Nikki Haley’s Proving She Can Piss Off Black People Almost As Much As Donald Trump
Former governor of South Carolina not sold that America was ever a racist country.
Nikki Haley clings desperately to a couple Lost Causes — one is her presidential campaign and the other is America’s racist history. She’s avoided stating directly that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, and perhaps more absurdly, she’s insisted that America was never a racist country.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper confronted Haley about her revisionist, Song of the South history during a town hall event Thursday at New England College in New Hampshire.
“Protections for the institution of slavery were written into the U.S. Constitution,” Tapper explained to someone who I assume has read a history book. “The White House was built with slave labor. Your home state of South Carolina seceded from the Union — fought a war to defend the enslavement of Black people.”
There’s a difference between individual racial prejudice and formalized de jure racism, which has existed since America’s founding. It’s not fun if an individual resents you because of your race, but it’s far worse when that individual can legally discriminate against you — deny you housing, lodging, or food at a restaurant. The pernicious myth about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is that he “fixed” racism by changing hearts and minds. The reality is that he fought and died changing racist laws.
“I understand you don’t think America is a racist country now,” Tapper added patiently. “But we’re here at a college. Do you really think, as a historical matter, America has never been a racist country?”
Here’s where Haley could’ve clarified her previous stupid statement. Maybe referenced noted Republican Abraham Lincoln and name-dropped Dr. King. Instead, she insulted the intelligence of everyone watching.
“When you look at the Declaration of Independence,” she said, “it was that men are created equal with unalienable rights, right?” She tripped over the word “unalienable” perhaps because her own tongue was in revolt over this stupidity.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, himself enslaved more than 600 people during his life. This was more than just hypocritical. It demonstrates how white people of the period fundamentally did not consider enslaved Black people fully human. That in itself was obviously “racist.”
Black people’s labor made the United States wealthy, but Black people were legally prevented from fully sharing in that bounty. That was racist.
In May 1896, 30 years after the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson that there was no justification to treat Black people as fully equal to their white citizens. That was racist.
Then there were all the separate water fountains. That was racist.
When Black people were forced to surrender their seats on a bus to lazy white people, that was definitely racist.
This isn’t a matter for debate, no matter what The Washington Post suggests.
“But what I look at it as is I was a brown girl that grew up in a small, rural town,” Haley continued. “We had plenty of racism that we had to deal with, but my parents never said we lived in a racist country, and I’m so thankful they didn’t, because for every brown and Black child out there, if you tell them they live or are born in a racist country, you’re immediately telling them they don’t have a chance.”
Haley contends that racism is only an issue if we acknowledge that it exists. This is classic right-wing thinking, but it doesn’t work that well in the plantation fields: “My parents never taught me that I’m a slave so that means I’m free to leave and maximize my potential!” For more than 200 years, Black people who didn’t obey even the most minor racist codes of conduct could become victims of what Richard Wright called “the White Death.”
Of course, Nikki Haley isn’t Black. I don’t discount her own personal experience with racism, but she can’t use that experience to diminish the systemic, institutionalized racism Black people have endured in this country. She’s competing in the Republican primary, after all, so she probably thinks gaslighting our ancestral trauma is fine if it wins her some white moderate votes. Her ambition easily exceeds her empathy, yet that still won’t prevent her ultimate humiliation in South Carolina.
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The only way you can bring "All men are created equal" into the debate is to say that groups that have historically been enslaved or otherwise marginalized have used the language that was originally not intended for them to assert their rights over the arc of history. There is no way that the "all men" of 2023 are the ones the Founders meant 250 years ago.
“ and I’m so thankful they didn’t, because for every brown and Black child out there, if you tell them they live or are born in a racist country, you’re immediately telling them they don’t have a chance.”
The fact that Nikki Haley’s parents didn’t have to have ‘the conversation’ with her tells you how different the lives of Indian Americans are from Black Americans…