Ron DeSantis insists US is ‘not a racist country’, echoing claim by Nikki Haley

The hard-right Florida governor Ron DeSantis says the US is “not a racist country”, echoing a controversial claim by Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is also trying to deny Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination.

“Well, the US is not a racist country,” DeSantis told a CNN town hall this week in New Hampshire. “And we’ve overcome things in our history. You know, I think the founding fathers – they established a set of principles that are universal.”

More than 250 years before independence from Britain, enslaved African people were brought to American soil by Spanish ships in the 1500s. Native Americans were displaced and enslaved.

The first ship of enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil in 1619. Slavery in southern states caused the civil war (a fact Haley failed to mention when quizzed on the subject last month), a conflict fought between 1861 and 1865 and ending with slavery abolished. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and unequal treatment in southern states until the civil rights reforms of the 1960s.

Entrenched social and economic inequalities persist, affecting all racial minorities. The last presidential election, in 2020, took place after a summer of protests for racial justice inspired by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Going into the New Hampshire primary next week, DeSantis and Haley trail Trump by wide margins. This week, DeSantis edged out Haley for a distant second in Iowa.

On Tuesday, Haley, whose parents came to the US from India, told Fox News: “I’m a brown girl … who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a UN ambassador and who is now running for president.

“If that’s not the American dream, I