Former Governor of South Carolina and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley recently appeared on PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover.”
During the interview, which lasts nearly half an hour, Hoover and Haley discussed multiple topics, including Haley’s time at the U.N., and the way in which the United States should deal with Iran and North Korea.
In the latter half of the interview, Hoover asked Haley about her decision as Governor of South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from the position it held in front of the statehouse.
HOOVER: While you were governor, a white supremacist killed nine South Carolinians in the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It was really how you navigated the aftermath of that event that caught the attention of the country … because the issue of the Confederate flag had been one that had been debated for a long time in South Carolina, but nobody had been able to remove it entirely until you were governor, and you were able to successfully bring together people from all sides of that debate in order to reach a conclusion that everybody agreed upon.
Hoover remarked on how the debate came up again recently, prompting Haley to pen an op-ed for The Washington Post. “Help maybe clarify and answer this question about how the killer hijacked the flag from people who saw it as service and sacrifice,” Hoover said.
Haley replied:
Well, I think it’s interesting, and it shows the times that I’ve literally said the same things for all the years since, but now in the outrage of media and the sensitivity of political correctness, suddenly everybody has a problem with what I’m saying.
What I said was, the reason this was so hard was, we needed a 2/3 vote to bring the flag down. I saw an opportunity to make something right. The Confederate flag, I’ve said from from the very beginning, never should have been there in the first place, but because it was there, I saw the opportunity that maybe we could have a conversation about bringing it down. But in order to bring a compromise, you have to be able to respect the views of your people.
Haley then noted that there “were two different sets of people.” There were those for whom the flag represented “pain and racism and slavery,” and those for whom it represented “heritage and sacrifice and service.”
“If I had gone and condemned those people that saw it that way, that flag never would have come down,” Haley stated. “Instead, I had to acknowledge the thoughts of both and say, ‘But now it’s time for our state to move forward.’ And through those actions, I called for the Confederate flag to come down, and it came down.”
It was here that Haley offered an important lesson for today’s United States:
If you go around vilifying people for their views, they’re not gonna listen to you, much less work with you. I needed to let them know, ‘I understand that that’s how you feel.’ Not how I feel, but I understood that’s how they felt. And we had to find a way for them to feel like they were part of this decision for the betterment of South Carolina.
Hoover pushed back, saying that the Confederate flag re-emerged as a widespread symbol in the 1960s just as a certain segment of the southern population were “trying to resist the federal government forcing racial equality upon them.“
“As a woman of color who grew up in the aftermath of that, how do you square that with the heritage-not-hate messaging?” Hoover asked.
Haley responded, saying it was “hard,” and that symbol being brought back into the southern mainstream during a resistance to racial equality “is why the Confederate flag never should’ve been there in the first place.”
What it came down to for Haley was that the “heritage not hate” crowd could respect the flag, as well as their notion of what it means, in the confines of a museum so that those who were truly disturbed by the Confederate flag wouldn’t have to experience “pain” when walking or driving by the statehouse.
If someone – if a child looks up at that flag and feels pain, we’re doing something wrong … at the end of the day, [that] was to make sure that the pain I felt growing up as a brown girl in a black-and-white world shouldn’t be the same pain of a child growing up today looking at that statehouse.