Scholars worry Haley and Ramaswamy's race-blindness helps GOP advance "white supremacist worldview"

Donald Trump training his racist "birther" conspiracy theory on former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, one of his few remaining 2024 GOP primary foes, garnered widespread criticism in the aftermath of Monday's low-turnout Iowa caucuses, which saw the former president beat out the other Republican candidates with 51 percent of the votes.

But political scholars caution against paying too much attention to the racism Haley and ex-candidate Vivek Ramaswamy encountered from within their party as Asian Americans, arguing it obscures the GOP's real end in evoking race.  

Trump's theory deems Haley ineligible for the presidency because she was born to two Indian immigrant parents, dismissing that she was born and raised in the United States. The irony of his circulation of the baseless claim for Haley, some pundits argue, is that it comes amid the former South Carolina governor's recent gaffes denying racism in the U.S., the most recent being her assertion that America has "never been a racist country," and campaign hinging, in part, on ignoring race in the country altogether. 

Trump's comments reflect a white Republican tendency to discard or attempt to "other" Republicans of color when they no longer find them useful, Democratic political commentator Kaivan Shroff argued. The former president's recent social media post saying Ramaswamy, who repeatedly praised Trump on the trail, "is not MAGA" as well as the pushback Black Republicans received when challenging Florida's new slavery curriculum further demonstrate that dynamic, he said. 

"That's certainly a pattern that we see and [is] nothing new but really does, I think, speak to the predicament these minority figures are in and also maybe how futile their efforts to — whether you want to say whitewash, or deny racism or try to align with the dominant privileged forces in the country — are," Shroff told Salon.

Amid the furor over Trump's birtherism and Haley's latest comments on race, however, other political experts warn that focusing on the racism party members now aim at the ex-South Carolina governor and threw at biotech entrepreneur Ramaswamy distracts from the ways the GOP is using race — and the polarizing figures themselves — to make its preferred, white nationalist worldview the country's reality: by stoking white victimhood. 

In a now-viral moment, MSNBC host Joy Reid argued that Haley's chances of success in the GOP primary were slim given the volume of xenophobia and racism that Trump has stirred up in the party, attributing part of what she suggested is Haley's inevitable electoral failure to that bigotry.

"It’s the elephant in the room. She’s still a brown lady that’s got to try to win in a party that is deeply anti-immigrant, and which accepts the notion you can say immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country," Reid told her co-panelists, according to Mediaite. "She’s getting birthered by Donald Trump, and I don’t care how much the donor class likes her — which will ramp up a lot the better she does in New Hampshire — it’s still a challenge."

MSNBC anchor and co-host Lawrence O'Donnell echoed those thoughts, commenting on a national CBS/YouGov survey taken last week about Trump's claim that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the country, comments many have associated with Hitler's rhetoric. Seventy-one percent of Republican voters agreed with the language if they were presented it without attribution, according to the poll, and 82 percent agreed if it was attributed to Trump. 

"That means that 81% of the Republican primary electorate believe Nikki Haley has poisoned blood and is poisoning the blood of the United States,” O’Donnell concluded, positing that the figure represents an "impossible" roadblock for Haley in winning over the MAGA Republican vote.

But suggesting that Republican voters would shy away from voting for a person of color based on that person's skin tone or ethnic origins is "short-sighted," Dr. Sangay Mishra, an associate professor of political science at Drew University, told Salon.

"What matters is how close [the candidates] take themselves to the idea of racial anxiety that [white conservative voters] are experiencing," Mishra said, referring to fears around the white population declining and white dominance being challenged. 

Those concerns peek out of Ramaswamy's wife, Dr. Apoorva Ramaswamy's, meetings with Iowa voters in the days ahead of the caucuses about the reservations they may have about voting for her husband.

Iowa voters peppered her with questions about her and her husband's country of origin — Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Indian American, was born and raised in the U.S., while Apoorva told voters she migrated to the country from India when she was four — and assumptions that they were Muslim (they are Hindu). Some, according to reports from NBC News and The Bulwark's "Focus Group Podcast," expressed hesitation because of Ramaswamy's "dark skin" and name. 

In that sense, there's truth to Reid's point that GOP leaders and voters view Haley and Ramaswamy differently because of their skin or, in the latter's case, his name and the misconception that he would be Muslim, explained Dr. Claire Jean Kim, a professor of politics and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine.

But, she argues, in focusing on the moments of racism against the two, the public misses the bigger picture of "what's going on with race" in the GOP.

"What they are doing is advancing a white supremacist worldview, through their discourse, through their actions, and it's a worldview that's based on a fantasy of white victimhood," Kim told Salon. "They literally take historical political reality and invert it. They turn it on its head and say whites have been the victim all these years of other groups trying to take things from them."

This belief targets immigrants, particularly Mexicans and other Central Americans attempting to cross the border, and Black Americans by way of affirmative action, and works to justify efforts to reproduce and increase white America's power, Kim said.

How Haley and Ramaswamy fit into the equation, she explained, calls back to an almost "century-long" dynamic of political leaders "deploying" Asian Americans as "front men for the establishment" to essentially validate white supremacist ideology through favorable policies, which in turn allows willing Asian Americans to appeal to the base.

"Asian Americans have been invoked to this very purpose since at least the 1940s: how the US government talked about Japanese Americans during the war as model Americans, as super patriotic, as cooperating with the government and assimilating — all of this while the Black Civil Rights Movement is becoming more international becoming more radical, becoming more assertive," Kim said. "In that context, the U.S. government says, 'Oh, we need some people of color to validate U.S. ideals and U.S. practices,' and they turn to Asian Americans." 

Haley and Ramaswamy, though the latter is no longer in the presidential race, both "want to appear as somebody who is willing to be in defense of white dominance or white supremacy," Mishra added, pointing to their platforms and how they discuss race, immigration and American history. "All of that is to communicate that they are not too far from where Trump is in terms of invoking white racial anxiety and white racial resentment."

When reached by Salon for comment, Ramaswamy's campaign spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, questioned if the suggestion that Ramaswamy is a "'pawn' to be 'used' just because he's brown" isn't inherently racist in itself. "'Anti-racists' turn out to be the real racists almost every time," she added.

Haley's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The South Carolinian came under fire at the tail-end of 2023 for refusing to mention slavery when questioned by a voter on the cause of the Civil War. The viral exchange prompted sharp rebuke of the Republican, who has been described as a moderate, and she later walked back her answer, insisting that "of course, the Civil War was about slavery." 

Her Tuesday statement proclaiming America is not and has "never been a racist country" also sparked widespread outrage, as she tried to provide a counter to Reid's claim and declare that, though she experienced racism growing up, the country "is a lot better" now. Haley defended her remark Thursday night, explaining she believes the country's “intent was to do the right thing.” 

Both she and Ramaswamy have leveraged race ignorance in their speeches and platforms while espousing charged rhetoric. Ramaswamy has staunchly rejected identity politics and in August made false claims that the threat of white supremacy is manufactured.

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Haley, according to Mishra, instead "individualizes" her childhood experiences with racism in South Carolina in a way that removes them from a historical context, a move she demonstrated in her Tuesday remarks. In late 2022 she also called for the deportation of U.S.-born Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who is Black, over his left-leaning views on border security at a rally for Herschel Walker. 

Candidates of color, regardless of party, have to reconcile their racial identities with whiteness and the expectation that they prove themselves good enough for the role, Mishra said, noting they often navigate that dynamic through "colorblindness."  

"Within the Republican field, if you have these candidates who are people of color, then they really have to start embodying the idea of colorblindness," he explained, pointing to how Haley argues that, despite the racism and xenophobia she and her parents faced, she was able to overcome and obtain the political positions she has. That posture often also gives Republicans the sense that the GOP isn't racist, Mishra added.

But race is "a central organizing principle in American politics in general," noted Dr. Vincent Hutchings, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

Hutchings told Salon that the U.S. party system has been racially based for decades in its presidential nominations, seeing Republican candidates sweeping the white vote and Democratic candidates garnering a majority of the non-white vote, particularly the Black vote. Race, then, is "built into the system in a way that's more difficult to interrogate, or at least it's less dramatic," he said. 

"White voters are concerned that non-white candidates might not prioritize their interests, and so when a candidate, whether that person is a Republican or a Democrat, can overtly signal that they will be colorblind — in other words, they will not be color-conscious — that works to their benefit because many, probably most, white voters prefer it that way," Hutchings said, noting Democratic former President Barack Obama's efforts to reassure voters he was "not the president of Black America." 

Last week's CBS/YouGov poll also found that 61 percent of Republican respondents believed President Joe Biden would put the interests of racial minorities over white people, compared to 26 percent who believed he'd treat all groups the same way. Eighty-four percent believed Trump would treat everyone the same way, compared to just 3 percent who believed Trump would put the interests of racial minorities over white people's. 

Haley's apparent flip-flop "acknowledges that these voters that she is trying to win over — call it MAGA, call it the larger Republican Party — are fundamentally ahistorical, first of all, and racist," Shroff told Salon, speculating that Haley knows she must deny the country's racist underpinnings "if she's going to have a fighting chance" despite knowing "it's not true." 

"I think these really are people who are willing to be human shields — props — for this party," he added, referring to Ramaswamy, Haley and Republicans of color more broadly, and noting that "they have nothing to show for it at the end of the day" in terms of electability. 

As far as Haley is concerned, however, Hutchings disagrees. Her growth in the polls can't be accurately compared to Trump's because of how loyal his supporters are, Hutchings argued, noting that while many of the New Hampshire primary polls show Trump's lead among Republican voters, she is bounds ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

The real story of Haley is "about the fact that she, in spite of her non-white background, is able to do so well," Hutchings said, adding: "She's playing the appropriate racial game, which is basically by not adopting that color-conscious or race-targeted platform. By implication, she's embracing the racial status quo."

Haley's ongoing and Ramaswamy's failed campaign, regardless of their success in the current election cycle, also raise the potential for another Republican of color to pick up where they leave off, pursue the presidency — and even win — in future contests, Mishra suggested.

"There might come a time when a conservative Republican person of color might be the best defender of white supremacy," he said. "And Republicans would not hesitate to elect that person because that would give a cover to some of the racist things that underlie that platform or that way of thinking about what is real America, and how do we need to defend the American way of life, and what does it mean to make America great again."