Tweet Share Share Comment Since a late December New Hampshire town hall in which she failed to say that the Civil War was about slavery, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has been busy cleaning up after her unforced error. In some cases—“I had Black friends”—she made things worse. But this spectacle reveals the heart of Haley’s dilemma as a Southern, conservative, brown daughter of immigrants running for the Republican nomination. By her own admission, her political life has been guided by a lesson she learned as a child: embrace your similarities with other people and ignore your differences. The result is that, until now, she has avoided excavating her own relationship with racism. For all her energy, ambition, and talent, this is central to why she remains an empty candidate, and a potentially rudderless leader.
Despite her long and public history as a far-right, hawkish conservative, Haley has refashioned herself into a genuinely appealing option for Republicans who are tired of the Trump circus and moderates who don’t feel like either party speaks to them. By simply articulating both sides of an argument in an empathetic tone, she has convinced people that she is both for and against any number of policies, from abortion rights to tax cuts for the wealthy. Her breezy posture of being all things to all people makes the uncomfortable middle feel good, pacified that they don’t really need to make a choice at all.
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Indeed, she turned flip-flopping into an art form, in no small part because her path to power has been riddled with obstacles related to her intersectional identity, to use a term I’m sure she would reject. She overcame racist and sexist attacks during her political campaigns by carefully balancing an acknowledgment of her identity with an insistence that color didn’t matter.
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In her 2012 autobiography, Can’t Is Not an Option, Haley tells the story of how, as a kindergartner in her rural South Carolina elementary school, she was cast as Pocahontas in the Thanksgiving play. “Didn’t they realize that I wasn’t that kind of Indian?” she writes. She found herself surrounded by little boys doing “the American Indian hand-to-mouth call.” But she does not describe feelings of hurt, shame, or anger. Rather, she says, “It was annoying. I remember thinking to myself, Why can’t I be the pilgrim?”
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That sentiment is familiar to any person of color who, as a child, was singled out in some offensive or bizarre way and wished to blend in with the white kids, the white wall, the white anything. And in her South Carolina community of Black people and white people, few knew what to make of this brown girl and her family, how to fit them into their racial binary. One can imagine little Nikki, confused, subconsciously embarrassed—and henceforth determined to defy stereotypes, expectations, and critics.
She did her level best to fit in, adopting a bloodless routine of assimilation. “This habit of finding the similarities and avoiding the differences became very natural to me over time,” she writes. So natural, in fact, that the adult Haley recounts wrenching experiences of her youth with minimal scrutiny. Her father being tailed by law enforcement suspicious of his turban. A brother so sick of being teased that he begs his parents to let him cut his hair. A repulsive experience at a repulsive, segregated beauty pageant. She relays these stories with a tinge of sadness, but little reflection on—or determination to change—any of the inequities that led to them.
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“I know the hardships, the pain that comes with racism,” she said in a recent interview after the slavery gaffe. She also knows the cost of making too much of these experiences—that if she wants to win the Republican nomination, she needs to offer a palatable balance of honesty and exculpation to her fellow conservatives who, as Jelani Cobb wrote in 2016, “often ask their nonwhite candidates to forget that there was ever anything to be absolved.”
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Read More As many of us do, Haley benefits from America’s racial progress. But she has skipped gaily upon each milestone, obscuring the nature and means of that progress. In her telling, America sometimes unintentionally veers into inequality and injustice. Even what she considers a proud decision, to remove the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse, came after years of coy avoidance and tortured, disingenuous attempts to placate all sides. And in an increasingly browning America, she perhaps assumed that her path would become easier as Republicans’ electoral fortunes demanded a broader, more diverse constituency. Surely, over time, those racist and sexist attacks would be a thing of the past. Instead, the election of Donald Trump trapped her.
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Haley’s easy manner of gliding over the jagged edges of living history has largely worked. Indeed, this is how a South Asian woman once cast as Pocahontas in the school play comes full circle at the Al Smith humor dinner, quipping, “You wanted an Indian woman. But Elizabeth Warren failed her DNA test.” She joked about her “off-white” privilege, a sly nod to the white adjacency that we Indian Americans—and not American Indians—are sometimes afforded. In a chilling allusion to Trump’s immigration policies, she joked at the dinner that she kept her “legal” immigrant parents “at an undisclosed location—just in case.”
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Her self-deprecating (one might say self-loathing) anti-woke defiance is the price of GOP membership. But her recent town hall blunder was a reminder that the space in which she can navigate these contradictions—of her country, of her party, of herself—has narrowed.
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As her star rose throughout the primary, she grew comfortable wielding her identity as both a weapon and a shield. “They know they can’t call me a racist,” Haley said of the Biden campaign. “They know they can’t call out anything I do because I’m their worst nightmare.” But her sense of invincibility as a conveniently colorblind brown woman collapsed in that town hall.
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Which brings us back to Haley’s impossible dilemma. Few people have the political gifts it takes to become president. One needs to know oneself at an atomic level. It takes genuine, sometimes painful, soul-searching to answer Roger Mudd’s piercing question: Why do you want be president?
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In her public statements and books, Haley has barely skimmed the surface. She has yet to meaningfully turn over the fraught and ugly racial dynamics she has endured, as Barack Obama did in his first memoir. Obama understood that rather than avoid them, he needed to take his own needle and puncture them—sapping them of their power to weigh him down.
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But Haley cannot do this because to the extent that her secret shame includes suffering because of racism, it is inextricably tied to the very public shame of the Republican Party she represents. This is why she’s unable to speak about racism or the basics of U.S. history with moral clarity, why she can be for and against Donald Trump in the same breath, and why she doesn’t seem to stand for anything. Above all, a president needs a strong sense of herself, an unshakable core that serves as a ballast in the most difficult job in the world. But Haley’s hollowness as a candidate would make it untenable to trust her as a leader. And so she’ll carry on as a cipher of sorts, guided by the only North Star she’s ever known: opportunism.
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