A man asked Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley at a recent campaign town hall in New Hampshire, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?”

Haley said it “was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?” The questioner pointed out that he is not running for president and wanted to hear her answer.

Haley: “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”

Questioner: “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.’”

Haley: “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

Questioner: “You’ve answered my question, thank you.”

Facing a backlash, Haley acknowledged 12 hours later during a New Hampshire radio interview, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery . . . a stain on America.” But she stuck to her talking point that “freedom matters.

And individual rights and liberties matter for all people.”

Haley, who served as governor of

South Carolina for six years, must know that the state’s 1860 Ordinance of Secession cited slavery among its reasons for seceding from the Union – the first to do so — in its opening sentence, “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.”

While Haley campaigned for governor in 2010, the now defunct Palmetto Patriots asked her about the Civil War. She replied that “one side . . .was fighting for tradition and I think you had another side . . . that was fighting for change.”

That is also her position on the Confederate flag, one of which was displayed on the state capitol grounds for 54 years. It is “not something that is racist,” she said, and rejected a call to take it down from her Democratic rival Vincent Sheheen, whom she defeated by 4.5 percent, as a political stunt.

She stuck to her position even after Dylan Roof, a European American, then 21, in 2015 fatally shot nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina while they were in Bible class. He had posted a racist manifesto on his website, including a photo of the Confederate flag,

“For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble – traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry,” she said. “The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and loser.”

In a Washington Post column, she stated, “Today’s outrage culture insists that everyone who holds a view that’s different from our own is not just mis-

taken; they must be evil and shunned. That’s wrong. I know too many good people in South Carolina who think differently about the flag but who are not the least bit racist. The tragedy of all of this is that it makes compromise far less possible.”

Even after Haley pushed South Carolina lawmakers to approve the removal of a Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds, she maintained that it embodied “traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry.” She expressed similar sentiments in her 2019 book “With All Due Respect.”

Why is this important? Because millions of Americans refuse to accept the defeat of the Confederacy and mourn their “Lost Cause.” That sentiment, handed down from generation to generation for 159 years now, must surely color their perception of race and power, They are, in effect, glorifying an American era when human beings were made into chattel. It is sustained by the lie that some reason other than slavery sparked the Civil War. It motivates Southern states to weaken the franchise for the nation’s 41 million African Americans and operate under a system of institutional racism that regards them as inferior and must be contained to preserve the “white race.” It is why Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis threw state power behind the fiction that slavery was a skills training program.

Haley provides comfort for them. Even as she refuses to link fealty to the Confederacy and its flag to racism, she knows that it exists. She has said her Sikh parents were able to rent a small house provided they would not entertain African American guests – in Bamberg, a South Carolina town evenly divided between African Americans and European Americans. She was called a “raghead” because of the turban which Sikhs wear. As a child accompanying her father as he bought produce from a roadside stall, one of the owners called police on him.

Still, even after the Roof killings, Haley was explaining, “I lived my life trying not to judge people because I know what it’s like to be judged. So if you want me to go out and say that certain people are bad, I’m not going to do it. Because there are some of my friends who still respect the Confederate flag and there are those who think it is a horrible thing. I’m not going to

pick any of those friends over the others.”

Then President Donald Trump, who appointed Haley ambassador to the United Nations, channeled her years later when he said the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., had “very fine people on both sides.”

Haley, birth name Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, has also frequently referred to rising from humble beginnings as a child of industrious immigrant parents. “I was a brown girl in a Black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship. But my parents never gave in to grievance and hate,” she said in a speech to the Republican National Committee.

“To experts who watched the speech, the use of ‘American Dream’ language perpetuates the ‘model minority’ myth which praises Asian Americans as inherently hardworking and willing to dismiss the oppression of Black and Latino Americans,” Sakshi Venkatraman of NBC News reported.

Lakshmi Sridharan, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together, in an interview with Venkatraman, accused Haley – and former Louisiana Gov. Piyush “Bobby” Jindal – of doing “a great job highlighting their South Asia roots when it is convenient to appeal to an immigrant narrative and simultaneously gaslight the very existence of racism.”

Arwa Mahdawi, a British-born journalist, writing in The Guardian, said Haley “spent her career playing politics with her identity – cynically weaponizing her status as a ‘woman of color’ to excuse and enable racism.” Women like Haley and former British Home Secretary Priti Patel “are integral to the smooth functioning of patriarchy and white supremacy.” Mahdawi wrote, “Their personal successes are held up as ‘proof’ that systemic oppression doesn’t exist. Their individual experiences are used to shut down criticisms of institutional racism and misogyny.”

Still, Haley could become the Republican presidential nominee if Trump is forced off the 2024 ballot. And, should President Joe Biden bow out, Haley would have to face a candidate who also has Indian ancestry: Vice President Kamala Harris. That possibility is probably already causing nightmares for those who fear an existential threat from what they call the “replacement theory,” the same people Haley defends as “friends.”