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A Quick History Lesson For Nikki Haley [1]

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Date: 2024-01-22  

By now we’ve all been subjected to Nikki Haley’s fabrications regarding America’s past. “We’ve never been a racist country,” she insisted, even as she has acknowledged the racism she has personally experienced. “The intent [of America’s founding] was to do the right thing,” she claimed. Right by who’s measure, Ms. Haley? If we’re honest about the intentions of the [white, male] founders, privileging white people over all others was the “right thing.” It was also racism. Drafting laws that stripped people of their personhood and reduced them to mere property because of their race – that’s racism. Sanctioning genocide against Indigenous peoples – that’s racism. Haley’s spokesperson has allowed that “America has always had racism,” but “America has never been a racist country. The liberal media [or liberals in general] always fails to get that distinction.” I beg to differ. From the beginning of America’s colonial period there were racists who deliberately inserted racism into the very fabric of American life. To argue anything else is dishonest and dishonorable.

Across the country educators are being restricted by law from addressing topics that might be discomforting to students. But the totality of the facts that contribute to our national narrative present a much fuller, more nuanced, truer picture than what conservative politicians, pundits and activists would allow. American history, told honestly, with all its discomforting details, is a story of separate and unequal. Racism and white supremacy were foundational elements of our history. Racism was baked into our narrative from the outset. That is not my opinion, it is our truth. Ours is a very messy past, and we are often reluctant, even aggressively resistant, to face it in all its complexity. But failure to tell ourselves the truth, to reconcile with the harsh realities found in much of our history, renders us incapable of moving forward, of realizing the dream of a truly equitable society.

We stand frozen in this place of myths and half-truths and obfuscations. There are those who consider “revisionist history” a grave insult, an erasure of our “sacred” national narrative. But the reality is that much of the story we have long told about our past is itself a revision, an excision of all the messy elements, those facts that render us imperfect and human rather than exceptional. We all have a stake in correcting the flawed version of American history to which many have clung tenaciously and to which many conservatives remain committed. It is right and just and honorable that we do so.

When I hear the phrase “all lives matter” what I hear is a tragic untruth. It is a tantalizing fiction. The fact is that the lives of Black people and people of color have never truly mattered. Among conservatives’ proposed curriculum changes, as the advocacy group Civics Alliance insists, is the promise that “the reality that many Americans at some point were denied liberty and equality will be given due attention and placed in the appropriate historical context.” [italics mine] In what context would slavery and genocide be made more palatable? Noting that slavery was practiced by many cultures throughout human history? How does that exonerate those who implemented it, profited mightily from it and enshrined it in law in the American colonies? If we are to laud the founders as intellectual giants supposedly influenced by Christian principles, shouldn’t we rightfully condemn them for their embrace of a practice so utterly horrific? And if, as the Civics Alliance insists, the bedrock of American history is the quest for liberty, how does the fact that 10 of the first 12 presidents were slave owners, for example, provide context in support of that concept?

Fact: from our very beginning Black bodies have been brutalized and commodified and objectified, all in service to the self-interest of wealthy white men. Poor white people were exploited too, but they were mollified by the alluring promise of some future equality to be gained simply by virtue of their whiteness. They were co-opted in support of the self-interest of wealthy men with the promise of equality – not of condition necessarily, but at least of opportunity – made available to them specifically because they were white. They were sold the fiction that whiteness meant superiority and conveyed supremacy over all of those who were not white. A poor white man could take comfort in the fact that, no matter the degree of his poverty, in American society he was superior to every Black man simply by virtue of the color of his skin. That “truth” was told from the very beginning.

The story of America’s founding is therefore also a tale of the creation and implementation of a fictional white racial superiority. That falsehood has had profound consequences over the course of 400 years and remains a stumbling block in the way of forming that “more perfect union” to which we as a nation claim to have always aspired. To revise the narrative of our past, and to talk honestly about white supremacy, is simply to set the historical record straight.

In considering the racism of those who declared themselves superior to all others, because they were simply “men of their time,” we have no right now to condemn them for their moral failures and intellectual duplicity? We must excuse the southern politician who wrote of African Americans that it was their enslavement that allowed for their moral and intellectual improvement, and thus he knew slavery to be a “positive good”? Or grant a moral pass to the Jamestown settler who called for the annihilation of Indigenous peoples – he observed that it would be easier to exterminate them than to civilize them – because if we contextualize that call to violence he was merely acting in the interest of his fellow colonists? Where is the intellectual legitimacy in any of that? Why is excusing or simply ignoring that inhumanity somehow more comfortable to some of us than condemning those views?

The quest for real equality has been hindered for too long by our collective refusal to accept the painful truths about our past. Though many conservatives decry “revisionism” as the enemy of patriotism, revising how our history has been told is a crucial, essential first step towards addressing that reality. We must be willing to acknowledge that racism in America did not develop as something that was organic, natural or inevitable. Racial discrimination was not merely accidental, or incidental. Inequality didn’t just happen. People made it happen. Deliberately. Self-consciously. In service to their own self-interest. It is well within our reach, as a society, to realize true equity and inclusion, ensuring that all voices are heard as vital parts of our national story. But to Ms. Haley and others I say that we must start with telling ourselves the truth, and that means acknowledging that yes, America has been a racist country.

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