By Mayank Chhaya
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has yet again been found hemming and hawing—this time about racism in America.
Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade asked Haley during in an interview whether the GOP is a racist party. She offered a surprisingly expansive reply saying the US has “never been a racist country.” Although Kilmeade’s question was quite specific, for some inexplicable reasons she chose to expound it to the country rather than the party.
While the response had within it the possibility of a clarification that her campaign offered soon after her assertion earned her ridicule, the way she responded sounded as if she had not thought of it beforehand.
The notion that America is not a racist country is debatable in terms of institutional and societal racism where the former has evolved and significantly improved over decades even as the latter continues to be problematic.
“We’re not a racist country, Brian. We’ve never been a racist country,” Haley told Kilmeade. “Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can.”
“I know I faced racism when I was growing up. But I can tell you, today is a lot better than it was then. Our goal is to lift up everybody. Not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else. We’ve had enough of that in America,” she said.
It was a strangely broad answer to a very focused question, almost as if she was being defensive about the country unsolicited.
As expected, her campaign was later prompted to issue a comment. CNN quoted a campaign spokesman as saying, “America has always had racism, but America has never been a racist country. The liberal media always fails to get that distinction. It can throw a fit, but that doesn’t change Nikki’s belief that America is special because its people are always striving to do better and live up to our founding ideals of freedom and equality.”
Haley’s response to Fox News was somewhat reminiscent of her answer to a question at a town hall last month in New Hampshire. She was asked what the cause of the Civil War was. She said, “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.”
She added, “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.”
The fact that she did not instantly mention “slavery” as the primary cause of the Civil War triggered a considerable backlash. Even the person who asked her the question said to her, “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery,” the voter said.
“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley asked.
Her equivocation on two deeply sensitive issues of racism and slavery may be a consequence of her style of articulation but a lot of people see that as a deliberate ploy not to stir up trouble for herself within the staunch Republican base where there has been an increasing tendency to be dismissive about racism and offer extenuation about slavery.
Ironically in the midst of all that, former President Donald Trump returned to his familiar race-baiting. The target was Haley. “Anyone listening to Nikki ‘Nimrada’ Haley’s wacked out speech last night, would think that she won the Iowa Primary,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. He deliberately misspelled her given Sikh name Nimrata as part of his well-known tactic to otherize those who are not White Americans.
