Two days after Nikki Haley claimed in a Fox News interview that the United States “has never been a racist country,” the GOP presidential candidate was asked to explain herself during a town hall event at New England College in New Hampshire.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper, after reading her remarks back to her, pointed out a few inconvenient facts.
“Protections for the institution of slavery were written into the U.S. Constitution. The White House was built with slave labor. Your home state of South Carolina seceded from the Union—fought a war to defend the enslavement of Black people,” he told Haley, who recently didn’t mention slavery as a cause of the Civil War when asked directly about it.
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“I understand you don’t think America is a racist country now,” Tapper continued. “But we’re here at a college. Do you really think, as a historical matter, America has never been a racist country?”
Haley responded first by citing the Declaration of Independence.
“It was that men are created equal with unalienable rights, right? That was what we all knew,” she said. “But what I look at it as is I was a brown girl that grew up in a small, rural town. We had plenty of racism that we had to deal with, but my parents never said we lived in a racist country, and I’m so thankful they didn’t, because for every brown and Black child out there, if you tell them they live or are born in a racist country, you’re immediately telling them they don’t have a chance.”
“I think it’s important that we tell all kids that, look, America is not perfect. We have our stains. We know that,” she added. “But our goal should always be to make today better than yesterday. It’s hugely important.”
The former South Carolina governor went on to claim that too many people are participating in “national self-loathing.”
“It is killing our country. We have got to go back to loving America,” she urged. “We are blessed, because that little brown girl in that small rural town in South Carolina, she grew up to become the first female minority governor in history. She then went on to be U.N. ambassador, and now she’s running for president of the United States.
“I want every brown and Black child to see that and say, no, I don’t live in a country that was formed on racism. I live in a country where they wanted all people to be equal and to make sure they had life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Tapper stayed on the issue, telling Haley that she was pointing out “the ideals” of the country.
“But America was founded institutionally on many racist precepts, including slavery,” he said.
Haley then cited once again the country’s founding document that all but assured the Revolutionary War.
“But when you look, it said, ‘All men are created equal.’ I think the intent, the intent was to do the right thing,” she said, basically agreeing with how Tapper had said that her focus was on the aspirations of the founding fathers.
“Now, did they have to go fix it along the way? Yes,” she said. “But I don’t think the intent was ever that we were going to be a racist country. The intent was everybody was going to be created equally. And as we went through time, they fixed the things that were not ‘all men are created equal.’ They made sure. Women became equal, too. All of these things happened over time.”
“But I refuse to believe that the premise of when they formed our country was based on the fact that it was a racist country to start with. I refuse to believe that,” she concluded.
“I have to know in my heart and in everybody’s heart, that we live in the best country in the world and we are a work in progress and we’ve got a long way to go to fix all of our little kinks. But I truly believe our founding fathers had the best of intentions when they started, and we fixed it along the way, and we should always look at it that way.”
