Carson speaks at a rally in Phoenix last week. (Photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP)

Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson is criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement for misdirecting its anger at “politically convenient” targets — specifically Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“The idea that disrupting and protesting Bernie Sanders speeches will change what is wrong in America is lunacy,” Carson, the lone African-American candidate in the 2016 race, wrote in an op-ed published by USA Today. “The ‘BlackLivesMatter’ movement is focused on the wrong targets, to the detriment of blacks who would like to see real change and to the benefit of its powerful white liberal funders using the attacks on Sanders for political purposes that mean nothing for the problems that face our community.”

“The notion that some lives might matter less than others is meant to enrage,” the retired neurosurgeon continued. “That anger is distracting us from what matters most. We’re right to be angry, but we have to stay smart.”

Carson’s critique comes on the heels of several tense confrontations between Black Lives Matter activists and Democratic candidates, including Sanders, ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Earlier this month, Black Lives Matter activists disrupted Sanders’ speech in Seattle.

Two days later, they planned to disrupt Clinton’s speech in Keene, N.H., but were stopped by the Secret Service. Instead, they met privately with Clinton after the event, pressing her about how she plans to address the tensions between white police officers and black communities — and asked what she would do to change American “hearts and minds” about black lives.

“I don’t believe you change hearts,” Clinton said. “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart.”

“Of course, the protesters are right that racial policing issues exist and some rotten policemen took actions that killed innocent people,” Carson wrote. “But unjust treatment from police did not fill our inner cities with people who face growing hopelessness. Young men and women can’t find jobs. Parents don’t have the skills to compete in a modern job market. Far too many families are torn and tattered by self-inflicted wounds. Violence often walks alongside people who have given up hope.”

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If Carson’s response to Black Lives Matter and his position on the root of race inequity in the job market sounds familiar, it’s because Sanders has been beating a similar drum for weeks at his campaign events, where he has repeatedly stressed the importance of economic equality in minority communities.



“I have talked over and over and over again that 51 percent of African-American kids are unemployed or underemployed,” Sanders told reporters in New Hampshire on Monday. “You think that’s an important issue? I do.”

In the op-ed, Carson recalled his experience growing up in Detroit:

I grew up in neighborhoods most Americans were told to never drive through. I saw bullets, drugs and death in the same places I played tag and ball with my friends. Both of my older cousins died on the streets where I lived. I thought that was my destiny. But my mother didn’t. She changed all of that. She saved my brother and me from being killed on those streets with nothing but a library card. My mother knew what the problems were and she shielded me and my brother from them. I can tell you she wasn’t worried about Socialist senators from tiny rural states. “BlackLivesMatter” could learn from her to focus on the real sources of our hopelessness.

Carson suggested Black Lives Matter activists should “march” on the board of education (to protest America’s failing school system), city hall, Washington, the entertainment industry (for “demeaning women,” “glorifying violence” and “equating prison time with authenticity” in films like “Straight Outta Compton”), “crack houses” and the Republican party.

“We need to tell them they have ignored us for too long,” he wrote. “They need to invite us in and listen to us. We need to communicate and find a different way.”

Carson added: “There are many things to be angry about when you are consumed by hopelessness. Bernie Sanders isn’t one of them.”