The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Nikki Haley has mixed record on bias statements
Four years after South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag from its Statehouse grounds, Nikki Haley offered two separate explanations of the flag’s meaning in less than a week.
Haley, the state’s governor when the flag was pulled in 2015 from its place of honor in Columbia, said in a 2019 interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the man who shot and killed eight Black churchgoers in Charleston — murders that were the impetus for the flag’s lowering — had “hijacked” a symbol that many people took to stand for “service and sacrifice and heritage.” Two days later, she wrote in the Washington Post, “Everyone knows the flag has always been a symbol of slavery, discrimination and hate for many people.”
The two messages capture Haley’s sometimes contradictory messages on race. Throughout her career, the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants has generally called out acts of individual prejudice and the people responsible. But Haley, now a Republican presidential candidate, has avoided denouncing society or groups of people as racist.
As the GOP primary race moves to South Carolina and its Feb. 24 contest, Haley is trying to cut into former President Donald Trump’s advantage. He has repeatedly attacked adversaries throughout his career with racist language, trying to appeal to as many voters as possible without alienating conservatives who reject the idea that systemic racism exists
in the United States.
But Haley’s approach has drawn bipartisan criticism at times, particularly after a December town hall when Haley refused to say slavery had been a cause of the Civil War. She later walked back those remarks, saying that “of course the Civil War was about slavery.”
Haley was pushed for more answers on her feelings about race when she was interviewed Wednesday on “The Breakfast Club,” a nationally syndicated hip hop morning radio show on which presidential candidates and other politicians have discussed issues of race.
Asked about the 2015 shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Haley told cohost Charlamagne that the national media “came in and wanted to define” the event and “wanted to make it about racism.” Haley acknowledged, after being pressed, that the killings were “motivated” by racism. Dylann Roof, a white man, was convicted and sentenced to death.
The Haley campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Haley and Trump are competing for votes both along South Carolina’s rapidly growing coast with its booming aerospace and defense industries and in the rural swaths of a state where the Civil War began more than 150 years ago. Some in South Carolina still venerate the Confederate cause and play down the fact that Southern political leaders wanted to secede to keep slavery intact, as well as the lasting legacy of official federal and state discrimination against Black people.
Haley, who was Trump’s U.N. ambassador, has described facing prejudice in her upbringing in rural Bamberg.
“My parents never wanted us to think we lived in a racist country,” Haley told reporters recently. “I don’t want any brown, Black or other child thinking they live in a racist country. I want them to know they can do and be anything they want to be without anyone getting in the way.”
Hajar Yazdiha, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, argued that Haley was making a conscious choice to better appeal to conservatives.
“Nikki Haley will strategically deploy her identity in one moment and not the next. So in one moment, she’s drawing out that history,” Yazdiha said. “She’s really claiming her ethnic identity and using it to tell a compelling story about the American dream. And then on the other, she’s minimizing it and erasing it and acting like it has no bearing on who she is.”
At a recent Haley rally in North Charleston, Terry Holyfield said she applauded Haley’s push to bring down the Confederate flag. Holyfield said it was “the right thing to do at that time, and I applaud her for standing by her beliefs.”