GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley may have claimed that America has “never been a racist country,” but her 2012 memoir tells a much different story. “Can’t Is Not An Option: My American Story” details how Haley’s parents, The Randhawas, were Indians who entered the U.S. via Canada, and the book has all the proof you will ever need to know that America is, indeed, a racist country.
On the campaign trail, Haley has shockingly defended America’s racism and tried to gloss Black people’s suffering and slavery as a cause for the Civil War in another controversial town hall. Earlier this month, she told Fox News host racism is seemingly obsolete and that “our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can.”
Yet 2012 book, however, sings a much different tune, USA Today reported. Haley’s father taught biology at Voorhees College—a historically Black school— while her mother was a trained lawyer. They were eager to pursue the American dream, even though they were viewed as outsiders in the small town of Bamberg, South Carolina, and experienced housing discrimination in a way that still happens to many Black people today.
She wrote:
“When it came time for my parents to find a home, no one would rent to them,” Haley wrote. “Word quickly got around that my father worked at the ‘Black school,’ and besides that, he and my mom were obviously foreigners themselves. When they finally found a house, they had to buy it, not rent it.”
“And they were told there were conditions: They couldn’t entertain Black people in it. They couldn’t have alcohol in it. And they had to sell it back to the man they had bought it from.”
Additionally, Haley also told a disturbing story in which the police were called on her father and his roadside fruit stand because neighbors felt uncomfortable by his presence.
“Even then, I knew this was a part of his daily life that he hoped I hadn’t noticed,” she wrote. “But I did notice, and it hurt.”
She also said that she “had grown up with a white population that didn’t think we were white enough and a Black community that didn’t see us as minority enough.”
For Haley to say that America was “never” a racist country is an outright lie that’s easy to clock, but the denial of racism seems to fit into her playbook to garner more white votes. Republican playbook. But as a woman of color making these claims, it just makes it harder for folks who identify as such.