There was a moment in which people thought — and many liberals feared — that Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and former United States ambassador to the United Nations, would be the post-Donald Trump face of the Republican Party as a political candidate.
She was somewhat respected, had crafted an image of competence and seemed to have more of a moral center than many Republicans now toeing the line in support of Trump. Also, she would solve, or at least challenge, two of the issues that continue to dog Republicans: racism and misogyny. She is an Indian American woman.
But, Haley burned all that to the ground when she engaged in an astounding bit of revisionist racial history about the Confederate battle flag and its relationship to Dylann Roof, the then 21-year-old white supremacist who in 2015 gunned down nine black worshippers in the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
In an interview for Glenn Beck’s podcast, Haley said:
“Here is this guy that comes out with his manifesto, holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of. We don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. There’s always the small minority that’s always going to be there, but people saw it as service and sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it.”
This is such an astonishing statement for the very brazenness of its erasure of history and its bowing to a racist narrative. Any image of morality and unity Haley had cultivated vanished when those words left her lips.
Even the idea that Haley is a heroine of the taking down of the flag in South Carolina is a myth, like the idea that Roof suddenly altered the reality and meaning of the flag.
So, I reached out to Bree Newsome Bass, the young activist who scaled a flagpole in the wake of the shooting and removed the Confederate battle flag by hand. Bass is a true heroine of the flag’s removal.
Bass quite correctly saw Haley’s response “as part of the ongoing revisionist history that people continue to engage in around Confederate symbology.”
The NAACP had been boycotting the state for 15 years, including under Haley’s tenure as governor, before the state finally took it down. In 2011, Ben Jealous, then the NAACP president, issued this scathing assessment of Haley on the flag: “Perhaps one of the most perplexing examples of the contradictions of this moment in history is that Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s first governor of color, continues to fly the Confederate flag in front of her state’s Capitol.”
Indeed, just eight months before Dylann Roof executed his horrific act of white-supremacist terror, she deflected from the issue of removing the flag in a gubernatorial debate, instead saying of the “sensitive issue” surrounding it, “We really kind of fixed all that when we elected the first Indian American female governor.”
Be clear, Haley: The Indian American journey in this country is special and important, but that journey has absolutely nothing to do with adjusting or erasing the journey of enslaved Africans and their descendants in this country.
Haley used her status as a racial minority to shield her party’s racial animus.
The people who want to recast this racist emblem of a flag as “Southern pride” are the white Republicans in the South that Haley had to court to win her seat. A CNN poll conducted in 2015 found that 75% of Southern whites describe the flag as a symbol of pride.
Let’s be clear: The Confederate battle flag we know today is an emblem of oppression, white supremacy and the fight to maintain slavery. That is its heritage.
William T. Thompson wrote in an 1863 editorial about the “Stainless Banner,” the second national flag of the Confederacy, “Our idea is simply to combine the present battle flag with a pure white standard sheet.” He continued, “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematic of our cause.”
In South Carolina, the Confederate battle flag made a slow march to greater prominence as civil rights for black people were asserted or attained, beginning by being displayed in the State House in 1938 “after angry Southerners in Congress managed to defeat a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime” and reaching the top of the dome on the Capitol in 1962 “after President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to end poll taxes and literacy tests for voting and the Supreme Court struck down segregation in public transportation,” as The New York Times wrote in 2015.
Whereas Roof’s killings had shocked the state, and President Barack Obama’s eulogy at the funeral of one of the slain had moved it, Bass’ radical action had embarrassed it.
As she put it, when Dylann Roof displayed the Confederate flag, “He was coming in the tradition of that racism and that violence.”
Bass makes a piercing point: The NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan “are in agreement about what the Confederate flag is.” There is no true ambiguity.
Charles Blow |The New York Times
Charles M. Blow is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.