Or, as Haley put it during the 2020 Republican National Convention, “America is not a racist country. This is personal for me. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. They came to America and settled in a small southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a black and white world. We have faced discrimination and deprivation. But my parents never succumbed to resentment and hatred.”
My black parents never succumbed to resentment or hatred. Most blacks don’t, despite what our families have endured for generations. I wouldn’t stand a chance of success if they gave up or if I gave up. And yet I feel like Hayley is masterful in telling her story in a way that downplays and dismisses people like me who refuse to play the anger we feel. sometimes it seems that the obvious racism around us is not justified.
i know the strength Hailey’s stories, knowing the pain she talks about what happened to her father when she was a little girl. Her father committed a mortal sin in the south of the Bible Belt: buying groceries at a fruit stand, being swarthy and wearing a turban. He was a Sikh, the turban was part of his faith. Someone called the cops who stood guard while he bought his stuff. Hailey has told the story in many different ways over the years, including in her memoir. And that’s the incident Haley exploited when she pushed lawmakers to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds in 2015 when she had done nothing before to remove it.
“I remember how bad it was,” Hailey said of the fruit stand incident. “And my dad walked up to the checkout, shook hands with them, said thank you, paid for his stuff and didn’t say a word as he walked home. I knew what had just happened. That grocery store is still there, and every time I drive past it, I still feel that pain. I realized that this Confederate flag was the same pain as many people.”
Hailey’s father had to swallow their fanaticism and even thank them for it by handing over his hard-earned dollars to them. This is what was expected when white people demanded stoic submission. In the same era, my father had to calmly endure insults even from white children who insulted him, knowing that their skin color would protect them.
I know that such incidents leave an indelible mark on your psyche, in your soul. You will never outgrow this, especially if, like Hailey, you and your family have faced racial and religious discrimination in so many ways. Her parents, immigrants from India, were initially unable to find accommodation in Bamberg due to the laws and social norms of Jim Crow. Hayley was expelled from the Little Miss Bamberg beauty pageant at the age of 5 because the insidious racial system left no room for people like her who were neither white nor black. She wanted to be a pilgrim in the school play, but had to portray Pocahontas instead. (“Did they realize I wasn’t such an Indian?” she later said.)
She survived racism as an adult when she fought to become the first woman of color and person to become governor of South Carolina in 2010. State Senator Jake Knotts, a Republican like Haley but an ally of one of her opponents, called her a “dumbass.” (He applied the term to then-President Barack Obama as well.) The Lexington County GOP denounced him and ordered him to resign. Instead, he issued a half-hearted apology “for the unintentional insult” but stated that Haley was “pretending to be someone she’s not like Obama did.”
Growing up in the circumstances that Hayley and I lived in, you learn pretty early on that you have to make a certain amount of compromises and sacrifices in order to succeed in the eyes of white people. You can cry in private, but show a hard upper lip in public. It could mean swallowing hard, as Hailey’s parents and my parents did to accommodate the white people in your orbit. And sometimes it meant inadvertently buying into their illusions, or having common sense and good Southern manners “God bless your heart” so as not to bust their myths. We were taught by history teachers in our public schools from books written by apologists and descendants of the Confederacy. We learned that the enslaved people were happy and that the enslavers treated them like family members, and that the Confederate flag was “a symbol of respect, honesty and duty” and “a way to honor the ancestors who came to the service of their state“. Those were Hayley’s words. But she also said the opposite, reminding viewers that the flag was also perceived by some as “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally repressive past“.
In an interview with the Palmetto Patriots during her first run for governor in 2010, Haley defended the states’ right to secede and said the Confederate flag was not racist and its placement was “a compromise of all people that everyone must accept“. She was referring to the General Assembly’s decision in 2000, under pressure from a boycott by the NAACP, to remove the flag from the roof of the State Building and place it in front of the building. As part of the “compromise”, the legislature also initiated plans for a monument to African Americans to be erected in the State Capitol and established the official administration of Dr. Jr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s public holiday coincides with Confederate Memorial Day. This “compromise” was the key to racial progress in South Carolina. In exchange for the privilege of moving the traitor flag while still flying on Capitol grounds, black citizens had to agree to a public holiday commemorating the traitors who wanted us to be enslaved forever.
At the same time, Haley made history by nominating Tim Scott to the US Senate, making him the first black from the Deep South to serve in that chamber since Reconstruction. And she signed into law a law that began to correct years of inequalities that had plagued school districts like the ones she and I attended.
