WATCH: ‘America is not a racist country,’ former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley claims

Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, pushed back on the recent national reckoning on racial injustice in the United States during her speech on the first night of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 24, 2020. “In much of the Democratic Party, it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist,” Haley said. “That is a lie. America is not a racist country,” she said before going on to talk about what it was like for her growing up as the child of Indian immigrants in a small Southern town, where she said she faced “discrimination and hardship,” but nevertheless went on to break barriers as a minority female politician. Haley decried the loss of Black lives in America, as well as recent protests against racial injustice that have turned violent in some instances. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Haley said, remembering bipartisan support for the decision to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s state capital after a white supremacist shot 12 African-American worshippers at a church in Charleston back in 2015, leaving nine dead.

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