Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Who is Nikki Haley?
Nimarata Nikki Haley is the former governor of South Carolina who is currently seeking the Republican nomination for president of the United States.
Haley was born and raised in Bamberg, South Carolina, to immigrant parents from Amritsar, Punjab, India. She served in the South Carolina legislature and in the Trump administration as ambassador to the United Nations.
What did Haley say about the Civil War?
During a campaign stop in Berlin, New Hampshire, on Wednesday, an audience member at a town hall asked Haley: “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?”
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley said. “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are.” When the audience member specifically brought up the slavery part of the equation, Haley seemed perplexed, asking: “What do you want me to say about slavery?”
By Thursday, Haley had reversed course.
“Yes, we know the Civil War was about slavery,” she told the radio show hosts on The Pulse of New Hampshire Radio program “Good Morning NH with Jack Heath” before launching into another weird rant about how the “lessons” of the Civil War is “that freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people” blah blah blah more words that don’t rhyme with “slavery.”
What’s wrong with what Nikki Haley said?
Because the Civil War was about slavery.
Before suffering a temporary bout of race-based amnesia, Haley could have easily pointed to Georgia’s Declaration of Secession, which blamed the rift on “numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the…
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