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Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is under fire after news broke that he spent Juneteenth hiring a man who thinks it’s ok for white people to use the N-word
According to Vanity Fair, Wednesday, Eric Blankenstein, joined Carson’s Office of General Counsel at HUD. It’s been reported that Blankenstein’s work will specifically relate to Ginnie Mae, the HUD-controlled housing finance firm whose primary focus is to promote homeownership among those not already well served by private lending market forces.
READ MORE: No, he didn’t! Ben Carson proposes shaking down poor people with rent hikes
The only problem is, this man who is now making $166,500 to be working against discrimination under Carson, had to resign from a post in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in May, after a series of blog posts he wrote in the mid-2000s surfaced.
In one of the posts, he opined that a white person using racial slurs against Black people shouldn’t be called prejudiced.
“Fine…let’s say they called him n[—-]…would that make them racists, or just a**holes looking for the most convenient way to get under his skin?” Blankenstein wrote.
Yesterday we learned that @HUDgov hired Eric Blankenstein despite his record of racist, offensive writings.
In the Trump Administration that sort of thing doesn’t get you fired, it opens the door to more opportunities. https://t.co/90VuYqEjYR
— Allied Progress (@AlliedProgress) June 20, 2019
READ MORE: Ben Carson says his plans after 2020 don’t include Trump administration
He also asserted that believed “hate-crime hoaxes are about three times as prevalent as actual hate crimes” and slammed a proposal by the University of Virginia to impose penalties for acts of hate as “racial idiocy.”
Blankenstein admitted to the posts but never apologized for them, asserting they had nothing to do with his work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “The insight to be gained about how I perform my job today—by reading snippets of 14-year-old blog posts that have nothing to do with consumer-protection law—is exactly zero,” according to a statement from him.
In September when the Washington Post wrote about his penchant for sharing problematic ideologies, initially Blankenstein was defiant, dismissing the blog as “statements I wrote as a 25-year-old.” And it took several months of his colleagues raising concerns about his ability and willingness to contribute to their anti-discrimination work before he finally resigned.
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