Re the Huffington Post, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) met with the agency’s employees today and his remarks were just as surreal what we’ve come to expect from denizens of Trumplandia. Elaborating on the trope of America as a “can-do” society, he gave a special shout out to African Americans who he seems to think “immigrated” to the U.S. to claim their piece of the American Dream:
“That’s what America is about,” Carson said. “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. 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.”
Not only did they work for less, they worked for nothing — although they made lots of money for the folks who “facilitated” their “immigration” and later found their labor very useful in realizing the special American dream shared by white plantation owners. And I suspect that of the various iterations of grand children that Carson enumerates, many might want to have a few words with Carson about that American dream and how it worked out for them.
It’s interesting too that this paen to forced immigration and the exploitation of brown people’s labor was delivered on the same day as the Trump Muslim immigration ban, version 2. Seems like we don’t want any more of those can-do, mostly brown immigrants now that we don’t have slavery as a mechanism to ease their integration into that prosperous and happy American dream.
Or maybe Carson is just as slow on the uptake as Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, who declared that historically black colleges and universities represented the first successful exercise of school choice. Either that or both DeVos and Carson have been reading too many of those factually-challenged revisionist historians that folks on the right just love — and that folks like DeVos want to embed in our school curricula.
But seriously, deluded statements like this from the lone African-American on Trump’s cabinet should probably be expected. How else but by signing on to the rightwing alternative reality can Carson justify serving in an administration assembled by a presidential candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and viewed as a champion of the white nationalist movement. This is a president whose chief advisor derives his world view from gross, overtly racist 20th French agitprop, and who has to be practically forced to utter a few pro forma words condemning the huge uptick in racist, anti-Semitic attacks that have characterized the period since his election.
I try hard to steer clear of attempting to explain political behavior in terms of internal psychological states that I can’t confirm, but what else can be going on in Carson’s mind it it isn’t an effort to disguise his own racially-based self-hatred?