The president’s speech at a South Carolina church did not go over well with the GOP candidate.

The president’s speech at a South Carolina church did not go over well with the GOP candidate.

Joe Biden gave a speech in South Carolina on Monday, and Nikki Haley isn’t happy about it. Specifically, she’s not happy about the part where the president called her out for her extremely cringeworthy comments about the Civil War, saying, “Let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War.”

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The issue of the Civil War—and her commentary on it—has come up for Haley in the past. While running for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she described the war as a matter of two sides fighting over “tradition” and “change,” adding that the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.” She also claimed there was no reason to take the flag down from the statehouse grounds (until five years later, after the mass shooting at the Charleston church). After Haley’s gaffe in December, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that her failure to mention slavery was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.”

  • @TheActualDevil
    2•11 months ago

    But they gave their honest pov as a representation of white people in general.

    Yeah, but until relatively recently, white folk didn’t think that way. At all.

    Edit: Also, to be clear, what we currently call the “confederate flag” wasn’t associated with the entire rebellion. It was the battle flag of a specific army, the Army of Northern Virginia. It was mostly moved to irrelevance by everyone other than confederate apologists until the civil rights era when old-school racists started to put a bunch of confederate statues up everywhere and promoting the flag as a symbol in an attempt to frighten Black people fighting for their rights.

    Even before World War II, cracks were evident in the foundation of the flag’s status as a symbol of heritage. Occasional northern and African-American voices questioned the wisdom of displaying a flag they associated with disunity or treason. And young white southerners began using the flag in distinctly non-memorial ways as a symbol of regional identity.

    The growing battle over the post-Reconstruction South’s established racial order of Jim Crow segregation resurrected the Confederate flag’s use as a political symbol.

    Supporters of the States Right Party (aka the Dixiecrats) in 1948 embraced the flag as a symbol of support for segregation. Although the Dixiecrats emphasized Constitutional principal, “states rights” in the 1940s and 1950s translated, as it had in the 1860s, into the purposeful denial of fundamental human and civil rights for African Americans.

    The explicit use of the Confederate flag as a symbol of segregation became more widespread and more violent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Southern states resisting federally-mandated integration incorporated the flag into their official symbolism.

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