Ron DeSantis essentially agrees with Nikki Haley that the United States wasn’t built on racism, but he acknowledged challenges along the way to a colorblind society.
In New Hampshire on Tuesday, the 2024 presidential candidate was asked to address his opponent’s claim that America has “never been a racist country,” and his narrative contained more complexity than that of the former South Carolina Governor.
“Well, what I said was, we’ve had challenges with how race was viewed,” DeSantis told Wolf Blitzer.
“And so for example, those were universal principles in the Declaration of Independence. And you had a decision in the 1850s. The Dred Scott case said Dred Scott because he was black wasn’t an American citizen. That was wrong, that was discriminating on the basis of race. That’s what you ended up having the 14th Amendment ratified to overturn Dred Scott. So yes, we’ve had challenges with how we’ve dealt with race as a society, but we are the best, no matter what your background is,” he said during a CNN town hall.
The Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision was rooted in the argument that Scott, an enslaved Black man who was taken from a slave state to a free state, lacked standing to sue, even though he’d been moved to territory where slavery was illegal. DeSantis has said its the worst ruling in SCOTUS history.
“I know there’s not everyone that is willing to admit that anymore, but that’s just the reality,” DeSantis said last month.
Chief Justice Roger Taney, an Andrew Jackson appointee who came from a slave-holding family in Maryland, used the case as a pretext to overturn the Missouri Compromise, allowing slavery in the territories and giving slaveholders the presumption of elastic property rights.
During the CNN interview, DeSantis also said the United States “is not a racist country and we’ve overcome things in our history.”
“You know, I think the Founding Fathers, they established a set of principles that are universal now, they may not have been universally applied at the time. But I think they understood what they were doing, they understood that those principles would be the engine for progress for generations to come.”
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