A day after the United States honored the memory of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley insisted to Fox News that America “has never been a racist country.”
The former South Carolina governor’s comments come just weeks after she sparked backlash by failing to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War, prompting numerous clean-up attempts that included blaming her flub on a “Democrat plant” and mentioning her “Black friends.”
Haley’s latest remarks are in response to MSNBC host Joy Reid claiming that Haley’s third-place finish in the Iowa Republican caucus on Monday night is largely due to the former United Nations ambassador’s race and ethnicity. Following Donald Trump’s blowout victory in Iowa, Reid noted that the majority of Republican voters agree with the ex-president’s Hitleresque “poisoning the blood” rhetoric about migrants, adding that Trump has also suggested Haley isn’t qualified to be president because her parents are immigrants.
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“It’s the elephant in the room. She’s still a brown lady that’s got to try to win in a party that is deeply anti-immigrant, and which accepts the notion you can say immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country,” the MSNBC host said. “She’s getting birthered by Donald Trump, and I don’t care how much the donor class likes her—which will ramp up a lot the better she does in New Hampshire—it’s still a challenge.”
During a Tuesday morning appearance on Fox & Friends, Haley was asked to respond to Reid’s comment. The progressive host, Haley said, “lives in a different America than I do.”
“I am a brown girl that grew up in South Carolina who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a UN ambassador and is now running for president,” she added. “If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is.”
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade then wondered aloud whether Haley believes the GOP is a “racist party,” leading Haley not to only defend Republicans but also the history of the United States.
“No! We’re not a racist country, Brian! We’ve never been a racist country,” the presidential hopeful exclaimed. “Our goal is to make sure we are better than yesterday.”
Aside from the fact that slavery was legal in the U.S. until the 1860s and was the main reason the country fought a bloody internal war, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1896 that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution, further emboldening Jim Crow codes in the South. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, led by King, that Black Americans finally achieved some form of equal protection in the U.S.
Moments after saying America was never racist, Haley lamented that she “faced racism growing up” in the Deep South and said “today is better than it was then,” seemingly contradicting her own assertions about the country’s racial history.
Haley concluded the interview by saying her “goal is to lift up everybody, not divide on race, gender or party,” adding that other countries around the globe envy U.S. “freedom of speech and religion” and Americans’ ability to “be anything we want to be without government getting in the way.”
