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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / Post-racial America / Yes, It Is About Heritage

Yes, It Is About Heritage

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Nikki Haley is getting some Twitter non-love (never say “hate”) for her comments about Dylann Roof and the Confederate flag:

Here’s the text of the key part:

“Here is this guy that comes out with this manifesto, holding the Confederate flag,” she said. “And had just hijacked everything that people thought of—we don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. It’s a small minority; it’s always going to be there.”

“People saw it as service, and sacrifice, and heritage,” the ex-governor continued. “But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it. And the national media came in droves—they wanted to define what happened. They wanted it to make this about racism. They wanted to make it about gun control. They wanted to make it about the death penalty.”

Oh that nasty national media, trying to make an incident where a white shooter killed nine black parishioners at a church, and left behind two white supremacist manifestos, about race. And how the hell does a white supremacist hijack a symbol of white supremacy?

Haley’s comeback is that she signed a bill to remove the flag from the statehouse–in 2015. Sorry, when you’re a century and a half too late, you don’t get pity points.

Reader Interactions

58Comments

  1. 1.

    geg6

    Fuck her. Just fuck her and her shitty ass kissing up to white supremacists. Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her.

  2. 2.

    Yutsano

    Did I miss something? Why is she talking about Dylann Roof in the past tense? Was he executed and I didn’t notice?

    And the absolute gall. Nikki needs to stop sucking up to the white people.

  5. 5.

    Mary G

    She wants to run for president and thinks pandering to the racism that is the Republican Party will do it. I highly doubt their base will ever vote for her whatever she does, so she’s wasting her time. A brown woman to be the boss of us, or even VP where she might be boss? Never. Her job is to be a token somewhere they don’t care about and where there’s no real power, like the UN.

  7. 7.

    trollhattan

    Really thinks she’s something special, doesn’t darlin’ Nikki? What a frickin’ ghoul.

  8. 8.

    germy

    The man who designed the confederate flag:

    In a series of editorials, Thompson wrote why he felt the design should be chosen to represent the Confederacy as “The White Man’s Flag.”

    “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race: a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.”

  9. 9.

    trollhattan

    @wvng:

    Think she’d come back for Pompeo’s jerb? One of Mulvaney’s? Her book certainly seems an effort to repave that path she took getting away from Trump not so long ago.

  11. 11.

    JaneE

    It was heritage all right – a Heritage of slave owning and racism that produced Dylann Roof, not one he hijacked.  Good old three greats grandpa fought for what he believed in – the right to own people based on the color of their skin.  It wasn’t right then any more than it is today.

  13. 13.

    Bruce K

    Hey, if you want to defend the Slavers’ Swastika*, you have that right, but don’t expect not to be judged harshly for it. The damned thing stood for slavery, and waging war to protect slavery, and the people who ignited that war were loud and clear that they were defending slavery.

     

    *I used to label it the Hillbilly Hakenkreuz, but had second thoughts, because it might paint with too wide a brush.

  14. 14.

    H-Bob

    “we don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. It’s a small minority; it’s always going to be there.” They don’t exist but they’ll always exist!

  15. 15.

    chopper

    Nikki Haley says the Confederate flag was about “service, and sacrifice, and heritage”

    she forgot the “…in the name of slavery and white supremacy”.

     

    until Dylan Roof “hijacked” it

    yeah it was that one guy that did it.

  16. 16.

    H-Bob

    Similarly, the treason flag is about “service [by black people], and sacrifice [of freedom by black people], and heritage [of enslavement for black people]”!

  17. 17.

    Baud

    So she gave up on the noble Confederate Flag because of Roof? So if she’s president and some sovereign citizen commits terrorism while wrapping himself up in the American flag, will she give up on Old Glory as well?

    The whole thing is weak sauce.

  18. 18.

    jl

    One of their heroes, Robert E. Lee, said that battle and political symbols of Confederacy shouldn’t be displayed and waved around. For reasons often mentioned on this blog, Lee was not a nice person in many ways. But he was right about some things.

     

    The Confederate flag should have been consigned to the department of historical interest only. White supremacists have displayed it waved it around several times as a political symbol several times since the Civil War in order to further their very ugly and peculiar cause. The most recent episode in this shameful and divisive exploitation of US history occurred after racial integration following WWII and the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

     

    So, racists and bigots made the Confederate flag toxic, not anyone else. Haley’s BS is another sign that the GOP just can’t give up the bigotry, and no distance between Trumpsters and GOP. Case could be made that Trump, being a swindler who understands affinity fraud, latched on the GOP racism as one of the main selling points of his campaign and political identity because he could see it was a political winner, in addition to his own bigoted impulses. More I think about it, more likely I think its true. Trump is a bigot to his bones, but he doesn’t care all that much, and if he could have sold himself another way, he would have. The GOP and the GOP base are bigots to their bones, and they do care that much. Sometimes hard to see how they care about anything else, other than stuffing more money down the gullets of the super rich.

  19. 19.

    coin operated

    “Confederate flag:
    A sticker you put on the back of your truck to announce you intend to marry your sister…
    Think of it like a white trash ‘Save the Date’ card”

    – the Oatmeal

  20. 20.

    Immanentize

    I admit it does make me happy whenever I consider that all of our country’s greatest heroes since the civil war are buried on the land confiscated from that treasonous slave holder, Lee.

  22. 22.

    jl

    @nyrobbin: After Trumpsters get kicked out, a sign that we’ll just get more the same from the depraved racist rump that is all that remains of the GOP.

  23. 23.

    Patricia Kayden

    Haley is really pushing hard to convince Trump to dump Pence and put her in the VP spot so that she can run in 2024.  Imagine having such low standards that you will say just about anything to get into Trump’s good graces.  Ughhh.

  24. 24.

    Ella in New Mexico

    https://twitter.com/mattklewis/status/1203041385491947520?s=20

    Nikki on taking down the Konfederate Flag as SC Gov, pre-Trump Cult era:

     

    “The biggest reason I asked for that flag to come down was I couldn’t look my children in the face and justify it staying there” Haley later told CNN’s Don Lemon. “What I realized now more than ever is people were driving by and they felt hurt and pain. No one should feel pain…My father wears a turban. My mother, at the time, wore a sari. It was hard growing up in South Carolina.”

  25. 25.

    dlw32

    “Haley’s comeback is that she signed a bill to remove the flag from the statehouse–in 2015. Sorry, when you’re a century and a half too late, you don’t get pity points.”

     

    I would give her credit for removing the white supremacist flag from the NC state house but now she wants to take it back? What does she now say the justification for taking it down was?

  26. 26.

    Elizabelle

    I think Nikki’s sheet is sufficiently visible to many of the “both siders; Indian-American gal makes good” types.  This will be hard to erase.

     

    WRT Dylann Roof.  Interesting.  Note that Barr and Trump tried to start up federal executions again.  For political reasons, I am sure.  You have Roof and Tsarnaev the younger both sitting on death row.   I actually hope that neither is executed — they can have a good long life in prison.

     

    I have been hoping we might do away with the federal death penalty before too long.  Barr/Trump’s rush to execute is on hold with some federal judge … here’s an NBC report by Pete Williams from three days ago:

    WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is asking the Supreme Court to let the government carry out the first federal execution in nearly 17 years.
     
    A federal judge in Washington put a hold late last month on plans for a resumption of the death penalty, which was to begin next week. Late Monday, after a federal appeals court refused to lift the hold, Solicitor General Noel Francisco urged the Supreme Court to either stay the judge’s ruling or toss it out entirely.

    [Issue is manner of execution.  Barr has ordered the Bureau of Prisons to use a single drug — pentobarbital — rather than the usual cocktail of 3 which has led to botched executions and lawsuits over cruel and unusual punishment.]

    But Federal District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan put a hold on those plans, ruling that they violated the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994, which directs that federal executions must be carried out “in the manner prescribed by the law of the state” in which the death penalty was imposed. Because the revised federal protocol would be different, she said, it violated that provision.

    … In seeking to resume executions of federal death row inmates, Francisco said the Justice Department was “acting on behalf of the public and the victims” to enforce death sentences handed down by juries.

    Barr’s move runs counter to changing public attitudes toward the death penalty. Gallup reported in late November that a majority of Americans now say life in prison is a better approach for punishing the crime of murder. Its survey showed 60 percent say life without parole “is the better penalty,” while 36 percent favored the death penalty.

    First execution up is a white supremacist convicted of killing a family of three, including an 8-year old girl.

    FWIW:  Tanya S. Chutkan, born in Kingston, Jamaica and a woman of color, is an Obama appointee to the US District Court for the District of Columbia by President Obama.  She’s a UPenn Law grad.

    Go, strong professional women of the resistance!  Continue to do us proud.

  27. 27.

    jl

    @Patricia Kayden: Is that true, or is Haley just hawking her willingness to sell out to racists periodically to take the mantel after Trumpsters are out? Is Haley is so arrogant and foolish to think she can survive the political killing fields of officially serving that close to Trump, when almost no one else has?

     

    Maybe she figures she survived being the designated Trumpster blowhard and dangerous fool at the UN so she has learned the knack of surviving Trump. But the UN isn’t like having Trump tied around your neck at the WH.

     

    Edit: thanks to commenters above for pointing out Haley’s hypocrisy on Confederate flag issue. From a flag that she could not explain to her children to a symbol of sacrifice that should be defended. Let’s see if Trumpster rubes have any kind of memory.

  28. 28.

    BC in Illinois

    I see it as an assimilation problem.

    People flying the confederate flag simply haven’t integrated well into the United States.

     

     

    [Note: this is not original with me, but I have no idea who I stole it from.]

  29. 29.

    gene108

    I kind of feel sorry for Nikki, Mitt, and other Republican politicians, who have been steamrolled by the Tea Party, and now Trump

     

    Romney was perfectly positioned to be the “compassionate conservative”, because he signed universal healthcare legislation as governor, undercutting a major Democratic goal. But he ran in 2008 and 2012, and not 1996 or 2000.

     

    Nikki should be promoted by Republicans, because she’s a twice elected female minority governor of a very, very conservative state.  That’s a  case for have some level of political acumen.

     

    But Trump threw all the calculations out the window, when he mainlined open racism as the winning formula

     

    It’s nice she’s trying to be relevant, but she just won’t be able to pull it off.

     

    Trump really has shaken up Republican politics.

  31. 31.

    Mandalay

    Here’s another profile in cowardice, every bit as bad as NiKKKi.

     

    Lindsey Graham on 6/19/15, two days after the slaughter:

    Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican presidential candidate, on Friday said the Confederate flag is part of the heritage of his home state of South Carolina, rebuffing calls for it to be taken down after a mass shooting in the state….

    …”It works here, that’s what the Statehouse agreed to do. You could probably visit other places in the country near some symbol that doesn’t quite strike you right.”

    Lindsey Graham three days later:

    “After the tragic, hate-filled shooting in Charleston, it is only appropriate that we deal once and for all with the issue of the flag,” Graham said…

    …Graham added: “I hope that, by removing the flag, we can take another step towards healing and recognition – and a sign that South Carolina is moving forward.”

    The man is beneath contempt.

  32. 32.

    robmassing

    Haley’s comeback is that she signed a bill to remove the flag from the statehouse–in 2015

    How very odd that she would sign such a bill when the flag is all about heritage and Dylan Roof is just some random outlier white supremacist. Which is the real Nikki?

  33. 33.

    dnfree

    I was here in the 1960s and I remember what the flag stood for then. Dylann Roof started it?  How despicable.

  35. 35.

    Betty Cracker

    After the Emmanuel massacre, I remember saying right here on this hell-site that South Carolina would never remove that flag from the statehouse. Happy to have been wrong about that. But Haley’s cowardly backpedaling signals they never removed it from their shriveled hearts.

  36. 36.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @germy:

    Yes! Even leaving aside the white supremacy, the Confederates were a bunch of fucking traitors anyway who didn’t want to play democracy anymore when they lost fair and square.

     

    I’m so offended that Haley would call the Confederate Battle Flag, in reality a symbol of white supremacism and treason, a symbol of “service, sacrifice, and heritage.” Um no. That’s the Stars and Stripes, honey, not the Stars and Bars. As flawed as the US is and the many misdeeds it has done during it’s history, some good has come from it. Absolutely nothing good came from the CSA, which was little more than an authoritarian police state during it’s short existence

  38. 38.

    Raoul

    Haley’s comeback is that she signed a bill to remove the flag from the statehouse–in 2015.

     

    Because of course she can’t possibly apologize, or even fake-apologize (“I regret that I misspoke”), she has to go 100% defensive. Because if she apologizes, then the majority white supremacist GOP will bounce her out for apologizing.

  39. 39.

    John Revolta

    @gene108: Yeah, I feel like Haley’s time might’ve come and gone. The GOP doesn’t feel like it has to indulge in tokenism anymore- just the opposite in fact. I’d be surprised if they bother to put up any female or PoC candidates for high office or (FSM forbid) the Supremes.

  40. 40.

    Kent

    I used to have this conversation on occasion when I taught at a large diverse HS in Waco TX.  Although I was a science teacher, the topic would arise on occasion.

     

    My go-to response with my students wasn’t to get into the racism aspect.  I would just tell them:

     

    “It’s the loser flag.  On a whole bunch of different levels.  Honestly you should be glad when people put it on their cars and shirts because hey.  they are conveniently telling you who they are so you don’t have to guess.”   It’s a free country.  Everyone has the right to be a loser”

     

    The black kids would usually laugh.  A few white kids would sometimes squirm.  But I never got any pushback.   People rarely actually used the confederate flag in Texas though.  I think I see as many of them flying around backwoods WA and OR than I did in TX.  These days asshole Texans usually fly the actual state flag of Texas or the Gadsden flag (don’t tread on me) or the Texas “come and take it” flag.  That’s what the MAGA asshhole white kids usually flew on on their pickup trucks and would wave at football games.

  45. 45.

    Ksmiami

    @Bruce K: Id say even worse than the Confederate flag standing for the traitor Southern slave states (which was abhorrent then) the rise of the use of the Confederate flag in places like Indiana had an even more sinister meaning- that Blacks would never share in the country they built and would always be. At the mercy of our most vile and violent- hence the rise of the Klan and Jim Crow- so Fuck this Bitch

  46. 46.

    mrmoshpotato

    Oh Trump and all the Trump trash.  Need I say more?

     

    Back to watching the Kathy Griffin documentary.

  51. 51.

    debbie

    Yep, she’s a Rethug through and through.

     

    Anyone remember that 2012 proclamation that Michelle Bachman’s study group wanted every GOP candidate to sign, proclaiming that African Americans had it better under slavery than under the Obama administration? Had Nikki been running, she’d have pushed everyone aside so she could be the first to sign.

  52. 52.

    Amir Khalid

    Nikki Haley says the Confederate flag was about “service, and sacrifice, and heritage”

    This is a bizarre thing for a person of colour to say.

  53. 53.

    artem1s

    She wants to run for president and thinks pandering to the racism that is the Republican Party will do it.

    Yep.  got news for her.  she’s delusional if she thinks anyone who regularly votes GOP will vote for a woman of color.  That’s what you are Nikki.  YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE.  And those Trump loving MAGA’s would shoot you just as soon as look at you if you walked down the street with a sari on like your mother used to wear.  WTF are you thinking?

  54. 54.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The Confederacy was conceived as a white supremacist state.  The Dixie Swastika is a symbol of that white supremacist state.  The declarations of secession of the various Confederate states all made it clear that their movement was all about white supremacism.

     

    Darling Nikki is wrong on the facts.

  55. 55.

    TriassicSands

    Yes, there are plenty of southerners who think the Confederate flag is about service, and sacrifice, and heritage. But they aren’t likely to be thoughtful people and they are even less likely to be African Americans. What they most likely are is white racists.

  56. 56.

    Richard Guhl

    I agree with Haley. That flag is about a heritage, a heritage of shit. That flag was flown by those seeking to destroy the United States. That flag is all about treason in defense of slavery, the most barbaric institution devised by humans, based on kidnapping, murder, rape, theft, torture, brutality, and degradation. And everywhere it’s displayed it conveys the message to our African American citizens that they are held in contempt and may be killed on a murderous whim.

    Everyone who displays a Confederate flag deserves our everlasting condemnation.

  58. 58.

    Jim Graves

    @germy: Thompson was a newspaperman who wrote an editorial urging the adoption of the 2nd National Flag (nicknamed the Stainless Banner) not the Confederate Flag, which is actually the rectangular version of the 2nd Naval Jack and was the battle flag of the Army of Tennessee. The same design in a square version was the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.

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