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2024 Republican presidential hopeful and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley speaks on the New Hampshire Republican Social gathering’s First within the Nation Management Summit in Nashua, New Hampshire, on October 13, 2023. | Supply: JOSEPH PREZIOSO / Getty
Nikki Haley discovered herself trending on social media for all of the improper causes after whiffing spectacularly on a softball query posed by an viewers member at a city corridor occasion Wednesday night time in New Hampshire.
On face worth, the query was easy sufficient: “What induced the Civil Battle?”
Haley’s reply was not solely simply as easy, nevertheless it was additionally simply plain incorrect.
“I imply, I feel the reason for the Civil Battle was principally how authorities was going to run the freedoms and what individuals might and couldn’t do,” Haley mentioned nonsensically earlier than all however admitting she was clueless and asking the one that requested her the query what he thought the reply was.
When the viewers member responded that he was in disbelief her reply didn’t point out the phrase “slavery,” Haley, who’s Indian American, appeared stunned if not flustered, and requested him one other query: “What would you like me to say about slavery?”
Whether or not the non-answer from Haley — the previous governor of South Carolina, the primary state to secede from the Union to type the Accomplice States of America (also called the Confederacy) — was actually borne out of ignorance is anybody’s guess.
On Thursday morning, doing injury management, Haley backtracked on her flub the night time earlier than and advised New Hampshire voters that “After all, the Civil Battle was about slavery.”
But when historical past is any indication — and it often is — Haley’s preliminary omission of slavery because it pertains to the reason for the Civil Battle was the most recent occasion in a bigger sample of Republicans making an attempt to revise, whitewash and downplay American historical past during which Black individuals are undeniably centered.
What induced the Civil Battle?
In line with Daniel Feller, Emeritus Professor of Historical past on the College of Tennessee, “there was just one purpose to secede from the US and create a brand new Confederacy. That was to safeguard racial slavery from the risk posed by the election of an antislavery Northerner, Abraham Lincoln, as president of the US.”
A PBS documentary on the Civil Battle recalled that “the Civil Battle was fought over the ethical concern of slavery. Actually, it was the economics of slavery and political management of that system that was central to the battle.”
And if these mainstream sources of knowledge aren’t ok, nationwide spiritual and civil rights chief Bishop William Barber reminded CNN’s viewers on Thursday that the Civil Battle “was concerning the oppression of Black women and men. It was about turning human beings into chattel.”
Republicans’ revisionist historical past
Lest we neglect it was solely earlier this yr when Tennessee’s proclamation recognizing Accomplice Historical past Month, like Haley, additionally didn’t point out slavery as soon as. The proclamation as a substitute inspired “all Tennesseans to extend their data of this momentous period within the historical past of this State.”
That proclamation was signed by outstanding state Republicans proper across the time that two Black lawmakers in Tennessee had been expelled from the Home after a Republican-led vote eliminated them from obligation for main an anti-gun protest on the Home flooring within the wake of a lethal mass capturing at an elementary college in Nashville.
GOP whitewashing Black historical past
The Republican-led whitewashing of Black historical past extends far past the specifics of the Civil Battle and into the classroom, the place critics say Republican governors like Ron DeSantis — a presidential candidate, like Haley — have taken steps to downplay slavery and victim-shame African Individuals by the use of revised college curricula for Black historical past.
In Florida, for example, the state Board of Training unanimously adopted new history-teaching measures within the face of demonstrated opposition in a state that has been devoted to eliminating Black research programs.
In 2021, an Oklahoma Republican legislator proposed a invoice that might primarily penalize faculties for instructing essential race principle and failing to lie about slavery in America.
In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin pushed a curriculum for elementary college college students decried by critics as “racist” as a result of it deliberately excluded references to each slavery and historic Black figures together with Martin Luther King, for whom there’s a complete federal vacation.
And, after all, in Haley’s house state of South Carolina, a e-book written by scholar, activist and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was just lately banned by a faculty district after college students reported their instructor designed a lesson plan concerning the piece of literature. The 2015 nonfiction bestseller, Between the World and Me, is written within the type of a three-part letter from Coates to his teenage son chronicling his lived experiences as a Black man in America. However just a few college students reportedly complained that the lesson made them “uncomfortable” and “ashamed to be Caucasian,” in an instance of what’s possible the true motivation for the entire above and loads of different unmentioned cases of Republicans whitewashing Black historical past.
Nikki Haley
To make certain, that is all on model for Haley, who in June ripped former President Barack Obama — the primary Black president — for saying that constructive takes on the present state of race relations should “be undergirded with an sincere accounting of our previous and our current.”
Haley even introduced her present presidential bid with a video that purportedly bemoaned racial division whereas photographs of The 1619 Undertaking — an award-winning initiative that launched a nationwide dialogue on the position of slavery and the way it has influenced the material of this nation, invoking the wrath of conservative Republicans all over the place — and protests over racial injustice flashed throughout the display. Haley goes on to lament within the video how “some take a look at our previous as proof that America’s founding ideas are unhealthy.”
Actually, Haley doesn’t solely have a long-established file of whitewashing Black historical past — she has additionally been accused of whitewashing her personal historical past.
Again in 2012, Haley, then governor of South Carolina who was placing her political energy behind an initiative requiring voters to indicate their IDs on the polls, needed to be reminded by Black civil rights leaders that she, too, is a racial minority.
“She couldn’t vote earlier than 1965, simply as I couldn’t,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson mentioned on the time concerning the proposed voter ID legal guidelines that critics have lengthy seen as disproportionately affecting Black and brown voters.
Two years prior, Haley refused to say the Civil Battle was fought over slavery.
Haley has additionally beforehand mentioned the Accomplice Flag was not “racist” and insisted “There’s a place for that flag.” It was solely after backlash from these feedback that Haley lastly admitted “the flag has at all times been an emblem of slavery, discrimination and hate for many individuals.”
2024 election
Haley is seen as a longshot candidate in a race for the Republican presidential nomination for which Donald Trump is the frontrunner.
However in New Hampshire, the place Haley’s flub on the Civil Battle as made, her candidacy is seen as being a lot stronger, polling exhibits.
Whereas Haley has registered 10% assist in a brand new Yahoo Information nationwide ballot, that quantity greater than doubles within the state of New Hampshire, the place 22% of the voters have pledged their assist to her.
That is America.
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