Now that the first two primaries have illustrated the improbability of Nikki Haley’s White House bid, her wholesale capitulation to her party’s racial grievance wing seems even harder to comprehend.
Now, she’s trying to backtrack across the bed of coals she herself stoked.
Days after declaring, “We’ve never been a racist country,” the daughter of Sikh immigrants from India noted in a radio interview “how hard it was to grow up in the deep South as a brown girl.”
If her childhood was painful because of racism, she has been all too eager as a politician to embrace the white supremacist ideology that made it painful. When asked about the cause of the Civil War at a town hall last month, she grumbled that answering was not “easy” — not because she didn’t know the truth, but because the truth would antagonize voters who have embraced a false version of history.
Now she claims the answer is not difficult at all, “automatic,” in fact. “It’s always been known” the Civil War was about slavery, Haley says.
It’s always been known. What’s not known is whether a presidential candidate can acknowledge it and win her party’s nomination.
South Carolina, the state where Haley was born and raised and served six years as governor, seceded from the United States in 1860. The “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” is clear: The northern states refused to return people who escaped from enslavement back to their enslavers.
It wasn’t some vague blather about “how government was going to run” and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.” It was specific. South Carolina wanted the freedom to enslave people, and it wanted the government to force the return of enslaved people who escaped.
The truth is ugly, as Haley knows. And accepting that ugly truth leads to more ugly truths like the one lawyers for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, her former rival for the nomination, describes as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
Years before acknowledging this truth would be derided as “woke,” Haley noted in her first gubernatorial inaugural address in 2011 “it would be wrong to mention our greatness during the revolutionary period without noting the ugliness of much that followed. The horrors of slavery and discrimination … remain part of our history and a part of the fabric of our lives.”
When the Confederate flag finally was removed from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds in 2015, she called it — for some —“a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.”
But even then she understood that for the extreme right-wing of her party, the “cause of the Civil War” question is a shibboleth, a signal by which members of a tribe identify one another.
When an activist group, the Palmetto Patriots, asked it of her during her 2010 campaign, she dutifully replied it was a conflict between “tradition” and “change,” never mentioning the tradition was slavery.
The group didn’t ask her rival candidates because they were “Southerners whose families go back to beyond the war between the states, back to antebellum times, and they would have a deeper appreciation of Southern thinking and mentality.” Their loyalty to the revisionist Lost Cause interpretation of history was assumed. Haley, the daughter of immigrants, had to prove hers.
In the Bible, those who pronounced shibboleth “incorrectly” were killed. In today’s Republican presidential primaries, they just lose.
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League. He was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002 and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Georgetown University Law Center.
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