Presidential candidate Nikki Haley said during an interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the morning show Fox and Friends, that America has “never been a racist country” on Tuesday.
“We’re not a racist country,” Haley said in response to Kilmeade’s question about whether the Republican Party is racist. “We’ve never been a racist country. Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No, but our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can.”
The interview took place after Haley placed third in the Iowa state caucuses on Monday night, according to The Hill. Kilmeade posed his question as a follow-up to a discussion with Haley about comments made by MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Monday night expressing her doubts about Haley’s chances of becoming the GOP nominee for 2024 because the Republican Party is “deeply anti-immigrant.”
“The elephant in the room: she’s still a brown lady that’s got to try to win in a party that is deeply anti-immigrant,” Reid said. “It’s still a challenge.”
“I don’t see how she becomes the nominee of that party with Donald Trump still around, she continued. “I can’t picture it happening. Maybe it could happen. Ron DeSantis’s only argument for staying in it is [that] he’s the white guy … [who] can still make the appeal to white people.”
“Joy Reid lives in a different America than I do,” Haley told Kilmeade, according to Fox News. “I mean, yes, I’m a brown girl that grew up in a small rural town in South Carolina who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a U.N. ambassador and who is now running for president.”
“If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is,” she continued.
Haley’s statement that the U.S. has no history of racism follows another instance of ahistorical claims about race in America, in which she failed to cite slavery as a cause of the Civil War during a New Hampshire town hall in December.
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how the government was going to run,” she said in response to an attendee, according to ABC News. “The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
After receiving backlash for not mentioning slavery, Haley attempted to walk back her comments on the Civil War in an interview with The Pulse of NH. “Of course the Civil War is about slavery,” she said. “That’s the easy part.”
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