Just days after delivering the GOP response to the State of The Union, Nikki Haley’s image as a Republican good guy is becoming somewhat translucent.
Challenged by Trump for being weak on immigration, the Governor of South Carolina Haley responded,
“When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion. Let’s not start that now. We’ve gone too far than to go back into a race and religion issue. I’ve been through those fights. That’s not worth it.”
Hard to believe but this brown skinned daughter of Hindu immigrants, governor of the State that birthed the Confederacy, and the person who ordered the final removal of the racist confederate flag (after the Charleston murders) she really claimed that there have never been racist laws in the history of this nation. Presumably as a Hindu American she is unaware of the suffering of the African Americans of her state under South Carolina’s Jim Crow laws, including making it “illegal for “any white man to intermarry with any woman of either the Indian or negro races” and banning restaurants from serving “white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter” until 1954.
I guess “Indian” and”Hindu” mean different people? But then Nikki Randhawa (her maiden name) once marked her race as “white” on her voter registration form in South Carolina. As journalist Sunil Adam describes it, Haley’s come to power by projecting herself as the wife a soldier, “an ultra conservative politician with all the trappings of a tax-cutting, Bible-thumping, evolution-denying, creation-trusting, union-baiting, gay-bashing limited government protagonist”.
Or perhaps, Nikki foes not know about immigration history. It was 1923 case of United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind that determined that immigrants from India were not Caucasians. Thind argued he was Aryan and thus Caucasian. But the judge decided though he might have “purity of Asian blood” Thind was not Caucasian in “the common understanding”. So he could not be considered a “white person”. Bhagat Singh Thind was stripped of his US citizenship.
Sandip Roy, discussing South Carolina’s brown governor in the site FirstPoast, has put the issue very well:
“Friends, Indians, Americans, lend me your ears
I come to praise Nikki Haley, not to crucify her
The North Carolina State Democratic party
Hath told you she called herself white.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault.
And grievously hath Haley not commented on it.
Now come I to speak on her behalf
For Nikki Haley is indeed a white person.
She has been the white person’s friend, faithful and just to them:
But the Democratic Party chair says she cannot tell the truth.
And the party chair is an honourable man.
So are they all, in North Carolina’s old boys club, all honourable men.
The Nikki Haley story is about Shylock.