During an MSNBC panel on racism with Chris Hayes Thursday night, Dr. Ben Carson urged Americans to focus less on race and “think more deeply” than skin color and superficial appearance.
In particular, Hayes confronted Carson on his assertions about racial identity in his new book, One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future. “Part of the point that you’re making in this book is that essentially these identities … are actually contrived by liberals to divide people,” the MSNBC host explained.
Carson responded by citing his profession as the reason for which he can look beyond race at the more deeper qualities of each human being.
“When I take someone to the operating room, and I shave their head and I open the scalp and take off the bone flap and open the dura,” the neurosurgeon detailed. “I am then operating on the thing that makes that person who they are. The skin has very little (to do) with who that person is and it’s something that we have allowed to define us.”
The other members of the panel, Demos President Heather McGhee and Telemundo’s Jose Diaz-Balart, both challenged Carson’s explanation. McGhee said it’s impossible to “wish” racism away with the “myth that we can be colorblind.”
Diaz-Balart responded directly to Carson’s brain surgery anecdote, explaining, “When you sow them back up .. that person is probably going to have a lot more difficulty because of the outside color of their skin being darker than a white guy that you sowed up.”
Carson alleged that the difference between a person who takes race into account and one who doesn’t is the degree to which superficiality exists in their life. He said that the more deeply one thinks, the less skin color will actually matter.
Watch the MSNBC segment below.
