At a campaign town hall stop in Berlin, New Hampshire on Wednesday, December 27, 2023, a questioner asked Nikki Haley an ordinarily softball question in the context of the Granite State that any fifth-grade public school student should be able to answer accurately.
Haley, though, morphed it into a hardball coming at fast speed. Within her South Carolina roots, this very question sparks intense and sometimes violent slug matches.
The questioner asked Haley, “What was the cause of the Civil War?”
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’,” the questioner 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, 2005-2011, Governor 2011-2017, 29th Ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration, and 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 polls for a second-place spot after Donald Trump, at least until her town hall in New Hampshire.
Haley attended grade school in South Carolina and earned her B.A. degree in accounting at South Carolina’s Clemson University. She 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.
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,” begins the State of South Carolina’s justification for seceding from the Union to take effect March 4, 1861, the day Abraham Lincoln was to be inaugurated as the 16th President of the United States.
South Carolina’s articles of secession 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 Berlin, New Hampshire town hall, Haley attempted to limit the tide of criticism by appearing on The Pulse of NH radio show by asserting that “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 for her is that she must tread a fine line by not alienating people on the left side of history who understand fully 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 to control their own white lives as well as to control the lives (and deaths) of those they have enslaved—an institution on which their economy, social structures, politics, and yes, religious precepts often existed.
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 termed 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, 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.”
Nikki Haley grew up Sikh and converted to Christianity. At a previous town hall, when the moderator asked her to talk about her position of trans athletes in school sports, she went total Planet MAGA:
“The idea that we have biological boys playing in girl’s sports,” she warned, “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 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 I, one would assume that anyone running for the highest office in the land would have at least an inkling of understanding for her potential constituents, people of all genders and relationship status in all kinds of family constellations.
No Nikki Haley, the most important “women’s issue of our time” is not trans athletes in sports, but rather, multiple issues and concerns including reproductive freedoms, 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 of sexual assault and higher sexual assault conviction rates, and peace throughout the world.
Trump and his complicit United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, frayed our international standing by bullying nations who dared vote against U.S. actions. Earlier in his administration, Trump loosened our ties within the NATO alliance.
Trump 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 Nikki Haley criticized Donald Trump’s contentious immigration policies of 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.”
As the governor of a large Southern state, and a possible presidential, vice presidential, or cabinet pick, 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.
A Brief History of “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 later 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, while denying citizenship to Chinese people already on these shores.
The Act also made it illegal for Chinese people to marry white or black U.S.-Americans. The Immigration Act of 1917 further prohibited immigration from Asian countries, in the terms of the law, the “barred zone,” including 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, passed expressly to decrease immigration of Japanese workers into the U.S.
Between 1880 and 1920, in the range of 30-40 million immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe migrated to the United States, 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.”
Jews continued to be, even in the United States during the 1920s, constructed as 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 blacks of African descent from entering the United States.
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 “unassimilateable 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. The Supreme Court, in 1922, however, denied his claim and, therefore, his U.S. citizenship.
In 1939, the United States Congress refused to pass the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which if enacted 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, reflecting the tenuous status of Japanese Americans, some born in the United States, military officials uprooted and transported approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans 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 to 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 each country), 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere, and accepted a total of 300,000 visas for entry into the country.
Is Racism Over?
When Nikki Haley announced her candidacy for the Presidency last February, her overriding message was and remains essentially that “Racism is over. Just look at me for proof.”
Well, stemming either from a poor education of U.S. and world history she received in the South Carolina schooling of her youth, her inability or unwillingness to believe the truth, her awkward attempt to straddle the political line, or her lack of moral clarity and unwillingness to stand up for the truth, 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 elective offices.
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