Ben Carson: We will 'destroy ourselves as a nation' if Americans don't wake up' and unite

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Ben Carson: 'We will destroy ourselves as a nation' if we don't wake up and unite

Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson responds to the push for 'racial equity' and the Chauvin trial verdict

Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson joined "America's Newsroom" Wednesday to respond to the Derek Chauvin trial verdict, and discuss his recent op-ed arguing that the term "racial equity" is "another kind of racism."

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BEN CARSON: Do we need some reforms? Absolutely. There are things that can be done, and we can do those much better if we work together rather than trying to demonize the system based on occurrences that are quite infrequent. And there are things that the police could use, for instance, that are non-lethal, that are very effective in immobilizing people. We need to move forward on those kinds of things.

But, you know, the president, I think, could probably do much better by saying we have a system in place. It works, as you've seen by the verdict that was done here. Do we need to make improvements? Yes. And let's work together to do that. It seems to me that would be much more presidential.

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent a lot of time trying to get people to not look at external characteristics which they cannot change, in which they cannot help, and instead to look at the things that you can change and the things that you can help, such as your character. What kind of person are you? Shouldn't we be paying more attention to that than to external characteristics?

You know, that's what animals do, base a lot of what they do on external characteristics because they don't have the mental capacity to dissect further into what's really important. We do. So let's utilize that. It just infuriates me when I see us acting so immaturely and we have so much more capacity and we can work together, we can solve these problems.

But there are those who want to use every instance to drive stakes of division into everything, be it race, be it age, be it income, be it religion. It doesn't matter. Just drive stakes and division in it. And, you know, we will destroy ourselves as a nation if we don't wake up.

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