By Dana Irwin
Perhaps, the most telling moment of Nikki Haley’s political career came with an appearance on the Colbert Report. She told host Stephen Colbert that South Carolina’s unemployment rate was down for the seventh month in a row. Colbert responded, “and we’re not going to credit Obama for that, are we?” She laughed and said no. Missing the glint in Colbert’s eye, she had walked into his trap. She had in one sentence displayed her lack of understanding of how the economy functions, and how blinded she is by her ideological certainty.
Haley has titled her new memoir, Can’t is Not an Option: My American Story. Apparently, neither is good grammar. The sentence makes little semantic sense. If one is incapable of something, there is no choice in such a matter. But that is neither here nor there. Within the piece, a rather tedious account of overcoming adversity and political travails, numerous fissures and paradoxes display themselves. Underneath Haley’s assured statements of how she believes the economy to function, there are numerous statements that demonstrate that she is not all certain of how she identifies herself and the relationship of her politics to her experience as a brown woman in the South. The book comes off as a desperate attempt to make herself into the brown Sarah Palin, mimicking Palin’s book cover and title of Going Rogue: An American Life , and devoting an entire chapter to the two brief conversations that they had.
Her discussion of her family, on the other hand, is limited to about thirty pages. She recounts a rather clichéd account of an immigrant family coming to America and thriving off the opportunities provided by America’s open free-enterprise system. But that gloss, which makes her narrative attractive to the right, conceals some mysteries. These pages could have provided Haley with an opportunity to analyze her place within a nation, and especially a state, well known for its racism and lack of sufficient support. Unfortunately, such analysis is not an option for Governor Haley because it would cause her to question her politics of which she has no doubt. A reader must tease out the tantalizing details that she grudgingly relates to forge a clearer picture of her place in South Carolina.
For instance, in most interviews Haley states her father came to this country, (actually it was Vancouver, but details, schmetails) with only “eight dollars in his pocket.” This buys into the standard Republican line of legal immigrants who come to America penniless and work their way up the color-blind corporate ladder. In fact, Haley’s family in India was prestigious and wealthy. Her mother “lived in a six-story house in the shadow of the Golden Temple” of Amritsar. Her father was descended from Indian colonial officials. These were not those immigrants who escape from injustice and persecution. In fact, Haley’s father came to North America to earn a Ph.D. and then went on to find a tenure-track position in a South Carolina college. Of course, Haley, in order to morph her narrative into one palatable to the far right, repeatedly states her family gave up their prestige: there were no maids, or vacations in Dharamsala, when they came to America, just hard work and glorious opportunities.
She celebrates her difference, but she also exhibits a sense of unease about being brown. As one of the few Sikh families in a remote part of South Carolina, much of this is understandable. “We weren't dark enough to be black,” she writes, “or pale enough to be white. We were brown.” This inability to be ascribed to a particular racial category calls on her and her siblings to fight hard “to fit in.” In one instance that gained a bit of attention in the blogosphere, she and her sister were disqualified form a beauty pageant at a young age because they could not compete as black or white.
The sense of shame internalized by these children is demonstrated in numerous tales of harassment. In one heartbreaking episode, her brother begs his parents to cut his hair, holding a pair of scissors in his hands. His juda was the target for taunts on the schoolyard, and often he was mistaken for a girl. She ends her discussion with the sentence: “He was four or five when they gave in to him.” She doesn’t explain ignorance caused people to mock a little boy because of his religious practices. She displays no moral outrage, partly because she wants to be fully assimilated into American culture, with only her skin tone to mark her difference. Everything else about her should be as white as Wonder bread. The concluding paragraph of a chapter that relates numerous instances of discrimination against her family (they were not allowed to rent in many places; and were harassed by police at a fruit vendor’s stall along the highway), she states: “That was the story I wanted to tell the press. The wonderfully, uniquely American story of a small southern town that accepted an Indian family despite our cultural differences.” What?? Every anecdote recounted in the chapter seemed to scream that this small town did not accept Haley, but feared and hated her. But as a Republican, Haley must distance herself from any talk that could be construed as inching towards victimhood.
She converted to Christianity when in college, and explained the conversion “because the [Sikh] ceremony was conducted in Punjabi, I never truly understood the message… I converted to Christianity because the teachings of Christ spoke to me in a way that I could understand.” She adamantly dismisses accusations of being ashamed of her past, but a statement of this sort betrays those sentiments. Even when she ran for governor, one infamously racist state senator referred to her on a radio show as a “raghead”. Yet none of these instances reveal to Haley a sense that racism still pervades much of the United States; these are just the actions of bad individuals.
Among these tales of discrimination, she drops in nuggets of her political philosophy, often so incongruously they read like non sequiturs. In a discussion of the back door deals she made to get a piece of legislation passed (the same type of deals she condemns Obama for, ad nauseum), she states: “The goal of every state government should be to reduce taxes and regulations to make it easier for businesses to thrive, because when business thrives, jobs are created.” There is no sense here that actually a state has a duty to protect citizens from violence or provide certain services, such as roads, schools and libraries. The only job of elected officials is to cut taxes. But what about the types of families that have nothing, especially in a state like South Carolina, where some families, of all races, live without electricity or basic health care? Apparently, those are of no concern to Governor Haley.
Haley has tried to demonstrate her seriousness, but has often been sidetracked by gubernatorial dictates that border on the inane. For instance, she issued a mandate that every state employee who answered the phone in an official capacity would have to cheerily open every call with: “It’s a great day in South Carolina.” Democrats in the legislature amended the bill, stating that people could not be required to utter such a banality and would instead only utter it if they believed it actually was a good day in South Carolina. Similarly, Haley drew criticism when she criticized Democrats who claimed there was “a war on women.”. She has dismissed research that demonstrates women make less than men for the same work; and she has fought against legislation requiring health care providers to treat women equally, forcing HMO’s and PPO’s to cover cancer screenings, pap smears and birth control. She dismisses the needs of half her constituency, and the half to which she belongs, because it goes against her misguided ideology. Haley, however, has sponsored useful, effective bills. When she was in the house, she passed a bill that required all legislative votes to be taken on record, not simply counted as voice votes, thus masking who voted for what. This commitment to transparency resulted in bipartisan work with Democrats, and the ire of Republican leaders in the state capital of Columbia. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only time she has worked across the aisle and fought for something that increases transparency and doesn't gut the budget of any and all social programs.
Haley is so blinded by her ideology, she doesn’t realize that her position against federal bills that aid her state result in hurting vast populations of her state: including women, minorities and the poor. She cares little for groups that are not businesses. It is a tragedy because, with her experiences as a young brown girl growing up in the South, she could do a lot to effect true change for disenfranchised and disadvantaged groups in her state. Unfortunately, she wants to be accepted by white, Republican dudes just too badly.
Dana Irwin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Emory University. His research focuses on violence, masculinity, and colonialism in nineteenth-century France. Dana obsesses over the idiocy of today's political luminaries and popular cinema. He currently works in the Office of the Provost at the University of Southern California. You can see more of his work, including a review of Rachel Maddow’s book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, on his blog.
