In Iowa on 1/4, an ostensible POTUS hopeful/realistic veep wannabe claimed no small degree of solidarity among herself and some “Black friends” from her grade school days (see “’Painful’: Nikki Haley slammed for using ‘Black friends’ defense after Civil War debacle,” Salon 1/5/24). She went so far as to broach (as if it were no big deal) what she called South Carolina’s “history [of]...you know, slavery.”
Yes, Guv. I do know. During the 18 months or so I’ve spent (all told) in the Palmetto State, I’ve heard (counting repeats) hundreds on hundreds of racial slurs (from Whites). Some of them strike me as even ‘less printable’ than the all-too-familiar n-word. Beyond that, I’ve studied the landmark 2009 Pulitzer winner for general nonfiction, whose title and subtitle speak volumes/shelves/data bases. Namely, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. (By Douglas Blackmon. From, of all outlets, the Wall Street Journal.)
Having spearheaded the Confederate Battle Flag’s removal from the state capitol, Haley touts her “moderate” creds. Two problems. One, if America never was racist, why did her home state accord that banner, that in-your-face symbol of slave owners’ hegemony, such a place of sacred honor? Two, given that she made her mark as a bobbleheading Trump stooge/surrogate, why does she not damn to the bowels of hell the search-and-destroy mission that saw that self-same flag wave, in all its toxic vainglory, in and around what Nancy Pelosi calls “the temple of our democracy” (aka our nation’s Capitol)?
Yes, Guv. I do know. I know enough to read the writing on the wall when Ron ‘Slavery As A Career Path’ DeSantis agrees with you that America was “never...racist” (see “Haley says US has ‘never been a racist country,’” CNN, 1/17).
Talk about weaponized ignorance. After toadying to Trump, must she now decline to acknowledge how starkly the Trump troop’s J6 gallows-cum-noose recalls the Ku Klux Klan’s democracy-smiting reign of race-based terror? Can she not grasp why US Navy combat vet/author/pundit/Ukraine legionnaire Malcolm Nance resolves the Capitol raiders’ “special body armor: their White skin?”
More than just the Trump era gets memory-holed. In 1980, Ronald “Monkeys” [as he once called some African UN delegates] Reagan (R) launched his general run for the White House before a nearly all-White crowd in a Mississippi town of 7000. Sixteen years earlier, not far from the Neshoba County Bandstand where he spoke, Whites had lynched three civil rights activists. America-the-never-racist, says Haley. (Really? On what planet might that be?)
Two items for the record. One, before touting Trump, the Klan feted Reagan. Two, Haley herself was born in 1972. That’s halfway between said 1964 triple lynching and Reagan’s Neshoba knuckle-dragging (where he effectively red-meated “States’ Rights [to rule by lynch mob].” While Haley was still an infant, Richard “Not A Crook” Nixon (R) caught himself on audio tape snarling that it would take “centuries” for Blacks to start contributing to the US commonweal. Before, during, and after Haley’s birth, racism has been as American as peach pie (and as Republican as plutocracy).
Mississippi native/Nobel laureate Willliam Faulkner reminds us that “The past is….not even past.” In a nutshell, here’s some background that we’re not supposed to know. In 1619, the Africa-to-America (broadly defined) slave trade that Christopher Columbus and son had established in the Indies metastasized to the mainland (i.e. Jamestown). Through the next half-century, it began to flourish in tidewater Virginia. Some of North Carolina. And in southern Maryland.
In 1670, some reputedly brutal British/Barbadian slave lords began to settle in and near what is now the lovely, Fort Sumter harboring city of Charleston, SC. Voila: the genesis of the Deep South.
Alas, it was not all moonlight, magnolias, and gleeful slaves galore. In the 2011 masterwork American Nations, journalist/author Colin Woodard points out that Deep South slaves’ mortality rate DOUBLED their tidewater counterparts’.
“You know,” Haley smarms. “Slavery.” In truth, for the most part, we still don’t know. As Slavery by Another Name documents and spotlights, in late 1941 (NOT April, 1865), FDR (NOT Abe Lincoln) at long last quashed the land of the free’s race-based slavery; he did so by ordering AG Francis Biddle to bust the scads of well-heeled perps who owned-and-sold latter-day, speciously ‘convicted’ penal slaves.
For all the accolades garnered by Blackmon’s book, few Americans seem to know such stuff. Alas, the Nazis (whom Trump now channels) were keenly and fondly aware. (Not to say such evils were confined to the South. Lest we ‘forget,’ Trump’s father was reportedly arrested at a Big Apple KKK rally. Like Trump pere et fils, the Hitler-inspiring eugenicist Madison Grant was New York born-and-raised. And so on.)
But still. Haley’s claim that America has never been racist resounds back to Dixie in general, and to the Palmetto State in particular. In 1944, less than 3 years after FDR at long last snuffed American slavery, Haley’s future home and native state charged 14-year-old George Stinney, Jr. with killing two White girls. No evidence? No problem! After a warp-speed, 10-minute ‘trial,’ a White jury (in all its solemn wisdom) convicted the lad, with every expectation that he’d be sentenced to death.
Help! Can some media marvel please make bold to ask Haley if, while America was never racist, that grim charade, that shameful episode might have had something to do with Stinney, Jr. being Black?
As Faulkner suggests, such ‘heritage’ remains undead. On 1/6/21, a nearly all-White, evidently ‘Trumped up’ invasion force did what Confederates had failed to do in the 1860s. That is (as alluded to above), it smashed its way into our Capitol. Waved said battle flag. And had itself a harrowing, violent field day.
“Fight[ing] like hell” (as Trump blared on the Ellipse), on the Capitol’s Upper West Terrace, Trump-aligned militant Zach Rehl crowed “Civil war started!” And here’s the thing. At Mississippi’s behest, in Statuary Hall (smack near the Rotunda) stands a statue of Confederate Commander-in-Chief Jefferson Davis. Not without seditionist zeal, he watches. And glowers. As if poised, in the end, to win.