10 mo. ago • 96%

Nikki Haley dogged by Civil War controversy: ‘I had Black friends growing up’

thehill.com Haley dogged by Civil War controversy: ‘I had Black friends growing up’

Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley is finding herself on defense again after she said “I had Black friends growing up” during a town hall as she sought to clean up remarks she made aroun…

45 comments

So we’ve gone from “I can’t be racist because I have black friends,” to “I can’t be racist because I used to have black friends?”

168
- Nina Turner said it so well the other day on TYT. To paraphrase, see the picture I'm responding to.
  
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She went to Orangeburg Preparatory School, a private school that was formed by the merger of two private schools that were segregation academies. Ask her how many black classmates she had. If the answer isn't zero it was in the low single digits in a county that's 60% black.

72
- The answer is zero. I went to a school like this on the west coast, the same graduating year. We did have a black foreign exchange student, at least one year. To be fair, Nikki's father taught at Voorheers college (a historically black institution), and her mom taught at a public school. Her mom started a boutique woman's clothing store that Nikki worked in.
  
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  Yeah, I went to a similar school very close to the one she went to. Knew people from there, had friends that transferred over from there, etc.
  
  It certainly wasn't my choice to go there, and I don't think my parents reasoning was out of racism in sending me there so I'm not about to conclude the same for her. But it's just realistically thinking, how many black friends is she going to make going there? On top of recognizing the same horseshit whitewashing of history that got her into this whole defense. The same one I was taught originally as well.
  
  15
- I wonder how many Indians went there?
  
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Just fucking embrace being a racist, it’s perfectly acceptable for a Republican. Hell, she’d probably take votes from Trump.

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- I hate to say it, but you’re right. She’s handling this issue like it’s 2012 and Republicans still have to pretend not to be racist. Keeping the mask on is not doing her any favors in the primary.
  
  26
- Yeah, I'm sure holding a clan rally would boost her numbers quite a bit.
  
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During a CNN town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Haley was asked to respond to criticism made by fellow GOP White House candidate Chris Christie after the former U.N. ambassador initially omitted slavery in her answer about the cause of the Civil War. Christie claimed she had answered the way she did because she was “unwilling to offend anyone by telling truth.”

“What I will tell you is Chris Christie is from New Jersey." [She said.]

I'm sorry, wtf does New Jersey have to do with this?

30
- He's a damyankee and doesn't understand, obviously
  
  /s
  
  16
- No, she's right, jersey is a shithole and Christie is a giant piece of shit. The bad news is that he is a much more reasonable candidate than her.
  
  12
  
  While I agree about Christie, have you ever lived in New Jersey, outside of the immediate New York suburbs? Or do you just drive through on the turnpike and think you've seen it?
  
  5
- See New Jersey is one of them librul states, so by the transitive property, Chris Christie is a goldurn librul.
  
  5
- “Chris Christie is from New Jersey. He can describe the civil war accurately and not have every single one of his white in-state supporters desert him. I’m from South Carolina. I can’t.”
  
  3
  
  Yeah, that makes more sense.
  
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This doesn't even make any sense. Is she saying she didn't bring up slavery as a cause for the civil war because she ~~has~~ had black friends? They won't mind. Go ahead and bring it up.

27
- "Some of my best friends are n---s" goes back a long way.
  
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  Oh, yeah, I get that. I just don't get why she's using the black friend defense it in this context. Her imaginary black friends were not the ones she was trying to placate by failing to list slavery as the cause for the civil war.
  
  4
This is pretty cool, because she’s backing herself into a corner. Ordinarily Nimarata Randhawa could of course fall back on her Indian heritage, but she’s spent most of her life distancing herself from it .

Awkward.

22
Oh, she played the "Some of my best friends are black" card, I guess we have to go home now.

20
- *were
  
  25
“I had black friends growing up until said friends got old enough to realize what a racist asshole I was.”

20
- No, more like, "I sat next to a black person in class and spoke to them when necessary."
  
  18
Isn't this issue a positive for her in the GOP primary?

18
- Used to be, but now she's got to get non-white conservatives. The GOP's worst nightmares have come true.
  
  2
she also basically told people who lose children in school shootings to get over it. why do people continue to call her a moderate?

15
- Because moderate is a relative term, especially with the GOP going off the deep end.
  
  7
Does that mean she doesn't have black friends anymore?

And has she asked those black friends she had when she was growing up what they thought about her Civil War answer?

13
But did her black friends have Nikki Haley for a friend?

11
Had.

10
LOL, this is like some kind of shit out of Veep.

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Go ahead. Name one. Just one.

7
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So...the paid servants were the only ones who would talk to her?

7
“I had Black friends growing up”

“...but now that I've shown my true face they don't like me anymore!”

6
This is the best summary I could come up with:

Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley is finding herself on defense again after she said “I had Black friends growing up” during a town hall as she sought to clean up remarks she made around the cause of the Civil War.

During a CNN town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Haley was asked to respond to criticism made by fellow GOP White House candidate Chris Christie after the former U.N. ambassador initially omitted slavery in her answer about the cause of the Civil War.

Haley’s response prompted jabs from fellow Republican White House hopeful Ron DeSantis’s campaign and criticism from pundits and political observers.

‘I had black friends growing up,’” the DeSantis War Room account on X, formerly Twitter, wrote, attaching a clip of her remarks at the CNN town hall.

During a joint interview with journalists from NBC News and The Des Moines Register on Friday, Haley defended her comments from the CNN town hall, saying she knew firsthand the pains of racism and that it was a “source of pride” to say she had Black and white friends.

The gaffes come at a critical moment for Haley, who has been seeing some momentum in New Hampshire polling, just a week out from the Iowa GOP caucus.

The original article contains 751 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

4
It’s like watching a stormtrooper furiously trying to shove a lit stick of dynamite up their ass, and failing.

2
- Well they do have spectacularly bad aim.
  
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