Haley Trying to ‘Mangle’ the Truth, Part of Right Wing Wanting to ‘Remake’ History
Republican candidate failed to mention slavery as cause of the Civil War
Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s stunning failure to name slavery as the cause of the Civil War has been roundly condemned across the political spectrum.
It's also being seen as part of the political right’s ongoing attempt to remake the telling of US history, especially the history of Black Americans.
Haley’s statement also is being called a dog whistle to the right which backfired on the former UN ambassador and one-time South Carolina governor.
Haley, who has been gaining momentum in recent weeks despite still far-distantly trailing Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, failed to mention slavery when a voter asked her what was the cause of the US Civil War.
She tried to blame the encounter on a Democratic “plant” in the audience but still spent the remainder of her week trying to clean up the fallout, which many political observers now say will blunt any strides she's been making recently.
“Well, she's trying to mangle the truth, and she is trying to merge it and fuse it with her own kind of conservative right-wing theme about the absolute ability to do what you want as the demarcation of freedom,” said Michael Eric Dyson, a prominent Black American academic and author, in an on-camera interview with CNN. “No, African-American people in this country, enslaved Africans who were here fighting against the worst form of dehumanization that one has seen in centuries in this country.
Dyson added, “It's not freedom from what, freedom to do what, freedom with the ability to do what. It had to do with enslavement. It had to do with color. It had to do with the inability of America to acknowledge that Black people were fully human, the three-fifths clause.
“Of course, it was about counting, but it also was about the dehumanization of Black people,” he said. “So this is the inability, again, of Nikki Haley to say straightforwardly, ‘It's about slavery.’ America in its history has enslaved human beings, and that's a nasty and nefarious part of our particular history. But the right wing wants to remake that historical trajectory and narrative.”
Haley’s comment comes straight from the Lost Cause, according to Eddie Glaude Jr, a Black American academic and author at Princeton University.
The Lost Cause is an American pseudohistorical negationist myth that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery.
“And the Lost Cause, what it tried to do as it tried to redeem the South, minimized slavery and accented states’ rights. And so, what you get is this rewriting of American history right after Reconstruction, right, as the effort of the Civil War collapses,” Glaude said in an interview with MSNBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend. “You see people writing the story of the nation in such a way that in some ways absolves the South of its moral crimes in some ways. And so, what Nikki Haley is doing, even in her redo, even in her cleanup on Aisle 12, she invoked a basic narrative strategy of the Lost Cause, Symone.
“And so, how do we address this quest for a more perfect union? Tell the truth about some of us actually holding the view that this country ought to be and must remain — ironically, coming out of the mouth of Nikki Haley — a white nation in the vein of old Europe,” he added.
Journalist and TV political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said that she is left disappointed in Haley.
“It’s so disheartening to see because I really did think of Nikki Haley as being less deplorable than a Ron DeSantis who was targeting gay children, you know, LGBTQ [Americans], and I thought of her as being a little bit better,” she said. “But this answer shows that she really is on that same, just base moral plane that the other Republican candidates are.”
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