Is America a Racist Country? Fred McKinney, Ph.D.

Is America a Racist Country? Fred McKinney, Ph.D.

January 19, 2024 Recently, CNN host Jake Tapper asked Nikki Haley, a candidate for the right to represent the Republican Party in the 2024 Presidental election: Is America a racist country?” This is not a tricky question. It is not a gotcha question unless you make it one. Her answer became news because she flunked this oral exam. Gotcha! Her response and her body language demonstrated to any voter who understands the seriousness of the job of President of the United States, that this is not a job for her. I cannot remember a Republican presidential primary where there is nothing to choose from but intellectual mediocrity. Pardon me for my pretentiousness, but a Presidential answer from a Republican candidate for the leader of the free world would know the answer is embedded in an understanding actual American history not the sanitized version Haley apparently and unfortunately received in the segregation school she attended in South Carolina, or the ”anti-woke” version of history DeSantis wants to institutionalize in Florida’s public schools and universities. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decided racial discrimination in public education was unconstitutional and that public schools should be integrated with “all deliberate speed.” Soon after Brown, private segregated white schools sprung up in the South like mushrooms on a cool summer morning. Southern cities and towns decided instead of allowing Black students in their public schools, they would create their own private schools and let in who they wanted and exclude who they wanted. Nikki Haley attended one of these schools. Since white kids would be taken care of in private segregated schools and whites controlled local government, public education would be underfunded, in effect taking money from the public schools to help whites finance their private segregated schools. America keeps providing us stories like Haley’s that for Black Americans reminds us how strong racism continues to play in our lives and in American society. Nikki Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants who practiced the Sikh religion. Her father Dr. Ajit Singh Randhawa was a biology professor at Voorhees College, a historically Black college in Denmark, South Carolina. Chances are a turban wearing professor would have had a difficult if not impossible job finding a faculty position at the University of South Carolina when he was searching for a job. It was not until 1963 that the University of South Carolina admitted its first three Black students. This was not random. After the Civil War, the insurrectionists seized power and created two separate and unequal systems; one white and superior and one Black that covered every aspect of life from where you were born, to what school you attended, to where you could live, to where you sit on public transportation, where you could eat, where you could go to the bathroom, and even where could be buried, I find it hard to believe that Nikki Haley did not see the remnants of Jim Crow when she was growing up and attending schools set up by slaveholders for their privileged white children. I also find it hard to believe that an intelligent man like Dr. Randhawa would not do what Black parents have done for generations - tell their kids to be the best they can be and understand that you must be twice as good as the white kid to be treated as an equal. When this narrative works, most successful Black Americans know their success is rooted in the struggle of past generations. Any Black person who denies the institutional barriers that exist is frequently viewed as a traitor to the race. The tell-tale sign of this betrayal is the claim their success is primarily the result of what they did and nobody else. Haley had a golden opportunity to tell the real story of who Nikki Haley is by answering this question. If she had answered the question with a story of her mother and father. What stories did they tell her about Sikhs in India and the Black students her father taught Voorhees College in Denmark, South Carolina? She could have reached countless Black voters who might not vote for her, but they would respect her. Haley knows that America has a racist history and unfortunately there are legacies of those racist systems that influence the lives of millions of people today. She could have told Tapper that her mother and father taught her to be the best she could be and that she needed to be twice as good as the white kids.