Along with most of my South Asian friends, I greeted the news of Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign this week with a combination of laughter, sadness and pity. After all, Haley is polling at an abysmal 4%, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone actually believes she has a realistic chance to dethrone Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis to grab the MAGA crown.
If you ascribe to the foolishness that people of color are ruled solely by “identity politics” and race, then I should be rallying and rooting for Haley purely out of South Asian solidarity. After all, she was the first woman of color to become governor of a historically segregated South Carolina, and the first Indian American in a presidential Cabinet.
The model minority myth has remained one of white supremacy’s most enduring and successful divide-and-conquer strategies.
Yet, she’s also apparently “white,” according to reports on her voter registration card from 2001. What we do know from her career and recent presidential campaign announcement is that her political platform veers dangerously close to laundering the “model minority myth,” in the process promoting harmful Republican policies that negatively affect communities of color.
The model minority myth has remained one of white supremacy’s most enduring and successful divide-and-conquer strategies. The educational and economic success of some Asian Americans has been used as a cudgel against Black people, in particular, who continue to be told by GOP politicians to stop blaming racism for their problems. Instead, they are commanded to work hard and pull themselves up by “their bootstraps,” even when they remain “bootless.” It’s a myth that gaslights Americans about systemic racism and our individual role in enabling and enforcing white supremacy.
According to a 2021 poll, a majority of Republicans believed that minorities are more favored than white people, as evidenced by the success of some people of color. Last year, a poll…
Read the full article here
