Nikki Haley’s gaffe reveals the ugly truth

The best explanation for Nikki Haley’s startling gaffe over slavery came from one of her Republican rivals, Chris Christie.

She isn’t a racist, he said. She knows that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, but she avoided it because “she’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth.”

That was damning with faint praise — and Haley had it coming.

For those who missed it, Haley appeared startled at a town meeting in North Conway, N.H., last week when a man asked her what caused the Civil War.

The only correct answer is slavery, as she belatedly acknowledged a day later. But she didn’t say that when she should have, instead prattling at length about how “government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life.”

A programmed pitch

That sounded like a programmed pitch to campaign contributors who crave lower taxes and less regulation. It was utterly irrelevant to the question. Haley fouled up even her subsequent correction, suggesting without proof that the questioner was “definitely a Democratic plant” to embarrass her.

Even if he was, so what?

The episode reflected a disturbing fault line in the Republican Party, which in its better days saved the Union, abolished slavery and provided the critical votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The whitewashing of slavery is now manifested, among other ways, by mainly Republican legislation to protect Confederate monuments whose local governments want them taken down. Two such obnoxious bills, HB 395 and SB 1122, are pending in Tallahassee. One of the Republican sponsors, Rep. Dean Black, is from Jacksonville, which would be compelled to put back a statue it just removed.

Slavery and its ‘benefits’

A myth of denial poisons Florida’s state school standards, which have earned widespread scorn for asserting that slavery benefitted some of its victims by teaching them trades.

It even infects the national citizenship test taken by immigrants applying for naturalization. The acceptable answers to “one problem that led to the Civil War” are, in order, “slavery,” “economic reasons” and “states’ rights.” The last two are cynical rationalizations concocted long ago by Southern propagandists to whitewash unpleasant truth.

The immigration agency is rewriting the entire test. Those deceitful answers need to come out.

Haley’s rambling answer in the mountains of New Hampshire sounded as if had been scripted by the same Confederate revisionists who got a University of Florida professor fired more than a century ago for saying the South was wrong to start the war.

There hasn’t been such a gaffe since President Gerald Ford declared during a debate with Jimmy Carter in 1976 that “There is no Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe.” Ford knew better, and so does Haley.

Her own state’s history

Her state of South Carolina was the first to secede after Abraham Lincoln was elected president. The delegates blamed it in writing on his opposition to slavery. South Carolina then started the Civil War by firing on Fort Sumter when the federal post refused to surrender.

As South Carolina governor, Haley sought and signed a law removing the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds after a young white supremacist shot and killed nine Black people at Charleston’s Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. church. Fittingly, a Black officer carried the folded flag away.

Haley has traded on that in her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. She knows full well that the Confederate flag, widely flaunted as a symbol by racists today, stood for a war fought to perpetuate and spread the appalling practice of slavery.

What she said in New Hampshire echoed the massive propaganda campaign run by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, white supremacist politicians, fiction writers and even many pro-Southern academic historians after Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow began. Their goal: sanitize slavery and its foul consequences. That’s how history was taught throughout the South. The effects persist.

The Confederate monuments being removed by courageous officials in Jacksonville and other Southern cities were put up as part of that disinformation campaign. The statues imply nobility in one of history’s most ignoble causes. As state Rep. Angie Nixon, D-Jacksonville, put it succinctly,

“We should not be uplifting losers who wanted to keep my people enslaved.”

Don’t go there, Governor

One person who should have kept his mouth shut about Haley is Gov. Ron DeSantis, her rival for the Republican presidential nomination.

“The minute she faces any type of scrutiny, she tends to cave,” DeSantis said. “It’s not that difficult to identify and acknowledge the role slavery played in the Civil War.”

This is the governor responsible for Florida’s artfully worded school standards that put a gloss on the dehumanizing brutality of slavery.

He’s also responsible for a law that prevents the truthful teaching of history if it might make any students — meaning white students — claim to be ashamed of their race.

Another DeSantis law forbids schools and universities from doing anything to promote diversity, equity or inclusion.

Even private businesses are barred from requiring sensitivity training. Under his pressure, the College Board dumbed down its AP Black History course to try to suit his starched-white preferences.

The point of all of this mass denial is to curry the votes of white people who resent racial equality and America’s changing demographics.

Consciously or not, that’s why Haley ducked the truth. For DeSantis to attack her over it is like being called ugly by a toad.