Appearing on Laura Ingraham’s radio show this morning, Dr. Benjamin Carson addressed activists who believe that George Zimmerman’s recent acquittal of murder charges is evidence of police bias against blacks: “Well you know, I always say to people who want to bang on the police: Can you imagine life for 24 hours without the police?”
The distinguished neurosurgeon, who drew national attention for his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, was also asked to comment on Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent remarks to the NAACP on Zimmerman’s acquittal. Holder (who, like Carson, is black) declared that Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin
caused me to sit down to have a conversation with my own 15-year-old son, like my dad did with me. This was a father-son tradition I hoped would not need to be handed down. But . . . I had to do this to protect my boy. I am his father, and it is my responsibility, not to burden him with the baggage of eras long gone, but to make him aware of the world that he must still confront.
Carson responded,
Well you know, I think what I would tell my sons, what I have always told my sons, is you need to be respectful of authority; it doesn’t matter where you are, it doesn’t matter what color you are . . . If you treat the authorities with respect, they treat you with respect; I’ve never seen any variation in that. . . . From his [Holder’s] perspective, you have to realize that people, when they have certain ideological strainers on their thought, they interpret everything according to their ideology . . . that’s something that you learn in Psych 101; it depends on your perspective.
He emphasized the need for conservatives to sincerely engage progressives on such issues as race relations: “That’s what we have to do is start engaging people in conversation, and draw people out as to why they believe what they believe. . . . As Saul Alinsky said, ‘Never have a conversation with your enemy, because that humanizes them; and your goal is to demonize them.’”