The hard-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said the US was “not a racist country”, echoing a controversial claim by Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is also trying to deny Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination.
“Well, the US is not a racist country,” DeSantis told a CNN town hall in New Hampshire. “And we’ve overcome things in our history. You know, I think the founding fathers – they established a set of principles that are universal.”
More than 250 years before independence from Britain, enslaved African people were brought to American soil by Spanish ships in the 1500s. Native Americans were displaced and enslaved.
The first ship of enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil in 1619. Slavery in southern states caused the civil war (a fact Haley failed to mention when quizzed on the subject last month), a conflict fought between 1861 and 1865 and ending with slavery abolished. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and unequal treatment in southern states until the civil rights reforms of the 1960s.
Entrenched social and economic inequalities persist, affecting all racial minorities. The last presidential election, in 2020, took place after a summer of protests for racial justice inspired by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Going into the New Hampshire primary next week, DeSantis and Haley trail Trump by wide margins. This week, DeSantis edged out Haley for a distant second in Iowa.
On Tuesday, Haley, whose parents came to the US from India, told Fox News: “I’m a brown girl … who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a UN ambassador and who is now running for president.
“If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is. You can sit there and give me all the reasons why you think I can’t do this. I will continue to defy everybody on why we can do this. And we will get it done.
“We’re not a racist country … 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.”
Amid criticism, a Haley spokesperson said: “America has always had racism, but America has never been a racist country.”
Race and racism are polarising issues across US society. Republicans have recently pursued attacks on teaching about race and racism in US history as a way of attracting support. DeSantis has faced his own controversies, including over a Florida attempt to change how the history of slavery is taught.
In New Hampshire, asked about Haley’s remarks, DeSantis said the principles of the Declaration of Independence – signed in 1776, saying “all men are created equal” – “may not have been universally applied at the time. But I think they understood what they were doing. They understood that those principles would be the engine for progress for generations to come.”
Pressed on Haley’s contention that the US is not a racist country, DeSantis said: “Well, what I said was we’ve had challenges with how race was viewed.
“And so, for example, those were universal principles in the Declaration of Independence. And you had a [supreme court] decision in the 1850s [that] said Dred Scott [an enslaved man who sued for his freedom], because he was Black, wasn’t an American citizen. That was wrong. That was discriminating on the basis of race. That’s why you ended up having the 14th amendment ratified to overturn Dred Scott.”
Approved after the civil war, the 14th amendment gave citizenship to formerly enslaved people. It also barred former Confederates running for office – a provision Colorado and Maine are now seeking to apply to Trump, for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress.
According to the Pew Research Center, Republican voters are overwhelmingly white.
“Yes,” DeSantis continued. “We’ve had challenges with how we’ve dealt with race as a society.”
On Wednesday, Kamala Harris, the first woman and first woman of colour to be vice-president, discussed Haley and DeSantis’s remarks with ABC.
“The issue of race in America is not something that should be the subject of a soundbite,” Harris said. “The history of racism in America should never be the subject of … a question that is meant to elicit a one-sentence answer.
“But there is no denying that we have, in our history as a nation, racism, and that racism has played a role in the history of our nation.”
