A Washington Post article criticizing Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s “all-white high school” was blasted by political commentators on Tuesday.
The piece, titled “Haley’s nearly all-White high school lacked lessons of racism, some say,” was written by the Post’s national political investigative reporter Michael Kranish. The reporter goes back to the mid-1980s when Haley attended Orangeburg Preparatory, a private high school in South Carolina. At the time, Orangeburg Prepatory was “a newly created private school formed from the merger of two institutions known locally as ‘segregation academies’ because of their nearly universal White enrollment in a majority-Black city,” according to the Post.
Shortly after the article was published, it was slammed by political commentators on social media.
“Ffs this is stupid. Now do Joe Biden’s high school,” wrote The Dispatch Editor-in-Chief Jonah Goldberg.
“This s*** is exhausting,” said Washington Examiner and New York Post contributor Brad Polumbo.
Mediaite staff writer Isaac Schorr chimed in, writing, “This article has nothing to do with Nikki Haley. What a classic of the ‘[Republican’ Name…Something Bad Unrelated to Said Republican]’ genre.”
The article’s main sourcing came from interviews the Post conducted with classmates of Haley who complained that they “weren’t adequately instructed about South Carolina’s history of divisive racial issues — from Jim Crow laws to Ku Klux Klan raids to lynchings.”
In the sixth paragraph of the Washington Post story, the reporter writes, “Neither Haley nor officials at Orangeburg Prep responded to questions from The Washington Post about her time at the school, and thus it could not be determined what she was taught there.”
The former South Carolina governor graduated from Orangeburg Prepatory in 1989 before going on to Clemson University. Haley was born to Indian immigrants, which The Washington Post article mentions, and has previously discussed growing up in a majority white school.
“We were the only Indian family in our small southern town,” Haley told NBC News last month. “I was teased every day for being brown. So, anyone that wants to question it can go back and look at what I’ve said on how hard it was to grow up in the deep South as a brown girl.”
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