Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the United States “is not a racist country,” echoing similar sentiments made by his GOP presidential rival Nikki Haley.
“Well, the U.S. is not a racist country, and we’ve overcome things in our history,” Mr. DeSantis said in a New Hampshire CNN town hall Tuesday. “You know, I think the Founding Fathers — they established a set of principles that are … universal.”
The principles “may not have been universally applied at the time, but I think they understood what they were doing,” he said. “They understood that those principles would be the engine for progress for generations to come.”
Earlier Tuesday, Ms. Haley said on “Fox & Friends” that the country has never been racist.
“Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can,” the former South Carolina governor said.
When host Wolf Blitzer asked Mr. DeSantis if he thought the U.S. “has never” been a racist country, the Florida Republican wouldn’t commit to the statement.
“Well, what I said was, we’ve had challenges with … how race was viewed,” he said. “And so, for example, those were universal principles in the Declaration of Independence. And so 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.”
He said there have been “challenges with how we’ve dealt with race as a society,” but that America is still the “best place” to pursue dreams.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.