New in PJ Media:
Can Nikki Haley read the room? Apparently not. With the New Hampshire primary just two days away, on Sunday she played the race card in a big way, making outlandish and implausible claims about her youth in South Carolina. Whose votes is she trying to win? Those of patriotic voters who are thoroughly sick of charges of “racism” being used as a weapon or those of the entrenched Washington establishment that weaponized those charges? The answer isn’t even close to being in doubt.
Haley came out big for identity politics on NBC Sunday, saying: “We were the only Indian family in our small southern town. I was teased every day for being brown. So anyone that wants to question it can go back and look at what I’ve said on how hard it was to grow up in the deep South as a brown girl.”
Now wait a minute here. It’s very common for kids to tease one another, and to seize upon whatever is available to do the teasing with, but did Nikki Haley really experience racism in the deep South? She was born in South Carolina in 1972. So she is talking about suffering from racist teasing in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet Haley didn’t grow up in the South of Theodore Bilbo and Bull Connor. She grew up in the New South of Ted Turner and Jimmy Carter, when even old segregationists including George Wallace and Strom Thurmond were apologizing for their old stances and courting support from blacks and whites who had earlier disdained them for their racism.
Haley, however, dug even deeper, adding: “If you wanna know what it was like growing up, I was disqualified from a beauty pageant because I wasn’t white or black, because they didn’t know where to put me. So look, I know the hardships, the pain that come with racism.”
Oh, come on. Is she expecting us to believe that there was a beauty pageant in South Carolina in the 1980s that disqualified anyone on the basis of race or even took any note of race at all? If there had been, and if what she says happened had really taken place, Nikki Haley and her disqualification would have been international news.
Discrimination on the basis of race had been a federal crime since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the New South was anxious to put its past behind it and project a new image to the world. Haley’s South is closer to Hollywood, where fat, drawling racist sheriffs still prowl the land, looking for poor black folk to devour, than to anything that has been seen in South Carolina or anywhere else in the South for decades.
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SC says
Well now we know. Those that play the race card will almost certainly endorse more race based legislation
Tony Wilson says
Can someone please explain your race laws? I grow up in Hackney in London and how you can say Megan is black or Nikki is brown? In regards to Nikki I browner than she is and I am white??
From The Other Side of Town says
Alas, Nikki’s articulations and actions are those of a professional politician seeking to stay one (see: “Biden” for more about how that turns out) rather than those of a presidential leader who will help return the US to better health, economy, education, and security.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I’ve read elsewhere that when she first ran for governor of South Carolina, she filed as “White”! If that’s true, it would be an amazing contrast to her claim of being dissed for being brown
Jack Reynolds says
The New Hampshire Primary results are in. … Darth Vader has a Commanding Lead.