Vice President Kamala Harris labeled on Tuesday Nikki Haley’s comments on racism as attempts at “soundbites” and said that there is “no denying” how racism is interwoven in U.S. history.
“It’s unfortunate that there are some who would deny fact, or overlook it, when in fact moving toward progress requires that we speak truth,” Harris told the View panel.
Harris appeared on The View, where Ana Navarro asked her to respond to Haley’s comments to Fox News on Tuesday that the U.S. has “never been a racist country,” a declaration she made weeks after suggesting the Civil War was not predicated on slavery.
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“I think we all would agree that while it is part of our past, and that and we see vestiges of it today, we should also be committed collectively to not letting it define the future of our country,” Harris told the panel. “But we cannot get to a place of progress on the issue of race by denying the existence of racism, by denying the history of racism.”
Haley has offered a slight equivocation on her Tuesday comments, acknowledging in a statement to CNN that America “has always had racism, but America has never been a racist country.”
“The liberal media always fails to get that distinction,” the spokesperson told CNN. “It can throw a fit, but that doesn’t change Nikki’s belief that America is special because its people are always striving to do better and live up to our founding ideals of freedom and equality.”
But Haley’s suggestions are indicative of a larger trend among Republicans, Harris suggested. She cited GOP efforts to ban books in schools as an example of limiting access to material that highlights America’s full history of racism.
“To suggest that enslaved people benefited from slavery, we will not grow as a country to push that kind of approach and doctrine and misinformation,” Harris told the panel. “It is not in our best interest to evolve on the issue of race in America, to suggest that the Civil War was prompted by anything other than slavery in America. It is not in the best interest of our progress as a nation to ban books and deny our children the ability to benefit from the knowledge of America's full history so that we can move toward progress.”
