When you've saved countless lives with painstaking precision in long, intense hours of neurosurgery, being outnumbered three-to-one in a political discussion on cable TV is a piece of cake. Dr. Ben Carson appeared live in studio on the May 22 edition of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes with the program's host and liberal think-tank president Heather McGhee. Newly-minted MSNBC host José Díaz-Balart rounded out the panel, appearing via satellite.
Carson was on the program in part to plug his new book, One Nation, and was asked by Hayes to defend his thoughts on how liberals exploit racial categorizations to divide Americans. Carson noted that his experience as a neurosurgeon has enforced his colorblind view of the world [watch the segment by clicking play on the embed below the page break]:
I was doing an interview on NPR, and I was asked, "Why don't you talk about race very often?"
And I said, "It's because I'm a neurosurgeon." And I got a very quizzical look. And I said, you see, when I take someone to the operating room and I shave their head and I open the scalp and take off the bone flap, and open the dura, I am then operating on the thing that makes that person who they are. The skin has very little with who that person is. And it's something that we have just allowed to define us, and it really has very little to do with who a person is.
