Video: Tucker Carlson Guest Pulls Up Fox News Host—'I Didn't Call You a Racist, Other People Do'

Fox News host Tucker Carlson was scolded by a guest this week for remarks he made about race, referring to his own chequered past on the subject.

Carlson's comments were made during Tucker Carlson Tonight on Tuesday. He said that Senator Elizabeth Warren had benefited from affirmative action by saying she had a Native American lineage to get a job at Harvard.

"She exploited somebody else's culture, and I'm the racist for pointing it out? I love that!" Carlson said, referring to the 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate.

"I didn't call you a racist," responded guest Jason Nichols, a University of Maryland professor. "Other people do, but I didn't call you that," Nichols added, referring to allegations of racism against the host. Laughing, Carlson uttered: "Other people do, that's pretty funny."

The Fox News segment was on reparations for slavery—the proposition that descendants of those victimized by the slave trade should receive financial compensation from the government. It has emerged as a talking point in recent days from Warren and her fellow Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro, who called the Atlantic slave trade "America's original sin."

On Tuesday, during a town hall in Jackson, Mississippi, Warren said she believed it was "time to start the national, full-blown conversation about reparations in this country."

Carlson said he agreed with the term "original sin" but suggested the U.S. was "actually not a very racist country" because there has been "a ton of inter-marriage and even more immigration over the 150 years since slavery ended." He called the compensation a reward.

"I don't think we should see it as a reward," Nichols said. "We should see it as a debt that is being paid, that has been owed for a very long time." Pressing for details, Carlson asked who should be eligible and how would it impact other anti-discriminatory efforts in the U.S.

The host said: "Who gets the money and who pays for it? If my ancestors came in 1980, am I on the hook for paying? And if your ancestors came in 1975, do you get the money?"

Nichols hit back: "No, this is for the descendants of enslaved Africans. So if your ancestors came in 1960 that would not necessarily fall under the purview. Again, the idea that this is something that is being paid by individuals rather than by the United States of America…we are talking about the country's debt that it owes to the descendants of enslaved Africans."

Carlson, who stressed he was playing devil's advocate, asked: "Would the slate be clean?" if the reparations process started. "Could we try to become a less racialized society? Could we end affirmative action? Could we end preferences in hiring?"

In comments that sparked Carlson's comments about Warren, Nichols responded: "When we talk about affirmative action or any of the many other programs that have been used to address discrimination, a lot of times they are used to address discrimination right now.

"By the way, affirmative action, despite what you will hear…the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white women, not African Americans," Nichols added.

Carlson asserted that affirmative action had "been scammed like no other." He said,"Warren was a beneficiary." As Nichols protested about the lack of evidence to back up such a claim, Carlson said: "The school bragged that she was the first tenured law professor of color."

Earlier this month, Media Matters for America published audio from Carlson's phone-ins to the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show between 2006 and 2011. He credited white men with "creating civilization and stuff" and repeatedly focused on Barack Obama's race.

As noted by Snopes, the fact-checking website, an investigation by the Boston Globe last year found Warren's ethnicity "was never considered" by the Harvard Law admissions faculty.

Last October, after years of memes and challenges by president Donald Trump, the senator published a DNA analysis she said backed up her claim to Native American ancestry.

"There's nothing that says she got anything from affirmative action," Nichols told Carlson. "That is what racist people say. Oh, you're there because you're black. You're there because you're something else," he added.