1/27/2024 0 Comments Nikki haley and computers at workIn that same era, my father had to quietly endure insults even from white children who would slur him knowing their skin color would protect them. That’s what was expected when white men demanded stoic subservience. Haley’s father had to swallow their bigotry, and even thank them for it, while handing them his hard-earned dollars. I realized that that Confederate flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.” That produce stand is still there and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. “And my dad went to the register, shook their hands, said ‘Thank you,’ paid for his things and not a word was said going home. “I remember how bad that felt,” Haley has said about the fruit stand incident. And it’s the incident Haley used when she pushed legislators in 2015 to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State House, even though she had done nothing until then to get it removed. Haley has told the story in many ways over the years, including in her memoir. Someone called the cops, who stood watch as he purchased his items. He was Sikh, the turban a part of his faith. Her father committed a cardinal sin in the Bible Belt Deep South: buying produce at a fruit stand while brown and wearing a turban. I know the power of Haley’s story, know of the pain she speaks when recounting what happened to her father when she was a young girl. And yet, it feels to me as though Haley expertly tells her story in a way to diminish and dismiss people like me, those who refuse to pretend the anger we sometimes feel at the obvious racism around us isn’t justified. I would have had no chance at success had they given in, or had I. Most Black people haven’t, despite what our families have endured for generations. My Black parents never gave into grievance or hate either. But my parents never gave in to grievance and hate.” I was a brown girl in a Black and white world. They came to America and settled in a small Southern town. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Or as Haley put it during the 2020 Republican National Convention: “America is not a racist country. Ben Carson, who also ended up in former President Donald Trump’s cabinet after spending his presidential campaign admonishing Black people to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Haley is adept at deriding what she calls a destructive identity politics of the left, and in the next breath using identity politics to gain favor among a largely white GOP base desperate to hear how great America is and why it’s wrong to critique its racial past or present. At times, she has weaponized her story against Black and brown people who don’t identify as conservative or the policies that might uplift them. The discrimination she endured, which she used to craft her political brand, magically disappears (or its edges are sanded down) when she speaks to a crowd of people who want to believe it never existed. That she was possibly on her way to doing something I had assumed nearly impossible - winning the governorship of my native state as someone other than a white man - was a bonus.īut Haley often only empathizes with people like me when it advances her political pursuits. I also voted for her in the Republican primary in part because I was taken aback by nasty rumors (that she denied) circulating about her private life. If we can rise from such humble and unfair beginnings, anyone can, darn it! Our paths first intersected when I was a journalist in Myrtle Beach and she was running to become governor in 2010. Each of us has the kind of stories that are often used to illustrate the promise of the American Dream. Stephen because I was Black and poor, common characteristics in town, and spoke with a severe stutter. Haley faced discrimination as part of the only Indian family in Bamberg.
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