Fresh off her third-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, Nikki Haley jumped right back into campaigning for next week’s New Hampshire primary — but not before fumbling yet another question on race.
In an interview on “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday morning, host Brian Kilmeade asked Haley about the GOP, “Are you a racist party? Are you involved in a racist party?”
“No, we’re not a racist country, Brian. We’ve never been a racist country,” Haley said. “I faced racism when I was growing up, but I can tell you that 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,” she added. “I don’t want my kids growing up where they’re sitting and thinking that they’re disadvantaged because of a color or a gender.”
The question came as Haley and Kilmeade were discussing comments made on Monday night by MSNBC host Joy Reid that Haley was unlikely to win the nomination because the GOP is “deeply anti-immigrant.” Kilmeade’s framing seemed intended to elicit a soundbite from Haley, so naturally her answer was a “no.” Her comments also echoed the opinion of many Republicans who deny the reality of systemic racism against people of color.
But saying that the U.S. has “never been” racist is rich, even for her, considering this country’s exceptionally prolific history of racism. To name just a few: committing genocide against Native Americans, enslaving and subsequently segregating and disenfranchising Black people, forcing Japanese people into internment camps, banning Chinese laborers from entering the country — the list goes on and on. Some of the most blatantly racist U.S. government policies in recent times were also engineered by former President Donald Trump, who is the front-runner in a party primary race that Haley hopes to win, and who is currently spewing enormously racist rhetoric about nonwhite people. Haley’s ahistorical tiptoeing around the topic of race on the campaign trail has led her to make repeated unforced errors. And like her failure to identify slavery as a principal cause of the Civil War, her comments on Tuesday underscored how incapable she is of talking about race frankly as she tries to win over conservative voters.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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