Can the fumbling Republican presidential hopeful get anything right about our nation’s history?
Earlier this week, former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley told Fox News viewers that the United States is “not a racist country” and has “never been a racist country.” While her first statement is debatable, her second is not. Even the most generous reader of U.S. history would come away with the understanding that, yes, historically we’ve been a pretty racist country.
Just to name a few examples: The Naturalization Act of 1790 exclusively limited naturalization to “free White person(s)” and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Immigration Act of 1924 combined to bar entry to a majority of Asian immigrants. These were matters of national public policy.
Is the racism charge true everywhere and at all times? Of course not. Individual opinion is never monolithic, and the degree of social or legal discrimination against certain groups of people varied. But over all, the predominance of laws targeting nonwhite people (for lack of a better term), especially prior to the mid-twentieth century, is well documented.
Even states like Illinois and Indiana, which banned slavery, also enacted laws and constitutional provisions to ban nonwhite people from their states.
As a two-term governor of South Carolina and graduate of Clemson University, you’d think Nikki Haley would be aware of this. South Carolina was probably the most racist state in the entire country, where a white minority held sway over a black majority for generations. Slave-based plantation agriculture formed the bedrock of the state until after the Civil War. Following the war, its white minority enacted a strict regime of segregation, intimidation, and voter suppression in order to maintain power.
That Nimarata Nikki Haley, born of Indian immigrant parents, rose to win election as a state representative and then governor, shows that things have changed since the days of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman (who, incidentally, helped found Clemson University).
Nikki Haley unwisely believes that acknowledging past mistakes tarnishes the present. To make a claim so laughably ridiculous as hers requires a willful misrepresentation, or a naive Pollyannaist view, of American history.
For years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an unabashed patriotism ruled the day, in which no one wanted to hear anything negative about our country, past or present. Haley began her political career during this time period, and since then her mentality hasn’t changed, which would be great if she was running for president in 2004, but it won’t play in 2024.
A clear and correct understanding of history allows us to discuss both the good and the bad and everything in between. To only focus on one extreme at the exclusion of the other is wrongheaded, and it makes you look ridiculous.
M.A. Kleen 