Former South Carolina Governor and present presidential candidate Nikki Haley insisted on Tuesday that America has “by no means been a racist nation,” earlier than claiming she had skilled racism in her personal life.
Chatting with Fox Information the morning after her third-place end within the Iowa caucus, Haley was requested if she felt she belonged to a “racist” social gathering.
“No, we’re not a racist nation,” Haley replied. “We’ve by no means been a racist nation. Our objective is to guarantee that at this time is best than yesterday. Are we good? No. However our objective is to at all times make certain we attempt to be extra good each day that we are able to.”
“I do know, I confronted racism once I was rising up,” Haley added.
Laughable contradiction apart, Haley’s feedback, made the day after a nationwide vacation commemorating civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr., are in fact fully ahistorical. From slavery, to segregation, to the continuing discrimination and vilification confronted by immigrants and minority teams, racism is a central element of the nation’s historical past — one which continues to have profound results on American life.
Haley appears wholly unaware of that historical past. Final month, she drew criticism after claiming that the American Civil Warfare “was mainly how authorities was going to run,” and “the freedoms and what individuals may and couldn’t do,” throughout a New Hampshire city corridor — with out making any point out of the position slavery performed within the battle. She later tried to defend the feedback partially by saying she had “Black buddies rising up.”
Haley, the kid of immigrant Sikh mother and father from Punjab, India, has spoken about her experiences with discrimination all through her life. In 2011 she described to The New York Instances having been kicked out of a magnificence pageant as a five-year-old as a result of she didn’t match into a selected racial class. In 2010, throughout Haley’s run for the South Carolina governorship, former GOP state Sen. Jake Knotts was requested to resign after referring to Haley as a “raghead” due to her Sikh background.
Through the 2020 Republican Nationwide Conference, Haley made an analogous — contradictory — denial of the nation’s racist previous. “America is just not a racist nation. That is private for me,” Haley mentioned. “I’m the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. They got here to America and settled in a small Southern city. My father wore a turban. My mom wore a sari. I used to be a brown lady in a Black and white world. We confronted discrimination and hardship. However my mother and father by no means gave in to grievance and hate.”
Because the GOP works to rewrite the historical past of racial wrestle in america and undermine efforts to appropriate previous wrongs by means of guide bans, preventing variety and inclusion initiatives, and horrendous conspiracy theories about minorities, Haley’s feedback underscore Republican’s lack of ability to acknowledge even probably the most fundamental truths about our nation’s previous.
