Nikki Haley’s refusal to acknowledge America’s racism is exactly why schools need to teach about it

At a campaign town hall stop in Berlin, New Hampshire on December 27, someone asked Nikki Haley what would ordinarily be considered a softball question that any fifth-grade public school student could answer accurately.

Haley, though, morphed it into a hardball coming at fast speed. With her South Carolina roots, this very question sparks intense and sometimes violent slug matches.

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The questioner asked Haley, “What was the cause of the Civil War?”

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Following a pained expression and a tense deep breath, she entered into a long-winded and inarticulate ramble about the role of government that seemed to satisfy no one, least of all the questioner.

“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” she said. “And we will always stand by the fact that I think the government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”

The questioner was confounded that Haley did not mention slavery in her response: “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery,’” they responded, prompting a rejoinder from Haley.

“What do you want me to say about slavery?” she asked, to which the questioner stated that Haley had answered the question.

Nikki Haley, (born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa in South Carolina), served as South Carolina State Representative from 2005 to 2011 and Governor from 2011 to 2017. She was the 29^th Ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration and the first Indian American to serve in the Cabinet.

She jumped into the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination on February 14, 2023 and has been gaining in the GOP primary polls for the second-place spot after Donald Trump, at least until her town hall in New Hampshire.

Haley is a lifelong resident of South Carolina, the state where the first shots of the Civil War were fired by Confederate soldiers in April 1861. She attended grade school there and then earned her B.A. at Clemson University.

According to the South Carolina Articles of Secession of 1860: “…[A]n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations [to uphold fugitive slave laws], and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.”

The secession would take effect on March 4, 1861, the day Abraham Lincoln was to be inaugurated as the 16^th President of the United States.  

The articles continued, “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

A reference to the rights of states to maintain the institution of slavery concluded with this language: “The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”

The day following her New Hampshire town hall, Haley attempted to limit the tide of criticism by appearing on The Pulse of NH radio show and asserting, “Yes, we know the Civil War was about slavery. But more than that, what’s the lesson in all this?”

Well, in Haley’s case, the lesson is that she must tread a fine line by not alienating people on the left side of history who fully understand the racist past of the country.

She believes she must balance this with appealing to those on the right and far-right side of history who to this day view the Civil War as a battle for the right for white people to control their own lives as well as to control the lives (and deaths) of those they enslaved — as slavery was an institution on which their economy, social structures, politics, and yes, religious precepts were built.

When Haley first ran for South Carolina Governor in 2010, she gave an interview with a right-wing group known as the Palmetto Patriots in which she described the Civil War as between two incompatible sides with one fighting for “tradition” (the South) and the other fighting for “change” (the North).

In that interview, she argued that the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist,” and she rejected the notion at the time that the flag needed to be taken down from the South Carolina statehouse grounds.

Five years later, however, following the tragic mass killing by a white supremacist shooter of eight Black church members attending a Bible study group in Charleston, South Carolina, Haley encouraged legislators to remove the flag from its platform near a Confederate soldier monument. Haley lamented and still attempted to straddle that fine line by saying the flag had been “hijacked” by the shooter from those who saw it as symbolizing “sacrifice and heritage.”

Haley grew up Sikh and converted to Christianity. At a previous town hall, when the moderator asked her to talk about her position on trans athletes in school sports, she went total Planet MAGA: “The idea that we have biological boys playing in girl’s sports, it is the women’s issue of our time…then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.”

While she hasn’t a clue as to the actual reasons why researchers are seeing an increase in depression among young people in the aftermath of a global Covid pandemic and the increasing pull by social media here on Earth, one would assume that anyone running for the highest office in the land would at least have an inkling of understanding for her potential constituents, people of all genders and relationship status in all kinds of family constellations.

No Nikki, the most important “women’s issue of our time” is not trans athletes in sports, but rather, reproductive freedom, quality affordable healthcare, quality P-12 education and affordable higher education, gun safety reforms, paid parental leave, subsidized child care, lower inflation, guarantees of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, increased SNAP benefits, gender equity in the workplace, humanistic immigration reform, increased retirement benefits, better policies and enforcement against sexual assault, higher sexual assault conviction rates, and peace throughout the world.

Trump and Haley, his complicit United Nations ambassador, frayed our international standing by bullying nations who dared vote against U.S. actions.

Earlier in his administration, Trump loosened our ties with the NATO alliance. He pulled us out of the Paris Climate Agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement. The latter action now opens wide the door for China to control trade throughout Asia.

During the 2016 Republican primary campaign season, then-South Carolina Republican Governor Haley criticized Trump’s contentious immigration policies restricting Mexicans and Muslims from entering the United States. In front of a group of reporters, however, Haley showed her extreme ignorance of U.S. history: “When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion. Let’s not start that now.”

I have very serious doubts regarding her academic background to lead. Unfortunately, Trump’s perverse proposals fit “right” in with the racist immigration history of the United States.

So in the service of education, I offer Nikki Haley the following tutorial focusing on issues of race in our immigration and naturalization policies.

Nikki Haley‘s guide to race in U.S. immigration policy

The “American” colonies followed European perceptions of race. A 1705 Virginia statute, the “Act Concerning Servants and Slaves,” read: “[N]o negroes, mulattos or Indians, Jew, Moor, Mahometan [Muslims], or other infidel, or such as are declared slaves by this act, shall, notwithstanding, purchase any christian (sic) white servant…”

In 1790, the newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which excluded all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans, the latter of whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited this land for an estimated 35,000 years. The Congress did not grant Native Americans rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though Asians continued to be denied naturalized citizenship status.

Congress passed the first law specifically restricting or excluding immigrants on the basis of race and nationality in 1882. In their attempts to eliminate entry of Chinese (and other Asian) workers who often competed for jobs with U.S. citizens, especially in the western United States, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to restrict their entry into the U.S. for a 10-year period, all while denying citizenship to Chinese people already on these shores.

The Act also made it illegal for Chinese people to marry white or Black Americans. The Immigration Act of 1917 further prohibited immigration from Asian countries. In the terms of the law, the “barred zone” included parts of China, India, Siam, Burma, Asiatic Russia, the Polynesian Islands, and parts of Afghanistan.

The so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement” between the U.S. and the Emperor of Japan of 1907 (in an attempt to reduce tensions between the two countries) was passed expressly to decrease the immigration of Japanese workers into the U.S.

Between 1880 and 1920, 30-40 million immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe migrated to the U.S, more than doubling the population. Fearing a continued influx of immigrants, legislators in the United States Congress in 1924 enacted the Johnson-Reed [anti-] Immigration Act (“Origins Quota Act,” or “National Origins Act”) setting restrictive quotas of immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe, including those of the so-called “Hebrew race.”

Even in the 1920s U.S., Jews continued to be considered nonwhite. The law, on the other hand, permitted large allotments of immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany.

This law, in addition to previous statutes (1882 against the Chinese, 1907 against the Japanese) halted further immigration from Asia, and it excluded Black people of African descent from entering the country.

It is interesting to note that during this time, Jewish ethno-racial assignment was constructed as “Asian.” According to Sander Gilman, “Jews were called Asiatic and Mongoloid, as well as primitive, tribal, Oriental.” Immigration laws were changed in 1924 in response to the influx of these undesirable “Asiatic elements.”

In the Supreme Court case, Takao Ozawa vs. United States, a Japanese man, Takao Ozawa, filed for citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which allowed white persons and persons of African descent or African nativity to achieve naturalization status. Asians, however, were classified as an “unassimilable race” and, therefore, not entitled to U.S. citizenship.

Ozawa attempted to have Japanese people classified as “white” since he claimed he had the requisite white skin. In 1922, however, the Supreme Court denied his claim.

In 1939, the United States Congress refused to pass the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would have permitted entry to the United States of 20,000 children from Eastern Europe, many of whom were Jewish, over existing quotas. Laura Delano Houghteling, cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration sternly warned: “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”

Following U.S. entry into World War II at the end of 1942, military officials uprooted and transported approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans – some born in the United States – to Internment (Concentration) Camps within a number of interior states far from the shores.

Not until Ronald Reagan’s administration did the U.S. officially apologize to Japanese Americans and pay reparations amounting to $20,000 to each survivor as part of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.

Finally, in 1952, the McCarran-Walters Act overturned the “racially” discriminatory quotas of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Framed as an amendment to the McCarran-Walters Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed “natural origins” as the basis of U.S. immigration legislation.

The 1965 law increased immigration from Asian and Latin American countries and religious backgrounds, permitted 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere (20,000 per country), 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere, and accepted a total of 300,000 visas for entry into the country.

So is racism over?

When Nikki Haley announced her candidacy for the Presidency last February, her overriding message was (and remains) essentially, “Racism is over. Just look at me for proof,” as NBC writer Ja’han Jones put it.

Well, stemming either from a poor education of U.S. and world history, an inability or unwillingness to believe the truth, or an awkward attempt to straddle the political line, she obviously does not maintain the honesty and integrity of conviction to serve in the highest office of the land.

She does, though, provide a great example of the reasons why we as a nation must defeat efforts to censure age-appropriate teaching of the “hard” history of the United States and to counter the growing right-wing movement to ban books, curricular materials, and class discussion on issues of race, gender, and sexual identity.

We don’t need any more miseducated and morally questionable residents of our great nation, especially those who are running and maintaining elected offices.