Santorum said he “mumbled it and changed my thought” in mid-statement. “I‘m pretty confident I didn’t say `black,’” he said. “I’ve looked at it several times. I was starting to say one word and I sort of came up with a different word and then moved on.” But, he conceded, “it sounded like black.”
Santorum told Bill O’Reilly:
“And I can tell you, I don’t use — I don’t — first off, I don‘t use the term ’black’ very often. I use the term ‘African-American‘ more than I use ’black.’ I can tell you as someone who did more work for historically black colleges, I used to have — every year, I used to bring all the historically black colleges into Washington, DC to try to help them, because they get very little federal money through the bureaucracy, and so I help to try to introduce them to people in the Department of Education so they could have more resources.”
