Political Catch-Up: Nikki Haley's History Lesson

Nikki Haley denies history

Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, former UN ambassador and still-clinging-on presidential candidate, put her foot in her mouth again earlier this week by saying the US has never been a racist country. Just to repeat--She didn't say it's not a racist country now, but that we had NEVER been a racist country. She made a fine distinction, stating that she herself had faced racism as a woman of color and the daughter of Indian immigrants, but that the country itself was not racist. 

Her demure was understandable, but cowardly. Earlier she screwed up by bunting on a softball question at a town hall about the cause of the Civil War and never mentioning slavery. As the governor of a former Confederate state she did not want to risk offending a large swath of potential supporters. With her never-racist answer, she hopes to curry favor with history-deniers and to emphasize America's good points and ignore or minimize its past transgressions. She says that there has been racism in our country, but that we are basically a "good" people at our core and in our founding there was the intent of everybody being treated equally. She is under the mistaken impression that we can all move forward without truly acknowledging our shameful past. 

Reconstruction was a brief era of
racial justice in the US.

We may not have explicitly endorsed racism in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, but the racist practice of slavery was tolerated and later endorsed with the Dred Scott decision, declaring black people were not legal citizens of the US and therefore need not be treated with the same dignity and respect as their white counterparts. That ruling made racism the official policy of the country. But the whole world, or most of it, was racist at the point. Our founding fathers were men of their time, many of whom owned slaves. From 1619 to 1865, the US government engaged in racist policy regarding slavery. We were not a racist country during Reconstruction (1865-1877) when freed slaves attained positions of power and directed their own destinies. Though we weren't exactly angels to the Native Americans at this point, pushing them off their land (again, this was our policy, not the act of a few hotheaded extremists.) And let's not forget the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.

Returning to Reconstruction, treating black people as equals was just too much for the South--and the rest of the country--and the birth and prevalence of the KKK and instituting of Jim Crow Laws returned the US to a racist status. Even in the North, there was official discrimination. My own grandmother was living in Delaware in the 1930s and made the error of sitting at the back of a crowded streetcar. The conductor stopped the vehicle and told her that area was reserved for black people and she couldn't sit there.

We did not truly become a non-racist country until the Supreme Court rulings ended legal discrimination and anti-miscegenation laws and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s. So, we are not now an officially racist nation, but the scourge of racism still exists. It was sleeping until Trump woke it up and made it socially palatable to express such heinous views. (In a web search on Haley, I found an article from her time in Trump's administration where she stated he was healing racial wounds. HA! Ironic, huh?) Elon Musk has made it worse by allowing conspiracy theories and hate speech on X, formerly known as Twitter. Haley would have been a terrible candidate but she might have won against Biden because she's younger and not a monster like her former boss. But she doesn't stand a chance of getting the nomination and we will have to deal with an even worse enemy when Trump steamrolls to the GOP slot.