Homework assignment for Dr. Ben Carson

Dear Ben:

Read your explanation of how African-Americans were immigrants who came to North America in search of opportunity and prosperity except that they worked for really, really low wages.

Let me explain something: your answer, rationalization, convoluted explication is not entirely… hm, complete?

I strongly recommend that you watch the four part 1998 PBS television series “Africans In America”. The first program may give you a more complete understanding of how things got started. But I would encourage you to watch all four parts because, I don’t know, you might really learn some things.

The website is http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/tvandbeyond/tvbeyonddescr.html. You can watch the episodes for free.

Also, if you have the time Ben, you might want to get a copy of the late A. Leon Higginbotham’s In The Matter of Color, a legal history of the race based laws that created, supported and furthered slavery as a political economic tool in the colonial, revolutionary war and antebellum eras prior to the U.S. Civil War. I had the great honor and pleasure of doing some seminar classes with Judge Higginbotham when he was Scholar In Residence at the University of California Berkeley Law School in 1978. You might also want to take a look at the late John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery To Freedom.

You may also want to see if someone could get you a copy of the film Belle. Its a British take on the whole slavery thing.

I make these suggestions Ben, not because I think you will change your mind, but in case you wanted to check to see if there is any real support for your position.

Sincerely,