South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley came to Washington on Wednesday and said some things on race that will make it hard to claim that Republicans unilaterally avoid matters of race.
Haley displayed some political agility and even personal concern. And, at the same time, she affirmed her allegiance to a very Republican worldview. You can read the full text here.
Haley is one of those politicians — make that one of those women — who has grown accustomed to charting new territory. She’s the South Carolina-born daughter of Sikh, Indian-American parents. She became the first non-white governor in a state that for many people typifies the Deep South, beating better-known white and male Republicans. And she’s long been part of the GOP’s go-to proof of their party’s diversity — living, state-leading proof that the party of mostly white voters will sometimes elect those who aren’t white, too.
In June, Haley’s name and image were widely circulated as she led her state through what was unquestionably a difficult time. An avowed white supremacist allegedly shot and killed nine African Americans in a historic black Charleston church.
Haley managed a hard-to-perfect mix of human kindness and political bravery before many in her party and the South had risen to the occasion. She called for the Confederate flag to come off the statehouse grounds. She also faced some particularly ugly forms of criticism from right-wing corners of the Internet. Some critics implied or said outright that Haley was an “immigrant” who does not understand “our” American history and culture.
With that kind of recent experience, it’s not hard to understand why Haley began her public speech on race with a personal story: While shopping at a South Carolina produce market with her Sikh and turban-wearing dad, a 10-year-old Haley experienced a kind of shopping-while-black or -brown experience that cannot, even today, be described as rare. The couple that owned the store were so suspicious of Haley and her father that they called police.
Telling that tale about an ugly side of America, and how she watched her father manage it with extreme kindness, is the kind of real talk about race that seems to rarely take center stage in Republican circles. And it’s the kind of thing that is actually less common from many of the party’s leading minority figures than it is from white Republicans who aim to display some concern about race matters in the United States.
If you doubt that, think about what you know of the life and times of Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — all currently vying for the GOP’s presidential nomination. What have you heard? Theirs are stories of nothing if not bootstraps, found and utilized — of a country that gave them and so many others unbridled opportunity.
And that’s fine. But it’s as if these men grew up in hermetically-sealed bubbles with an extra layer of patriotic coating. Any ridicule or mistreatment they faced might have been individually deserved. It’s certainly never connected to systems and structures that some say need to be reformed. And virtually never in the world they describe do some people benefit from generational privilege, or suffer the consequences of generational exclusion.
This very week, Rubio’s only real critique of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was that Trump does not speak about America in a way that affirms the constancy of its greatness. Right now in Rubio’s America, Latinos sit at or near the bottom of all sorts of critical socio-economic measures, including education, income, wealth and homeownership.
On Wednesday, Haley didn’t follow that script. She talked about the importance of expanding real economic opportunity to include more of her state’s residents. She talked about the need for Republicans to listen more and engage more deeply in the way that other people experience race in this country. She spoke several hard truths.
But Haley also offered some red meat to the Republican base. She sharply criticized the propensity of Black Lives Matter activists to yell or disrupt events. And she talked about the still-developing, assertively peaceful-but-not-always-polite Black Lives Matter movement alongside the looters and rioters who showed up, broke things and set fire to businesses in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore.
Haley’s comments were, however, worth noting. They likely reinforced the very common belief that many white Americans and the mostly white Republican party are unable to recognize individual action and culpability when more than one individual is black or brown. At the same time, Haley’s comments do offer one clear indicator of the uninsured damage that those rioters and looters really did to the larger effort to address police misconduct.
In fairness to Haley, her discussion of looters, rioters and peaceful protesters in the same breath really could have gone further. Over on Fox News and unabashedly right-wing blogs, Black Lives Matter has somehow become a hate group. It is as if working to draw attention to the fact that black and Latino Americans are disproportionately arrested, injured, killed and convicted when they come in contact with police — or yelling about any of the aforementioned — are equivalent to lynchings.
But successful protest movements are rarely limited to the Southern-style handshakes and hugs, prayers and quiet listening sessions that Haley championed in her speech Wednesday. Those things might be valuable, but the South has never lacked for social graces. We also know that, when combined with disruption, inconvenience, economic cost and international embarrassment, they often work.
Do not be mistaken. Many a meal went unfinished because of a lunch-counter sit in. Bull Connor’s hoses did not gently mist students in Birmingham. And, the loss of revenue had quite a bit to do with integrating Montgomery’s buses. History makes it clear: protest need not be polite to be effective.
Rosa Parks’s booking photo. Her refusal to move to the back of a bus touched off the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and served as a major catalyst of the civil rights movement.
But for Haley, the critical moment in the story about that produce shop couple came when her father ended the encounter by shaking hands with the police and the store owners.
It’s possible that those shopkeepers never did such a thing again. It is also just as possible that they had been treated with undeserved kindness and respect by people of color before that day. Haley’s speech implied that the person who instead opts to leave the store has bypassed some obligation to transform minds.
Dignity also has value.
Haley’s critics will undoubtedly point out that the state she described as tolerant is a place in which the Justice Department waged war to stop a law that more than one study found would disproportionately impede the ability of blacks and Latinos to vote. South Carolina is also a place in which 17 percent of white children live in poverty while 39 percent of Latino kids and 43 percent of black ones do the same.
Both are indicators of more than simply tonal problems in her state. But Haley deserves some credit for navigating one of the most difficult topics in American political life, by choice, and laying out her ideas.
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