“A House Divided” — The Abolitionist Challenge to Whiteness

Nikki Haley’s waffling non-response to a simple question about the cause of the Civil War was a recent reminder of the care contemporary Republican politicians take to avoid voicing even a hint of a challenge to the ideology of White supremacy.[i] Her unwillingness to name preservation of chattel slavery as the root cause of the secession of the Confederate States is an example of the way GOP leaders consistently divert attention away from racial politics and from racial injustice as central driving forces of American history. In a play to secure the votes of White Christian Nationalists and White Supremacists, Haley and other Republican presidential candidates have embraced the “Lost Cause” revisionist history of the Civil War. When Haley said “…the cause of the Civil War was basically how the government was gonna run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do…” she was toeing the MAGA line by ignoring the pervasive presence of racial injustice in the American past and present. She was also taking great care to avoid frightening away White Republicans who might interpret any mention of the history of slavery in America as an attack on Whiteness. <a href="https://medium.com/exploring-white-american-roots-digging-up/a-house-divided-the-abolitionist-challenge-to-whiteness-1260a8890b00">Website</a>