The Complicated History of Nikki Haley |
The Complicated History of Nikki Haley
The New Yorker
2016-01-13
Jelani Cobb, Staff Writer; Professor of History
University of Connecticut
 Like President Obama, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley—who delivered last night’s Republican response to the State of the Union—has harnessed the rhetoric and symbolism of racial progress. Credit Photograph Courtesy C-SPAN |
Set aside the feuding policy particulars and last night’s pairing of Barack Obama and Nikki Haley, in the State of the Union address and Republican response, becomes a far more compelling exercise. There was a particular symmetry to the speakers: two people of color with multiracial families, both of whom have deployed the rhetoric and symbolism of racial progress at key moments in their careers.
Last summer, Haley, the two-term governor of South Carolina, gained national attention for her decision to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State Capitol, in Columbia, South Carolina. Coming days after the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, the move marked an audacious if symbolic reckoning with the racial ugliness of the past.
The decision did not obviously fit into Haley’s broader vision for South Carolina, which preceded the events at Emanuel A.M.E. by several years. To a greater extent than any of her gubernatorial peers, Haley has promulgated and benefitted from the idea of a “New South,” which has shaken the grip of dead tradition and can serve as a model for the rest of the country. (It’s worth noting that even the concept of a New South is dated. When the Atlanta newspaper publisher Henry Grady used the term in the post-Reconstruction era, he, too, was hoping to cast off a moribund past and self-defeating tradition. The novelty of the South is that there is now a history of its efforts to move beyond its history.)…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Jelani Cobb, New Yorker, Nikki Haley, South Carolina, The New Yorker