Ben Carson’s tenure as HUD secretary got off to a weird start this week thanks to his speech to fellow staffers where he referred to slaves as “immigrants.” It’s truly only the tip of the iceberg for the speech that also went into odd details about the brain, but Trevor Noah and many others were hit by Carson’s choice of words. And while Noah gave the brain surgeon the benefit of the doubt and even pointed out that Obama used a similar example in the past — one he seems to clearly regret based on the video — it does seem that Carson’s attempt to clean up his gaffe made it worse.
When Carson said people need to actually look up the word immigrant, Noah does exactly that and finds a definition that sounds nothing like slavery. While you can say a slave is “a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country,” you can’t really say they did it by choice or received payment for it. But as Noah points out, we don’t need to act like our past is the same to have a future together.
To close it out, the show put together a movie trailer for the film version of Ben Carson’s view on slavery. Titled 12 Years A New Guy In Town, it really just shows that those slaves came to America with a dream that couldn’t be shackled in the same way their feet and hands were.
(Via The Daily Show)