Nikki Haley on Racism: What is Right, What is Wrong

 Nikki Haley said, “We’re not a racist country. We’ve never been a racist country.”

That's true and untrue. The Declaration of Independence is remarkably forward-looking. In 18th century colonial America, women could not vote--about 60% of men, mostly white, mostly landowning landowning men could. Having any voters at all was a new, radical idea. And the idea of all citizens voting was there--it just took a while to include women and nonwhite persons.

The famously ambiguous Declaration states: "all men are created equal," a loopily insane statement if taken to mean "of the same talents and attractiveness"--unless you've read through Jefferson's letters and know something of his biography. Unless you have a sense of the personal experiences giving rise to that political remark. Briefly: he was the genius child in a highly unequal group of siblings, two of whom were either very slow learners or intellectually disabled. Keenly conscious of the inequalities in his own family, he tried to even things up, arranging for his slow brother to take violin lessons. He wanted his siblings to be intellectually equal to himself--a tall order.

His letters show a more realistic grasp on equality: there, he wanted an artistocracy of virtue and talent rather than the European one of birth and wealth.

So his goal, like Nikki Haley's, was “lift up everybody, not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else.”

Haley was referring to Jefferson's aspirations--not to the systemic racism that came with slavery and Jim Crow, and which has now, through the legislature envisioned by Jefferson, been vanquished. Long vanquished. 

In other words, Nikki Haley is my second choice after Biden.