Retired neurosurgeon and former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson told The Daily Wire that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs would hamper American ingenuity and stand in the way of excellence.
Carson, who headed up the Department of Housing and Urban Development under former President Donald Trump, said on Monday that Americans would soon be feeling the negative effects of DEI in medicine. Carson, who became a world famous surgeon after growing up in poverty, said that everybody should be subjected to the same standards instead of focusing on identity.
“What we should be concentrating on is raising everybody to the appropriate standard rather than lowering the standards so that we can put more people in,” Carson told The Daily Wire. “The whole DEI argument is illogical if you are looking for excellence.”
Carson spoke about how he was being pressured at his own company for not having a certain percentage of women in higher level positions because he focused on experience and qualifications when looking to hire.
Speaking about his own experience as a child, Carson said he remembered going to Chattanooga and seeing signs designating certain spaces only for white or black people. He said that while much progress had been made, DEI might set back race relations.
“What DEI does is it takes one group and gives them an advantage over another group the same way it used to be in reverse,” he said. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, and all it’s going to do is exacerbate relationships rather than improve relationships.”
Carson said that the many companies adopting DEI programs and initiatives were “not taking the long view,” but instead trying to earn praise and accolades from activists. He said corporate heads knew that DEI would not be “conducive to excellence,” but were choosing to stick “their heads in the sand like an ostrich.”
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The former presidential candidate added that focusing on DEI would distract Americans from focusing on entrepreneurship and developing new inventions.
“You have to recognize that the United States of America is very unique in the sense that we developed an environment that encourages entrepreneurship and innovation,” he said. “That’s why 90% of the earth shattering inventions came out of the United States even though there was a lot of other world out there. And obviously, if we now change that environment, it’s going to have a deleterious effect on who we are and our leadership.”
Carson’s comments come as major medical schools have come under fire for incorporating the tenets of DEI into their curriculum and teaching students about things like colonialism and liberation during their time in medical school.