Nikki Haley and the manipulation of the model minority myth

• Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley plans to run in the 2024 presidential election.
• She will become one of the few South Asian women to have ever run for president of the United States.
• Haley has been criticized by some for distancing herself from her Indian heritage.

Last week, NPR revealed that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley plans to run for president in 2024. Having served as Donald Trump's US ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018, she is the first Republican to challenge the former president in a GOP primary election.

She will become one of the few South Asian women to have ever run for president of the United States, though she has been criticized by some for distancing herself from her Indian heritage.

Born Nimrata Randhawa to Indian immigrants from Punjab, Haley goes by her childhood nickname, Nikki. Though she grew up in a Sikh household, she has publicly emphasized her conversion to Christianity. She was also accused of listing her race as "white" on a 2001 voter registration card.

'A brown girl in a Black and white world'

At other times, Haley has been quite vocal about her Indian American identity, but mostly to use it as a twisted reference for America's progression toward racism. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, Haley claimed that "America is not racist," and cited her immigrant family's success despite a struggle with discrimination and adversity to make a case for a reformed nation. 

"I was a brown girl, in a Black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship. But my parents never gave in to grievance and hate," she said. "My mom built a successful business. My dad taught 30 years at a historically black college. And the people of South Carolina chose me as their first minority and first female governor."

Haley's on-and-off relationship with her Indian American heritage is what sociologists call strategic identity deployment. "It's the idea that there are ways of presenting your identity strategically to connect with and gain favor among particular audiences," said Hajar Yazdiha, an assistant professor of sociology at University of Southern California. "Among high status, powerful elites, tapping in and out of an identity is really a political strategy."

For most of Haley's political career, Yazdiha said, she benefited from aligning with conservative white people. But as she's grown her political ambitions, she's realized the necessity of reaching broader audiences. "And so she's strategically used her Indian American identity to gain favor among moderates, to give her credibility when she claims that America isn't racist, to manipulate the model minority myth, for her favor, and to claim herself as this evidence of the American dream," said Yazdiha.

"She really gives white Americans that kind of feel good story that they're willing to rally behind."

The model minority myth

Because Haley is South Asian, the model minority myth works in her favor, Yazdiha said. "The model minority myth is a racial project that's framing Asian Americans as a hardworking, law abiding, high achieving group. That's really a testament to the American dream," Yazdiha said. 

The myth is harmful as it imagines Asians as a monolith and is used to distract from the reality of systemic racism that affects other marginalized groups. "It gets rolled out to draw comparisons between Asian Americans and other racialized groups, especially Black Americans, to argue that by playing the rules and putting in the hard work, anyone can overcome discrimination and pull themselves up by their bootstraps," said Yazdiha. It also distracts from the real racism that Asian Americans face.

"The model minority myth becomes this political strategy for driving wedges between racialized groups that would, I think otherwise, be allies against white supremacy. So it gives Asian Americans this sense of conditional citizenship, that if they embrace the myth of the model minority, they can align themselves with white power," Yazdiha said.

The privilege of ambiguity

Haley isn't the only South Asian politician to employ the model minority myth. Former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal of the Republican Party has had his fair share of controversial instances of weighing between his Indian American identity and distancing himself from it, from defending a white-washed portrait of himself that hung in his office's lobby to claiming liberals are "obsessed with race."

Political commentators do it, too. Dinesh D'Souza, a right-wing political commentator and author has a track record of mocking Black public figures, from Barack Obama to Rosa Parks to the murder of Trayvon Martin. In his book "The End of Racism," D'Souza claimed "the old discrimination" has been replaced by "rational discrimination" based "on accurate group generalizations."

"Essentially, these people are being exalted to kind of mask the way white conservatives have perpetuated racism," said Vinay Harpalani, a law professor at University of New Mexico.

Haley's and Jindal's lighter complexions may also speak to the ways in which colorism benefits some conservative South Asian politicians in assimilating. It forges the perpetual foreigner trope.

"It's this idea that South Asian Americans really can never be American and will always be associated with our homelands more than with the US, even if we were born and raised here. But appearing white allows people like Nikki Haley to mitigate the effects of that stereotype, and people question her American-ness less. It allows her to pass even if her heritage is known," said Harpalani.

Yazdiha agrees. "Ambiguity, in many ways, can actually be a privilege. Especially when your racial ambiguity gets compounded by the status privileges of wealth and education, having that ambiguity can be a powerful political tool because you can effectively play both sides," she said.

Some might view playing both sides as a survival mechanism for those who are in positions of lesser power, or write it off as an expected political maneuver to find success in political systems primarily made by and for white men. To this, Yazdiha believes we have more of a reason to hold those who are in positions of cultural and political power to a higher standard.

As Yazdiha said: "We should question a system that gives these strategies. We should resist a system that makes these strategies so effective and we should resist the politicians of color who build their power by maintaining white supremacy."