s done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more.”

Carson — an accomplished neurosurgeon with no experience running a sprawling bureaucracy — in 2013 called Obamacare “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”