Carson: Obama Can't Identify With 'Experience of Black Americans'

Retired neurosurgeon and presidential candidate Ben Carson says President Barack Obama does not know what it’s like to be a black American. Carson added that Obama was “raised white,” and “he didn’t grow up like I grew up…not even close.” In a podcast with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, Carson responded to a question about his feelings watching Obama sworn in as the first African-American president:

Like most Americans, I was proud that we broke the color barrier, when he was elected. But I also recognized that his experience and my experience are night and day. He didn’t grow up like I grew up, by any stretch of the imagination, not even close.

[Obama is] an African American, he was raised white. Many of his formative years were spent in Indonesia, so for him to claim that he identifies with the experience of black Americans, I think is a bit of a stretch.

“I’ve been around for 54 years — I’ve had a chance to see what real racism is,” Carson added, with a subtle dig at Obama. Carson also insisted that “the way I am treated by the Left is racist: Because you’re black, you have to think a certain way, and if you don’t think that way, you’re an Uncle Tom, you’re worthy of every epithet they can come up with.”

“If I weren’t black,” Carson declared, “then I’d just be a Republican,” not remarkable to liberals. Due to his race, the doctor declared, he is singled out for unfair treatment. “They demonize people like me — he’s evil, he’s an ‘Uncle Tom.'” Carson didn’t stop there. When asked about the water crisis in Flint, Mich., he argued that “a lot of things that people identify as racism is really classism — there’s a lot of classism in our society.”

The retired neurosurgeon insisted that Republicans vehemently dislike Obama not because of the president’s race, but due to his ideology. “What President Obama represents is an ideology that is antithetical to the ideology of most people in the Republican Party — I don’t think it has anything to do with race,” Carson declared.

Carson may trail in the polls for the Republican nomination, but he’s still as feisty as he was on that cold morning in 2013, where he unwittingly launched a movement by criticizing Obamacare in front of the president at the National Prayer Breakfast.