Nikki Haley Defends Cringeworthy Civil War Comments by Declaring, “I Had Black Friends Growing Up”

January brings with it a time for resolutions, and GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley might want to put this one at the top of her list: come up with much better answers to questions about the Civil War. Haley came under fire last month when she said the US Civil War was over “the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” failing to mention the word slavery. She later claimed the strange omission should not be read into, stating that “of course the Civil War was about slavery.” But then, on Thursday night, her response wasn’t great—again!

Asked about the matter at a CNN town hall, the Republican presidential hopeful said, “If you grow up in South Carolina, literally in second and third grade, you learn about slavery. You grow up and you have—you know, I had Black friends growing up. It is a very talked-about thing.”

Yes, Haley attempted to make her decision not to cite slavery as a cause of the Civil War better by literally saying she had Black friends.

Not surprisingly, she was subsequently called out for that and had to defend her comments on Friday.

Speaking about slavery and the Civil War has been an issue for Haley in the past. While running for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she described the war as a matter of two sides fighting over “tradition” and “change,” adding that the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.” She also insisted there was no reason to take the flag down from the statehouse grounds (though five years later, she urged state lawmakers to do so following a mass shooting at a church that left nine Black people dead). After Haley’s gaffe in December, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, wrote that her failure to mention slavery was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.” “Same person who said the confederate flag was about tradition & heritage and as a minority woman she was the right person to defend keeping it on state house grounds,” Harrison continued on X. “Some may have forgotten but I haven’t. Time to take off the rose colored Nikki Haley glasses folks.”