South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley Says We’ve Never Passed Racist Laws In This Country

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley Says We’ve Never Passed Racist Laws In This Country
Author: Stephen D Foster Jr January 14, 2016 2:14 am
We’ve never passed racist laws in this country, says the woman who is the governor of a former slave state where Jim Crow laws flourished and the Confederate flag flew until July 2015.
It’s most definitely the most ridiculous thing Nikki Haley has ever said, and it comes just a day after she delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union Address.
Only six months have gone by since Haley called for removing the Confederate flag off statehouse grounds after a racist gunman murdered nine African-American parishioners at a black church in Charleston.
The flag has been a symbol of white supremacy and slavery since the Civil War and actually flew on the statehouse itself after a law was passed mandating it. That’s why it took a vote of the South Carolina House and Senate to remove it for good.
So, it’s pretty damn mind-boggling to hear Haley claim that we’ve never passed racist laws in this country.
According to Talking Points Memo, Haley responded to criticism of her speech by Donald Trump, who called her weak on immigration. And let’s just say it didn’t go well.
“When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion. Let’s not start that now. We’ve gone too far than to go back into a race and religion issue. I’ve been through those fights. That’s not worth it.”
Yes, she really claimed that there have never been racist laws in the history of this nation, even though Haley lives and works in a state that seceded from the Union because they feared their pro-slavery laws would be abolished by President Lincoln.
As Gawker points out, South Carolina also had many Jim Crow laws on the books, including making it “illegal for “any white man to intermarry with any woman of either the Indian or negro races” until 1967,” and banning restaurants from serving “white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter” until 1954.
Racism is even present in our own Constitution as the Founding Fathers made it the law that African-Americans could only count as three-fifths of a person when determining the number of congressional seats each state has every ten years.
In addition, there’s the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, literacy tests for voting, Operation “Wetback” of 1954, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, just to name a few. To see more, click here.
Either Nikki Haley doesn’t know the history of America and our legal system, or she is whitewashing it. Conservatives must be proud.