WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats are calling for Housing Secretary Ben Carson to justify his hiring of a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official who resigned this year after the disclosure of racially provocative comments he made spanning more than a decade.

Last month, White House officials placed Eric Blankenstein, a former policy supervisor at the bureau who had been responsible for enforcing the country’s fair lending laws, in a relatively low-profile position in the general counsel’s office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was to work on issues related to Ginnie Mae, a government corporation that guarantees mortgage-backed securities.

But his hiring has infuriated Democrats.

“Mr. Blankenstein has a history of racist and sexist statements that appear to have contributed to his recent resignation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, wrote in a letter signed by five other Democrats.

[Read the letter from the Democratic senators.]

Mr. Blankenstein resigned in May after blog posts he wrote in 2004 as a University of Virginia law student surfaced in which he repeatedly used a racial slur. In a more recent exchange, he argued that the movement to deny that President Barack Obama was born in the United States was not racist.