In 2013, Carl Higbie was a right-wing radio host who said that he believed, “wholeheartedly, that the black race as a whole, not totally, is lazier than the white race, period.” Higbie also argued that “the black race” had a “lax morality” and that black women believed that “breeding is a form of employment.”
In 2016, allies of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign made Higbie the spokesman of the (Trump-aligned) Great America super-PAC. The following year, President Trump named Higbie chief of external affairs for the federal government’s volunteer service.
And then, CNN’s KFile unearthed Higbie’s reflections on the black race, and suggested that they might not befit the head of communications for the federal department that manages AmeriCorps. Shortly thereafter, Higbie resigned and apologized for his remarks, saying, “Those words do not reflect who I am or what I stand for, I regret saying them.”
Higbie was promptly hired as director of advocacy for America First Policies, a nonprofit that promotes the president’s agenda. And now that he’s completed his soft landing into the private sector, Higbie appears to be feeling much less regret about his past expressions of overt racism.
In a Friday interview with the “John Fredericks Show,” a local radio program based in Virginia, Higbie argued that it was grossly unfair for CNN to suggest that his remarks about the black race were prejudiced, saying, “I made a statistical observation, they think that’s racist.”
It’s not clear where Higbie found statistics supporting the idea that the “black race” (which is a biologically incoherent concept) is “lazier” (an inherently unquantifiable character trait) than the “white race” (also not a biological entity, but a socially constructed one). Nor did Higbie provide citations to support his other statistical observations, including the claim that Muslims like to “go crap in your hands and bang little boys on Thursday nights.”
Nonetheless, it’s clear that a fact-based analysis of Higbie’s remarks would lead one to conclude that he is merely a dedicated social scientist who isn’t afraid to follow the facts, no matter where they lead (and not an unabashed racist with disconcertingly close ties to the president). Someone get this man in touch with Sam Harris’s people.
