Four years after South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag from its Statehouse grounds, Nikki Haley offered two separate explanations of the flag\u2019s meaning in less than a week. Haley, the state\u2019s governor when the flag was pulled in 2015 from its place of honor in Columbia, said in a 2019 interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the man who shot and killed eight Black churchgoers in Charleston \u2013 murders that were the impetus for the flag\u2019s lowering \u2013 had \u201chijacked\u201d a symbol that many people took to stand for \u201cservice and sacrifice and heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two days later, she wrote in the Washington Post, \u201cEveryone knows the flag has always been a symbol of slavery, discrimination and hate for many people.\u201d The two messages capture Haley\u2019s sometimes contradictory messages on race. Throughout her career, the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants has generally called out acts of individual prejudice and the people responsible. But Haley, now a Republican presidential candidate, has avoided denouncing society or groups of people as racist.<\/p>\n
As the GOP primary race moves to South Carolina and its Feb. 24 contest, Haley is trying to cut into former President Donald Trump\u2019s advantage. He has repeatedly attacked adversaries throughout his career with racist language, trying to appeal to as many voters as possible without alienating conservatives who reject the idea that systemic racism exists in the United States.<\/p>\n
But Haley\u2019s approach has drawn bipartisan criticism at times, particularly after a December town hall when Haley refused to say slavery had been a cause of the Civil War. She later walked back those remarks, saying that \u201cof course the Civil War was about slavery.\u201d Haley was pushed for more answers on her feelings about race when she was interviewed Wednesday on \u201cThe Breakfast Club,\u201d a nationally syndicated hip hop morning radio show on which presidential candidates and other politicians have discussed issues of race.<\/p>\n
Asked about the 2015 shooting at Charleston\u2019s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Haley told co-host Charlamagne that God that the national media \u201ccame in and wanted to define\u201d the event and \u201cwanted to make it about racism.\u201d Haley acknowledged, after being pressed, that the killings were \u201cmotivated\u201d by racism. Dylann Roof, a white man, was convicted and sentenced to death. The Haley campaign did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Haley and Trump are competing for votes both along South Carolina\u2019s rapidly growing coast with its booming aerospace and defense industries and in the rural swaths of a state where the Civil War began more than 150 years ago. Some in South Carolina still venerate the Confederate cause and play down the fact that Southern political leaders wanted to secede to keep slavery intact, as well as the lasting legacy of official federal and state discrimination against Black people.<\/p>\n
Haley, who was Trump\u2019s U.N. ambassador, has described facing prejudice in her upbringing in rural Bamberg. \u201cMy parents never wanted us to think we lived in a racist country,\u201d Haley told reporters recently. \u201cI don\u2019t want any brown, Black or other child thinking they live in a racist country. I want them to know they can do and be anything they want to be without anyone getting in the way.\u201d Hajar Yazdiha, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, argued that Haley was making a conscious choice to better appeal to conservatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cNikki Haley will strategically deploy her identity in one moment and not the next. So in one moment, she\u2019s drawing out that history,\u201d Yazdiha said. \u201cShe\u2019s really claiming her ethnic identity and using it to tell a compelling story about the American dream. And then on the other, she\u2019s minimizing it and erasing it and acting like it has no bearing on who she is.\u201d At a recent Haley rally in North Charleston, Terry Holyfield said she applauded Haley\u2019s push to bring down the Confederate flag.<\/p>\n
Holyfield said it was \u201cthe right thing to do at that time, and I applaud her for standing by her beliefs.\u201d About the cause of the Civil War, Holyfield said she stood by her preferred candidate\u2019s answer. \u201cShe answered that question intelligently and correctly,\u201d Holyfield said. \u201cOur government was different than it is now, and our Constitution was different, and she answered that question spot on.\u201d People of color seeking high office have long faced disproportionate pressure to talk about race, especially before white audiences.<\/p>\n
During his own presidential bid last year, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian and the only Black Republican in the chamber, often talked to all-white groups in Iowa about personal responsibility and how \u201cwe don\u2019t have Black poverty or white poverty. We have poverty.\u201d Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Hindu, was often challenged by Christians in Iowa about whether they worshipped the same God. Both Scott and Ramaswamy have dropped from the nomination contest and endorsed Trump.<\/p>\n
Haley sometimes ties her upbringing to politics, mentioning how her mother criticizes people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without permission because she herself immigrated legally. But Haley has also had to contend with attacks from Trump based on her ethnicity. Trump called Haley \u201cNimbra\u201d on his social media site in a recent post. That was an apparent intentional misspelling of part of her birth name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Haley has used her middle name, \u201cNikki,\u201d since childhood.<\/p>\n
Trump also has promoted false conspiracy theories about whether Haley was eligible to run for president because she is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants. Her birth in South Carolina makes her a natural-born citizen, one of three qualifications to hold the U.S. presidency. Trump\u2019s promotion of this false claim echoes his \u201cbirther\u201d rhetoric about Barack Obama, the nation\u2019s first Black president. When asked by reporters whether Trump\u2019s criticisms of her are racist, Haley has instead portrayed him as \u201cdesperate to stop our momentum,\u201d using any means necessary to attack his opponents.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what he does when he feels threatened. That\u2019s what he does when he feels insecure,\u201d Haley said during a town hall on CNN when asked about Trump\u2019s false allegation that she was ineligible to be president. \u201cI know that I am a threat. I know that\u2019s why he\u2019s doing that.\u201d She often uses her own story as an example that the U.S. is fundamentally good. \u201cWe live in the best country in the world and we are a work in progress, and we\u2019ve got a long way to go to fix all of our little kinks. But I truly believe our Founding Fathers had the best of intentions when they started, and we fixed it along the way,\u201d Haley said as she tried to make her point during a CNN town hall last month in New Hampshire, where host Jake Tapper asked her if, from a historical perspective, she believed that America had \u201cnever been a racist country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tapper argued that \u201cAmerica was founded institutionally on many racist precepts, including slavery.\u201d Haley responded with a reference to the line that \u201call men are created equal,\u201d but then finished her thought by saying that \u201cthe intent was everybody was going to be created equally.\u201d In her memoirs and public appearances, Haley has often recounted experiencing discrimination during her childhood: bullying, comments about her ethnicity in school, being disqualified from a beauty pageant for being neither white nor Black. Her father, a professor at a historically Black university, was racially profiled at a farmer\u2019s market. Haley says she dealt with racism through bridge-building.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis habit of finding the similarities and avoiding the differences became very natural to me over time,\u201d she wrote in her 2012 memoir. During a 2014 visit to India, Haley spoke with an Indian news channel about her heritage and discrimination. Asked whether she felt the need to \u201cdisown\u201d parts of her heritage to work in American politics, Haley said her background was core to her identity. \u201cI\u2019m very, very proud of being the daughter of Indian parents, and I talk about it because it\u2019s something that\u2019s very special to me,\u201d Haley said. \u201cIt is who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Four years after South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag from its Statehouse grounds, Nikki Haley offered two separate explanations\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":29772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[9503,8257,9499,9502,758,3734,296,3899,329,7826,3143,8472,9500,9498,3530,9501],"class_list":["post-29771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-2015-shooting-at-charlestons-mother-emanuel-african-methodist-episcopal-church","tag-challenges","tag-confederate-flag","tag-ethnicity","tag-gun-laws","tag-mass-shootings","tag-nikki-haley","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-slavery","tag-south-carolina","tag-south-carolina-primary","tag-state-house-grounds","tag-systemic-oppression","tag-us-2024-presidential-elections","tag-us-civil-war"],"reading_time":"7 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}