SIDE-EYE POST OF THE DAY: Nikki Haley Is White?!

Governor Nikki Haley

Or at least she did back in 2001, now that Democrats have unearthed the South Carolina governor's voter registration application. The conservative Republican politician -- whose birth name is Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, and whose parents are East Indian immigrants -- is in a controversy. First Post writes: "Nikki Haley’s grave sin is not that the United States’ first Indian American woman governor apparently marked her race as 'white' on her voter registration form in South Carolina. Her real sin, is that an Indian American woman, the daughter of Punjabi storeowners, in this former slave state in the American South, took on the Old Boys Club and won.  The state’s first woman governor. The state’s first non-white governor. That’s a double whammy."

The article continues: "And boy, that rankles Democrats and some of her fellow Republicans as well. 'I believe she is the most corrupt person to occupy the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction,' John Rainey, a longtime Republican fundraiser and power broker told The Nation. And now they’ve found the perfect 'white lie'. They can use to it drive home the point that she is brown, that despite those blue power suits and that nice all-American National Guard husband, she is different, not one of them. They can now do it without being accused of playing race politics. They are hoping this might mark the beginning of the end for this particular shooting star story. Haley’s comet — the new face of the American South — now revealed to be an optical illusion. Now she’s brown, now she’s not."

Bookeristas Respond

Samantha Pierce, a GOP conservative in New York, writes: "Trying to create controversy with a ten year old voter registration card? Really? That is some weak sauce right there."

Noting that there was no specific option for East Indians on the form (the choices were "white", "black/African American", "Asian", "Hispanic", "Native American" or "other"), she adds: "This is like those people who get mad at mixed race folk where one of the races in the mix is black for choosing to identify as anything other than black. As if they get to decide for others what their identity should be. Like we used to say back in the day, step off fools."

Booker Rising response: While it is a much belated attack, I agree with the Democrats that Nikki Haley needs to stop fronting. For one, she isn't of European, Middle Eastern, nor North African ancestry (the current U.S. Census definition of "white", although the two latter groups aren't socially considered white in America). Two, shouldn't a white person actually look white? She doesn't look white. Governor Haley should've marked "Asian", which is what she is since her ancestry hails from the Asian continent. If she didn't like that category because she associates it with East Asia, then she should've marked "Other".