Tea Party Fave Nikki Haley Not White Enough, After All

South Carolina state Sen. Jake Knotts has served up the latest in what will certainly be a rising chorus of racist gaffes as the campaign season heats up. Knotts guffawed on a political talk show that both President Obama and Tea Party-backed gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley are “ragheads.” AP quotes Knotts saying: “We’ve already got a raghead in the White House, we don’t need another raghead in the governor’s mansion.” (Via HuffPo)

Haley was already fighting allegations that she’s a tramp (that’s the long and short of speculation over whether she’s had extramarital affairs). Now Knotts and others on the right are fretting over her Sikh heritage. Haley appears to be fretting over it as well, having set up an Obama-style “truth” section on her Website in which she reassures everyone she’s now deeply, truly Christian.

For his part, Knotts insists he was telling a joke that would not offend if we all heard it in context. He’s at least right that the broader context matters more than either his quip or himself. Knotts will not be the last partisan combatant to step in it this political season while questioning someone’s whiteness bona fides. Not everyone can be as subtle as Sarah Palin’s 2008 “real Americans” refrain.

Salon’s Gabriel Winant advances the coming trend with an essay worth reading today. Winant says beware the debate over whether Knotts and his ilk are racists, foolish or both. The point is that xenophobia is the connective tissue of today’s conservative movement. An extended snip after the jump:

Racism is, in this way, in the bones of the modern conservative movement. What we’ve seen in Knotts’ comment is a little corner of an x-ray. Through the second half of the 20th century, anticommunism was what gave structure to otherwise disparate elements of conservatism — the libertarians, the social conservatives, the nationalist war hawks. The War on Terror has had to tag in for the Cold War. Many of the trappings are the same: the paranoia about sleeper agents and Manchurian candidates within our own ranks certainly rings a bell. But the core of conservative animus and belligerence here is a belief in an irrevocable clash of civilizations that has been going on for centuries, and picks up on much of the legacy of Jim Crow-type racial conservatism.

[snip]

This isn’t to say that Mark Steyn and Bill Kristol have Klan hoods in their closets. I’m sure they think of themselves racial egalitarians and color-blind. (Well, I’m sure Kristol does, anyway.) Even Jake Knotts probably does. But they can’t defend the things that matter to them without racism.

Photo: Renée Ittner-McManus