Ben Carson defends op-ed arguing racial equity is ‘another kind of racism’

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson began trending on Twitter on Wednesday after an appearance on Fox News in which he discussed his belief that calling for racial equity is “another kind of racism.”

Appearing on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom,” Carson discussed an op-ed he recently wrote for The Washington Post titled, “Moving our focus from equality to equity won’t defeat racism. It’s another kind of racism.”

“Proponents of equity see no problem with treating groups of people differently based solely on race, as long as it serves their agenda,” Carson wrote in his piece. “This is what we used to call racism, and those not blinded by identity politics still recognize it as such.”

Host Dana Perino asked Carson to expand on what he said in his piece.

“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent a lot of time trying to get people to not look at external characteristics which they cannot change, in which they cannot help, and instead to look at the things that you can change and the things that you can help, such as your character. What kind of person are you? Shouldn’t we be paying more attention to that than to external characteristics?” Carson responded.

“You know, that’s what animals do, base a lot of what they do on external characteristics because they don’t have the mental capacity to dissect further into what’s really important,” Carson added. “We do. So let’s utilize that.”

Carson had previously spoken out against director of the Domestic Policy Council Susan Rice’s push for racial equity across all government agencies.

“I grew up in the ’50s, and ’60s, and I can tell you what real racism was like. It was an everyday event. The world is very different here in America right now. And to use race as a mechanism to obtain power and position, I think it’s really quite shameful,” Carson told Fox News host Laura Ingraham.