Rep. Jerry Carl (R-AL) said that “everyone has some racist in them” at a debate Wednesday in the state’s 1st Congressional District.

Carl’s remark was in response to a question the debate moderator had asked him and Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL) regarding whether they agreed with Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s statement that America has “never been a racist country.” 

“I used to work a lot with ministers … and I had some very private conversations. Everyone has some type of racist in them,” Carl said. “My mother through Pearl Harbor — she couldn’t stand the Japanese, she couldn’t stand it. And it used to just eat her from the inside out.”

Carl, who represents the 1st District, and Moore, who represents in the 2nd District, are competing to be the Republican nominee for the state’s 1st Congressional District in the March 5 primary following the construction of a new district map, which caused their respective districts to overlap.

After a federal court ordered new maps to be drawn up, the revised product included a black-majority district, which is expected to result in a Democratic member of the state’s delegate. Carl brought up the redistricting during the debate, saying that the districts should not have depended on voters’ race.   

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“I grew up in the ’60s. I know what race, racial madness is. We’ve spent so much time getting away from it, and now we’ve got an election system [that] is dragging us right back in,” Carl said. “It should be where it was … should be the original districts and let us serve the people we’re serving.”

Carl clarified his comments from Wednesday evening in a statement to NBC News, saying that “there’s been racism in America” but that the far Left’s support for organizations and groups including Black Lives Matter and antifa are dividing the country based on race. He also accused his challenger of perpetuating this division by voting to keep critical race theory in the military.