Sunny Hostin did not hold back while taking a swing at Nikki Haley for her recent comments — or lack thereof — about the Civil War.
“The View” co-host slammed the Republican presidential candidate during Tuesday’s episode for failing to mention slavery when a voter last month at a New Hampshire town hall asked Haley what had caused the Civil War.
At the event, Haley said that the Civil War was about the government and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.” She later admitted to Fox News that “the first thing I should’ve said was slavery.”
“It just shows you who she is,” Hostin said. “Maya Angelou said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’”
But Hostin wasn’t done. She pointed out that “this isn’t the first time” the former South Carolina governor has been a “hypocrite” on race.
“She said, ‘I, as a South Carolina governor, took down the Confederate flag,’” Hostin said. “Nikki Haley, you took down that flag because you were forced to.”
Haley was praised by then-President Barack Obama in 2015 for calling and later succeeding in the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House, The Washington Post reported. But she also did this after nine Black churchgoers were murdered in Charleston in 2015 by an avowed racist and had previously dismissed the issue of the flag, suggesting its presence wasn’t a big deal. Hostin noted on “The View” that she covered the shooting as a journalist, was in Charleston when the flag was taken down and was enraged by Haley’s speech at the time.
“When she took it down, she said, ‘For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble. Traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry,’” Hostin said, pointing at the camera. “So you can kiss my grits when you try to say some nonsense about how you ‘should’ve said slavery, everybody knows slavery.’ She didn’t say it intentionally because 85% of Republicans are white and she does not want to lose those votes.”
Haley’s remarks that the Confederate flag represent noble traditions and Southern heritage are nothing new. The Confederate flag is thought by some to be a tribute to the “Lost Cause” — or the belief that the Confederacy fought not to uphold slavery but to protect states’ rights and preserve a genteel way of life for white landowners. This reimagining of the cause of the war was created by white Southerns shortly after their 1865 defeat in the Civil War. It was an attempt to show the South’s role, and the deaths of thousands of Confederate soldiers, in a more positive light, according to National Geographic.
The Confederate flag, however, wasn’t a popular way to boast of Southern pride until “the 1940s and 1950s as part of a massive resistance campaign against the civil rights movement,” Matthew Guterl, a professor of Africana and American studies at Brown University, told The Washington Post in 2015.
“It wouldn’t exist in our national popular culture without this moment,” Guterl said. “When African Americans fought for their equality … the battle flag was recovered and redeployed as a symbol of opposition to it.”
He added: “What was once a very blatant, full-throated defense of white supremacy has now become this gesture to heritage and history that is presented as though it has nothing to do with the civil rights movement. But it has everything to do with the civil rights movement.”
