Ben Carson claims Obama was ‘raised white,’ doesn’t understand Black Americans

GOP presidential wannabe Ben Carson said the nation’s first black president doesn’t understand black Americans because he was “raised white.”

The neurosurgeon-turned-politician questioned Obama’s black “experience,” alluding to the president’s white mother.

“He was, you know, raised white,” Carson said in a Politico podcast. “I mean, like most Americans, I was proud that we broke the color barrier when he was elected, but … he didn't grow up like I grew up.”

Carson claimed Obama’s childhood — spent partially with his mom in Indonesia — made it difficult for him to identify with black Americans.

“Many of his formative years were spent in Indonesia. So, for him to, you know, claim that, you know, he identifies with the experience of black Americans, I think, is a bit of a stretch." 

Carson reiterated that rhetoric on MSNBC Tuesday.

“The fact of the matter is, you know, he did not grow up … in black America. He grew up in white America,” he told anchor Thomas Roberts. “Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that when a claim is made that he represents the black experience, it’s just not true.”

 

Carson grew up in Detroit with a single mother who worked three jobs. His family sometimes relied on government aid to make ends meet.

The Republican boasted about his transformation from rage-filled boy to refined neurosurgeon in his 1996 autobiography “Gifted Hands,” writing about how he once tried to hit his mom with a hammer and attempted to stab one of his friends to death.

But the doctor’s former classmates have questioned those stories, saying that they remember Carson as a shy student — not as a rough kid.

“I don't know nothing about that,” Gerald Ware, Carson’s classmate at Detroit’s Southwestern High School, said in November of Carson’s claims that he was once a dangerous teenager. “It would have been all over the whole school.”