Via Rollingstone.
Former South Carolina Governor and current presidential candidate Nikki Haley insisted on Tuesday that America has “never been a racist country,” before claiming she had experienced racism in her own life.
Speaking to Fox News the morning after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucus, Haley was asked if she felt she belonged to a “racist” party.
“No, we’re not a racist country,” Haley replied. “We’ve never been a racist country. Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try to be more perfect every day that we can.”
“I know, I faced racism when I was growing up,” Haley added.
Laughable contradiction aside, Haley’s comments, made the day after a national holiday commemorating civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr., are of course completely ahistorical. From slavery, to segregation, to the ongoing discrimination and vilification faced by immigrants and minority groups, racism is a central component of the nation’s history — one that continues to have profound effects on American life.
Well, this proves her gaff of not mentioning “Slavery” as a cause for the Civil War wasn’t a fluke.
Quoting Haley
Haley: We’re not a racist country, we’ve never been a racist country. Our goal is to make sure that tomorrow is better than yesterday. Our goal is to make sure we will always be more perfect in every way that we can.
I know, I faced racism growing up — but I can tell you that today is a lot better than it was then.
Our goal is to lift up everybody, not go and divide people on race, or gender or party or anything else. We’ve had enough of that in America. That’s why I’m so passionate about doing this.
Haley argues that things are better than they used to be, and that’s demonstrably true. She argues that she only wants things to continue getting better, and that’s a good sentiment. It’s after that point that she leans into the wingnut narrative.
Haley: I don’t want my kids growing up, sitting there thinking that they’re disadvanted because of a color or a gender. I want them to know that if they work hard they can do and be anything they want to be in America.
And there we have it, the meritocracy myth appears again. You can do anything — if you just y’know — Try. Like Hard. Yes, that perfectly explains why we’ve never had a woman President before, they just didn’t try hard enough. We’ve only had one black President. So obviously, all the other black guys just didn't TRY. We’ve never had anything but a Christian president — so all you Muslims, and Jews, and you Hindus, and you Sikhs (like you Nimrata), and all you Buddhists — you only gotta TRY more. That’s your problem.
It has nothing to do with anyone else, anywhere, doing — anything. Right?
Frankly, It’s not a matter of what your kids think is going on, the issue is will they actually be disadvantaged or not? It's not an issue of perception, it's an issue of reality.
And the reality is this: If you know ahead of time that you may be disadvantaged, that just might prepare you to fight even harder even if you also know that you might only get half as far ultimately. But being unaware and blind to the real challenges in your path just might set you up for a sad and painful disappointment when your efforts are found “insufficient.”
Which is it that your kids should really be thinking?
RS Continued.
Haley seems wholly ignorant of that history. Last month, she drew criticism after claiming that the American Civil War “was basically how government was going to run,” and “the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” during a New Hampshire town hall — without making any mention of the role slavery played in the conflict. She later tried to defend the comments in part by saying she had “Black friends growing up.”
Haley, the child of immigrant Sikh parents from Punjab, India, has spoken about her experiences with discrimination throughout her life. In 2011 she described to The New York Times having been kicked out of a beauty pageant as a five-year-old because she did not fit into a specific racial category. In 2010, during Haley’s run for the South Carolina governorship, former GOP state Sen. Jake Knotts was asked to resign after referring to Haley as a “raghead” because of her Sikh background.
So if you look at things this way, defining “racism” as to whether or not you have been personally confronted with racial slurs like “raghead”, “spick”, “wetback”, “wopp”, “kike” or “Nigger” chances are those experiences — where someone expresses racism directly to your face — have probably been pretty rare and increasingly so.
If that’s your metric, then it would be easy to say that America is mostly “not racist” because it’s not very common these days for people to openly express their racism in such terms. Most people deny it. [Probably because expressing such things could now expose you to possible criminal or civil action if someone can prove that you’ve acted on that bias in a professional capacity]
But does that mean they don’t still feel the same way without saying the words?
Well, there's been a former MAGA promoter who says that while he now opposes the movement, most of the people involved “aren’t racist and are still good people.”
Rich Logis, a former right wing pundit now dedicated to dismantling the Make America Great Again movement, published a Salon piece on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in defense of the people he’d like to see leave their political fold.
“Anxiety about America’s dwindling white population does not necessarily mean those who are anxious are racists or white supremacists,” Logis argues.
“In my conversations with fellow MAGA members, I don't recall any that dismissed the abhorrence of slavery,” he adds. “There was, however, considerable apprehension about the increase in national conversations about anti-Black racism.”
Logis’ logic — which would separate away from racism MAGA anxiety over changing demographics and social justice movements — relies on a white trauma narrative he blames on untrustworthy leaders who play upon their fears.
“Politicians and pundits whom the MAGA community follow have traumatized their followers to conclude that the imminent minority status of white people also means they will become a marginalized group,” Logis writes.
Yeah, y’know what I would call having “anxiety over racial demographics?”
Racism.
It doesn’t mean you support the implementation of slavery. It doesn’t mean you dislike black or brown people or would ever use the “N-word.”
It means you fear them. If having “Too many” Black, Latino, Muslim or Hindu people in the country or in your community is a problem for you — then that is still Racism. Logis is attempting a goal-post-shift here that is nonsense. It may help with his goal of trying to better appeal to MAGAs by putting them at ease that they won’t be criticized, but it’s bullshit. He’s trying to talk them out of being MAGAs — good luck with that — and I can see that his opening move shouldn't be to insult them. I get that strategy, but it’s nonsense.
This is the same goal-post-boogaloo that Nikki is attempting. Not everyone is a racist, so the country is not racist. Not everyone will racially insult you, so the country is not racist. Not everyone held slaves. Not everyone marched the Native Americans on the trail of tears. Not everyone blocked African Americans from voting, or going to college, or getting a nice job, or getting a loan, or buying a nice house. Therefore, ipso facto, the *Nation* — writ large — is not “racist.”
Yeah, ok.
I understand that MAGAs are likely sick of being called “Racist.” They may believe that a true racist is a whip-carrying over-seerer or slave-holding plantation owner from something like 12 Years a Slave and they certainly don't think of themselves in that way.
They’re nothing like someone like this.
But they still have “racial anxiety” — they still fear CRT and the 1619 Project. They still fear the people — mostly mothers and children — who are desperately trying to escape the deadly drug Cartels of Central and South America that are funded and armed by us, here in the U.S. They fear Muslims because they believe they all secretly sympathize with Al Qaeda and ISiS. They fear “Democrat Cities” because they’re full of “black criminals.”
So how exactly is all that shit not Racist?
If that is how you feel, where are you going to stand when there’s a potentially bigoted issue on the ballot? How are you going to vote? Do you truly think “Mexicans are Rapists” or not? Do you want a Wall for that reason? What will you stand for, and what policies will you stand against?
If you define a “racist country” as one where everyone is racist — then the answer is “No, of course not.”
Everyone in America is not a racist. And that has never been the case.
Sadly, you can also fairly state that most Americans didn’t fight racism either. Most people didn’t implement racism, but they also didn’t try to stop it. If it wasn’t impacting them personally, most people didn’t care and just let it slide. They didn't want to be bothered with it.
The movement to Abolish slavery didn't really get going until people read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
[Harriet Beacher] Stowe was an author whose commitment to the abolitionist cause was strengthened after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. She responded with the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, an immediate best seller that was credited with “putting a human face on slavery” and ultimately helping launch the Civil War.
Most people didn't much care about the issue of Civil Rights until they saw Bloody Sunday happen on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
On Sunday morning, March 7, 1965, about 600 people met after church in Selma, Alabama, to begin a 54-mile march to Montgomery. They were protesting continued violence and civil rights discrimination — and to bring attention to the need for Federal voting rights legislation that would ensure African-Americans couldn't be denied the right to vote in any state. News and images of the violent response from Alabama State Troopers spread in newspapers, magazines, and television. The day came to be known as "Bloody Sunday."
It’s not the case that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a national hero when he was killed, for many he was vilified as a “troublemaker.”
Many white Americans were saddened or appalled; others felt untouched by the murder and some actually celebrated, calling King a “troublemaker.” King's funeral in Atlanta drew leaders from around the world. Later, President Johnson pressured Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968 in tribute to King's work.
Not everyone was racist, but not everyone else was against racism. It continued and spread because most people were apathetic. Just as our major media continues to downplay and whitewash it today.
But if you define a “racist country” as one that has time and time again repeatedly implemented racist private, corporate and government policies -— starting with the original Fugitive Slave Clause which forced every state in the nation to support the slave trade,...
Clause 3. No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
to the exception of the “duly convicted” in the 13th Amendment which allows slavery to continue to be implemented within the Criminal justice complex to this very day, ...
Amendment XIII:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
an exception that allowed for the growth of Debt Peonage and Convict Leasing which was an even more brutal system of forced labor than slavery which was in common use well into the 1940’s, ...
Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. However, after Reconstruction, many Southern black men were swept into peonage though different methods, and the system was not completely eradicated until the 1940s.
[...]
In many more cases, however, workers became indebted to planters (through sharecropping loans), merchants (through credit), or company stores (through living expenses). Workers were often unable to re-pay the debt, and found themselves in a continuous work-without-pay cycle.
But the most corrupt and abusive peonage occurred in concert with southern state and county government. In the south, many black men were picked up for minor crimes or on trumped-up charges, and, when faced with staggering fines and court fees, forced to work for a local employer would who pay their fines for them. Southern states also leased their convicts en mass to local industrialists. The paperwork and debt record of individual prisoners was often lost, and these men found themselves trapped in inescapable situations.
and...
After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of Black people were forced into what authors have termed “slavery by another name” until the 1930s.
to the implementation of violent racial riots like the attack that decimated Greenwood Oklahoma in 1921 which killed 300 people and also erupted in Northern cities like Chicago in 1919…
The summer’s riots were fueled by simmering tensions and sparked by the stoning and drowning of a Black teenager named Eugene Williams. Williams had been on a raft with friends when they floated across the line dividing the White and Black beaches. George Stauber, a 24-year-old White man, began throwing rocks at the youths. One rock struck Williams, who fell off the raft and drowned. The police at the murder scene refused to arrest Stauber. The riots began at the beach on July 27th and lasted until August 3rd, 38 people were killed and 537 injured during the Chicago Race Riots.
The violence ended after the National Guard stepped in. Deadly racial riots had occurred across the U.S. during 1919’s “Red Summer.” Many considered the Chicago’s riots the worst.
to Plessy V Ferguson which allowed for the implementation of “Separate and (Un)Equal” which led to Racial Covenants…
A covenant is a legally enforceable “contract” imposed in a deed upon the buyer of property https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/payday-loans.html. Owners who violate the terms of the covenant risk forfeiting the property. Most covenants “run with the land” and are legally enforceable on future buyers of the property.
Racially restrictive covenants refer to contractual agreements that prohibit the purchase, lease, or occupation of a piece of property by a particular group of people, usually African Americans. Racially restrictive covenants were not only mutual agreements between property owners in a neighborhood not to sell to certain people, but were also agreements enforced through the cooperation of real estate boards and neighborhood associations. Racially restrictive covenants became common after 1926 after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Corrigan v. Buckley, which validated their use.
and Racial Red-Lining in housing which were used to manufacture secluded and impoverished ethnic ghettos around the nation, ...
In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America's housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a "state-sponsored system of segregation."
The government's efforts were "primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families," he says. African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects.
Rothstein's new book, The Color of Law, examines the local, state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation. He notes that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as "redlining." At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.
to the consistently racially biased implementation of law enforcement and the judicial system which has incarcerated black people at a rate of 5 to 1 compared to whites, ...
In recent years, police violence and militarization have been under a microscope. For many Americans, it is now frighteningly clear that police consider Black people suspects when sitting in their backyards, failing to signal, and simply going about many daily life activities — and that this racial targeting too often results in callous abuses, unjust imprisonment, and senseless killings at law enforcement’s hands. Tragically, policing is only one of many racial discrimination pitfalls in America’s criminal justice system, merely representing the first step in a deeply problematic process.
[...]
While peremptory challenges are limited, prosecutors often abuse this process to strike Black jurors — particularly when the defendant is Black — even though it’s illegal to strike a juror based on their race or ethnicity.
In one of the most egregious and infamous examples of this kind of systemic discrimination, former Mississippi District Attorney Doug Evans struck Black jurors 4.4 times more frequently than white jurors over the course of his nearly 30-year career. Under Evans’ authority, defendant Curtis Flowers, who is Black, faced six trials for the same charge, each resulting in a hung jury or a reversed conviction due to prosecutorial misconduct. During those six trials, Evans removed 41 of 42 potential Black jurors and struck them 20 times more frequently than white jurors.
[...]
While attorneys from both the defense and prosecution can strike potential jurors they believe hold biases that will prevent them from providing a fair verdict, many substantial biases either go undetected or, worse, are tolerated outright. There have been countless cases where a person of color was convicted of a crime, and it was later discovered that one or more jurors responsible for determining their innocence were racist. It is also important to note that the true number of cases where racism among jury members has resulted in an unfair conviction of a person of color is unknown. [...] According to the Sentencing Project, 48% of people serving life or virtually life sentences are Black. Moreover, in 2017, the United States Sentencing Commission reported that Black men receive federal prison sentences that are nearly 20% longer than white men convicted of the same crime. Federal prosecutors are also twice as likely to charge Black people with offenses carrying a mandatory minimum sentence than their white counterparts.
where this attitude allowed the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against Black Farmers for decades — leading all the way into the 1990s,
Black farmers have long faced systemic discrimination by public and private institutions and barriers to economic mobility. Inequities in the administration of government farm programs and discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture have had a devastating impact on rural communities of color. Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates there are roughly 40,000 Black farmers in America, owning less than one percent of our nation’s farmland as compared to roughly 95 percent of farmland owned by their white counterparts. Land dispossession and the unequal treatment of Black farmers have only widened the racial wealth gap and stymied intergenerational and community wealth building.
[...]
Farmers rely on credit to keep their businesses afloat, borrowing against expected harvests to pay for equipment, livestock, seeds, and supplies, and the rent or mortgage on their land, or relying on credit to make ends meet when the price of commodities fluctuates or weather causes crop failures. Yet Black farmers have long been denied the benefits of federal programs and struggled to access loans and other resources. As a result, the number of Black farmers has plummeted: In 1920, Black farmers operated about one-seventh of all farm operations in the United States. Today, Black farmers make up less than two percent of all farmers. Between 1920 and 1997, Black farmers gave up farmland, along with income from that land, that would be worth approximately $326 billion today.
to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby V Holder over a decade ago that has empowered dozens of states to implement racist voter suppression...
Over the past decade, scholars have studied myriad ways in which certain state voting rules make participation disproportionately difficult for Americans of color — including strict voter ID laws, lines faced on Election Day, and other facets of our election system. This analysis catalogs some of the most prominent research findings on the negative impact of voting restrictions on voters of color.
There is a large and growing pile of evidence that strict voter ID laws disproportionately impact voters of color.
- Using county-level turnout data around the country, researchers demonstrated that the racial turnout gap grew when states enacted strict voter ID laws.
- Researchers have also looked specifically at the turnout of individuals in North Carolina without proper identification, and they found that the enactment of the law reduced turnout. The turnout effects continued even after the strict voter ID law was repealed.
- Another study shows that voters in Texas who would be barred from voting absent the state’s “Reasonable Impediments Declaration” (a court-ordered remedy allowing voters without proper IDs to participate) are disproportionately Black and Latino. The study argues that its “findings indicate that strict identification laws will stop a disproportionately minority, otherwise willing set of registered voters from voting.”
- An article using a similar methodology and administrative records found that voters of color in Michigan were more likely to show up to the polls without proper identification.
- Yet another study used survey data to demonstrate that voters of color in states across the country lacked access to the needed IDs to vote in their state.
- While some studies have argued that voter IDs have little effect on overall turnout, it is clear that voters of color are less likely to have the IDs needed to participate.
and racist gerrymandering….
It’s election season again and, in America, sadly, that means it is voter suppression season. Starting in 2020, 49 states proposed over 440 bills to make it harder for Americans to vote, and many of them have passed. In 2021, state lawmakers started using the newly released census data to draw state maps that lock up their political power – often at the expense of communities of color. And now in 2022, these tactics are almost certain to impact the midterm elections for Congress, as well as local and state elections nationwide. Federal legislation that would have addressed these tactics and reversed some of the Supreme Court’s gut punches to the Voting Rights Act has stalled. And Republican lawmakers in at least eight states are trying to strip away power from secretaries of state, governors, and nonpartisan election boards over how elections are run and counted–effectively giving political operatives the power to cancel your vote.
...then you can only come to one logical conclusion.
If you look in terms of public policy — in terms of how decisions in this country have been repeatedly made on racial grounds — how can you possibly argue that this country has “not been racist?”
It has been. It still is.
The MAGAs say they just want America to be “Great Again.”
But let me just quote myself from when I questioned “When exactly was America Great?”
When was that? During Jim Crow? During segregation? While COINTELPRO when the FBI was killing and framing innocent people? Before the riots at Stonewall? Before Kent State? After the Trail of Tears? While the KKK was lynching people left and right? After the Tuskegee experiment? After the Chinese Exclusion Act? After Operation Wetback? After the mass incarceration of the War on Drugs? After the internment of Japanese citizens? After the Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond against Truman on a segregation platform? When Goldwater opposed Civil Rights? During the Southern Strategy? After the Wilie Horton ad? After “super predators” and three strikes? Before women could vote? Before African Americans were considered citizens, or even people? Was it great after the Homestead Act which granted land stolen from Native American tribes exclusively to White Americans? Was it great as Native American children were herded into boarding schools where their culture, then language - and often their lives - were stripped away? Was it great while the Department of Agriculture was discriminating against Black farmers by unfairly denying them loans? Was it great while big banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America wrongly steered Black homeowners into subprime mortgage loans that exploded on contact? Before an unarmed Rodney King, an unarmed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Michael Brown, an unarmed Tamir Rice, an unarmed Adam Toledo, an unarmed Philando Castille, an unarmed Darren Crawford III, an unarmed Armaud Arbery, an unarmed Walter Scott, an unarmed Patrick Lyoya and an unarmed George Floyd were brutalized and killed by police and bigots in the street, most of them having not committed any crime at all? Was it before Obama was elected?
When exactly was that “Great” time?
How exactly can the case be made — considering what has been codified into the Constitution, what has been government policy, what the Supreme Court has repeatedly decided, what private companies have chosen and done, what racial covenants have been established — that this country has not been repeatedly, virulently, racist?
It’s simply a denial of factual reality to claim it’s “never been” racist.
No one may have been racist to you personally recently. No one may have called you a racist slur. That hardly happens anymore, which is true. We have come a long way since that type of thing was commonplace. No one has, as a private citizen, “owned” a slave since — oh — 1942.
But not being personally affronted means nothing compared to the racist policies that have been implemented. Policies that continue to be implemented from the banning of books and classes on African-American History and Gender studies — systemic bias in the Justice system to ongoing and growing Voter Suppression.
The honest assessment can only be that this country has been racist since before its founding — and what we need to do is strive to not continue to be racist anymore. We need most of us to be against racism.
More importantly, we need a reconning on all these policies — and we need to strive to repair the massive damage that was done by them. Certainly in theory we can all be “anything we want” but we aren’t all starting from the same even playing field, some of us have been placed far, far behind the starting line. And we aren't all racing along the same path, some of us are running downhill, while some of us are on an uphill steeple-chase.
But Nimrata is not the person that will likely do what needs to be done. She can’t even admit that the country has *ever* been racist. She’s one of those people probably who isn’t a racist, but she isn't against racism all that much either. She doesn’t even see racism, not even when it’s right in her face.
She won't be the person to fix any of it.
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