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Nikki Haley

In New York Journal, Andrew Rice discusses the many disadvantages Nikki Haley faced being born and raised in Bamberg, a small southern town deep in South Carolina by two Indian immigrant parents. She was born in 1972, a time when there was not legal segregation, but in the small town she grew up in there were still black and white divisions. A railroad track divides the city of Bamberg. Haley said, “On one side lived the black residents, on the other the white,” recalling that her family, the Randhawa family, “didn’t fit either category. We weren’t dark enough to be black or pale enough to be white.” In her state, men were almost always the ones in office. However, in a matter of 6 years she moved from working as an accountant in Exotica, her parents small clothing boutique, to Governor of South Carolina. However, because of her lack of experience, gender and race, none of the established campaign consultants in Columbia would work for her. Voters in her semi-rural district, they said, would “never go for a candidate whose father wore a turban.”

In her political career, many people have made derogatory comments towards both her skin color and her gender. The Journal explains how many in the general public of South Carolina were ignorant of the fact that Haley was Indian-American. Once, a black state legislator later said that voters saw her as a “nice conservative woman with a tan.” Haley later spoke about how she felt attacked by this racially offensive comment. In her book, Haley wrote that growing up in Bamberg made her “adept in the art of finding common ground,” which in practice often meant downplaying her ethnicity.”

In the 2010 election for Governor of South Carolina, Haley’s opponents took to calling her “Mark Sanford in a skirt.” One state senator - a self-described “redneck” - called Haley a “rag-head.” A former political consultant to Haley, who had gone into business as a gossipy blogger, went public with a claim that they’d had an affair. Haley rejected the allegation as a “disgraceful smear” created by her opponents in order to hurt her campaign. She has never gotten over the way the press chased the story. “In a matter of days,” she wrote, “I had gone from no one caring about my campaign to having a pack of salivating wolves following me everywhere.”