Is America racist?

Recently, CNN host Jake Tapper asked Nikki Haley, a candidate seeking to represent the Republican Party in the 2024 presidential election, “Is America a racist country?” This is not a tricky question. It is not a gotcha question unless you make it one. Her answer became news because she flunked this oral exam. Gotcha!

Her response and her body language demonstrated to any voter who understands the seriousness of the job of president of the United States, that this is not a job for her. I cannot remember another Republican presidential primary where there was nothing to choose from other than intellectual mediocrity.

Pardon me for my pretentiousness, but a qualified Republican candidate for the leader of the free world would know the answer is embedded in a non-superficial understanding of actual American history — not the sanitized version Haley apparently and unfortunately received in the “segregation school” she attended in South Carolina, or the ”anti-woke” version of history Ron DeSantis wants to institutionalize in Florida’s public schools and universities.

American history is filled with the distinction between American ideals and American practices. The lofty and revolutionary concept that all “men” are created equal made an explicit distinction between the genders. And make no mistake, it was not an oversight. For the first 144 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, women could not vote until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

The dissonance between principles and practices was even more acute when looking at the plight of Black Americans. The original Constitution never uses the words slave, but says the following in Article 1, Section 2:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

The so-called “three-fifths” clause effectively gave increased Congressional power to the Southern states where slaves made up a sizable portion of the population, and which had smaller white populations than several of the northern states. Demographers estimate that 54 percent of the South Carolina population was Black in 1780.

Notably, women were included in the determination of how many representatives a state could send to Congress, even though they could not vote for those representatives. The three-fifths clause was not edited to include Black people as full citizens until the post-Civil War 13th Amendment.

The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decided racial discrimination in public education was unconstitutional and that public schools should be integrated with “all deliberate speed.” Soon after Brown, private segregated white schools sprung up in the South like mushrooms on a cool summer morning. Southern cities and towns decided that instead of allowing Black students in their public schools, they would create their own private schools, letting in who they wanted on one hand, and excluding who they did not want on the other. Nikki Haley attended one of these “segregation schools.”

Since white kids would be taken care of in private segregated schools and white people controlled local government, public education became underfunded, in effect taking money from the public schools to help white people finance their private segregated schools.

America keeps providing us stories like Haley’s that for Black Americans reminds us how strongly racism continues to play a role in our lives and in American society.

Nikki Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants who practiced the Sikh religion. Her father Dr. Ajit Singh Randhawa was a biology professor at Voorhees College, a historically Black college in Denmark, South Carolina. It strains credulity that she never witnessed (or experienced) racism in America.

Chances are a turban-wearing professor would have had a difficult, if not impossible, challenge finding a faculty position at the University of South Carolina (or any other white university in the Southern states). It was not until 1963 that the University of South Carolina admitted its first three Black students. This was not random. After the Civil War, the insurrectionists seized power and created two separate and unequal systems: ; one white and superior, the other Black and inferior, each covering every aspect of life including where you were born, which school you attended, to where you could live, where you could sit in public transportation, where you could eat, where you could drink from a water fountain, where you could go to the bathroom, and even where you could be buried.

I find it hard to believe that Nikki Haley did not see the remnants of Jim Crow when she was growing up and attending schools set up by slaveholders for their privileged white children. I also find it hard to believe that an intelligent man like Dr. Randhawa would not do what Black parents have done for generations — tell their kids to be the best they can be and admonish them that they must be twice as good as the white kid to be treated as an equal. When this narrative works, most successful Black Americans know their success is rooted in the struggle of past generations. Any Black person who denies the institutional barriers that exist is frequently viewed as misguided or a traitor to the race. The tell-tale sign of this betrayal is the claim that their success is primarily the result of what they did and nobody else.

Haley had a golden opportunity to tell the real story of who Nikki Haley is by answering Tapper’s question. Could she have enhanced her credibility if she had answered the question with a story of her mother and father, or stories they told her about Sikhs in India or being Sikh in America, or stories about the Black students her father taught at Voorhees College? She could have reached countless Black voters, or at least gained their respect.

Haley knows that America has a racist history and unfortunately there are legacies of those racist systems that influence the lives of millions of people today. There are scores of stories she could have told Tapper. Whether she was trying to play it safe, pandering to history revisionists, or simply lying, her answer was an unforgettable faux pas.

Fred McKinney is the co-founder of BJM Solutions, an economic consulting firm that conducts public and private research since 1999, and is the emeritus director of the Peoples Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Quinnipiac University.