Nimarata Nikki Haley
This past Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate Nimarata Nikki Haley (née Randhawa) caused a political firestorm at a New Hampshire town hall event when she gave a shockingly evasive answer to a question about the U.S. Civil War. Specifically, a voter in the audience asked Haley, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” The following exchange then occurred:
Haley: Well, don’t come with an easy question or anything. I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?
Q: I’m not running for president. I wanted to hear your view on the cause of the Civil War.
Haley: I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government. We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom, we need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties, so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want without government getting in the way.
Q: Thank you. In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you’d answer that question without mentioning the word “slavery.”
Haley: What do you want me to say about slavery?
Q: You’ve answered my question. Thank you.
Haley: Next question.
Approximately 12 hours later, after sharp criticism from many quarters, including from President Joe Biden, Haley’s campaign tried to correct her blunder, releasing a Thursday morning radio interview in which Haley said, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery,” further calling the war “a stain on America.” Haley went on to reiterate that “freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people.” However, the damage was done. Now Haley either looks like a racist, or just another mealy-mouthed politician saying different things depending on the audience and their reaction, rather than based on her own principles. In deciding which is the true Haley, the following quote from poet Maya Angelou comes to mind:
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
In that regard, the Associated Press reports that Haley’s answer on Wednesday was not the first time she omitted slavery from discussions about the Civil War:
As she ran for governor in 2010, Haley, in an interview with a now-defunct activist group then known as The Palmetto Patriots, described the war as between two disparate sides fighting for “tradition” and “change” and said the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.”
In 2015, Haley, then Governor of South Carolina, ordered the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds, saying that the flag “divides us.” However, it is not difficult to conclude that, if she were a presidential candidate at the time, she would have kept the flag in place, and her actions at the time were taken out of political expedience given the anti-confederate national sentiment going on then. Indeed, Haley did not state the most obvious reason for removing the Confederate flag — that it is a symbol of slavery and institutionalized racism.
In addition to Haley, fellow Republican presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who still places second to Donald Trump in most Republican presidential polls, has voiced similarly appalling views about slavery during his campaign. Most notably, DeSantis has repeatedly defended new Florida middle school Social Studies curriculum changes which include teaching students that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” DeSantis even said, in his own barely intelligible way, that the new Florida school curriculum is “probably going to show” that “some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
Taken together, these statements and actions show what American voters are up against in the 2024 elections: not only a leading Republican candidate, Donald Trump, who wants to try to shut down the democratic process, steal the election again and become a dictator, but a GOP whose candidates’ first instinct is to no longer hide their racism and bigotry. On the contrary, in today’s Republican party, candidates curry favor with GOP voters and donors by stirring up racism to the point where even America’s tragic legacy of slavery cannot be criticized or mentioned as a first response. Ironically, such racism and bigotry is a major factor that will likely prevent Nikki Haley — a woman of color born to immigrant Sikh parents from India — from winning the Republican presidential nomination that she so cravenly pursues right now.
Photo by DoD News, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/2p0kFX
