Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is facing backlash after she failed to cite slavery as a cause of the Civil War during a town hall event in New Hampshire last week. She later clarified that “of course the Civil War was about slavery,” but her initial reluctance to say so is indicative of how Republican leaders have long avoided reckoning with the country’s past, says Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad. “Nikki Haley has consistently denied the relevance of the history of racism in this country and the presence of racism in this country,” he says. “This is the Republican Party.”

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.