Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley insisted in a Fox News interview Tuesday that America “has never been a racist country.”
In the interview on “Fox & Friends,” co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Haley to respond to MSNBC host Joy Reid who said Haley’s race and ethnicity could be an obstacle to winning the GOP nomination for president after her third place finish in the Iowa caucuses on Monday.
Haley told Kilmeade that Reid “lives in a different America than I do.”
“I mean, yes, I’m a brown girl that grew up in a small rural town in South Carolina who became the first female, minority governor in history, who became a UN Ambassador, and who is now running for president,” Haley said, according to a clip shared by Mediaite. “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.”
Kilmeade then asked Haley whether she thinks the GOP is a “racist party.”
“No! We’re not a racist country, Brian,” Haley responded. “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.”
Moments later, Haley contradicted her own assertion that America is not a racist country by saying, “I faced racism when I was growing up, but I can tell you today is a lot better than it was then.”
Haley’s comments come weeks after she faced backlash for failing to mention slavery as the cause of the civil war. She then suggested that the person who asked the question was a Democratic plant before walking back her comments.
