Ben Carson says Black Lives Matter advocates are 'creating strife'

Dr. Ben Carson.
(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

While visiting with local leaders in Harlem on Wednesday, Dr. Ben Carson said that Black Lives Matter activists are "creating strife" and not searching for solutions to the issues that are important.

"Of course black lives matter," the Republican presidential candidate said. "But what I feel instead of people pointing fingers at each other and just creating strife, what we need to be talking about is how do we solve problems in the black community. Of murder, essentially." African-Americans, he continued, need to return to "faith and family, the values and principles that got black people through slavery and segregation and Jim Crowism." Without those values, he said, there are higher rates of poverty, single-parent homes, and dependency on welfare programs: "As we throw those things away, we're seeing terrible crimes occurring in our communities."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.