New York sources reported that Nikki Haley, the first and only Indian-American to attain the status of a member of the US cabinet has shared a piece of advice from her mother that propelled the child of Sikh immigrants to the high office: “Your job is not to show them how you’re different. Your job is to show them how you’re similar.” She recounted to a tv interviewer on sunday that in the small town of Bamberg in south Carolina where her mother wore a saree and her father a turban, she would get teased in the playground.
But when she got home, her mother’s advice was to stress to positives of her being an American. Overcoming all odds, she became the governor of her state in the southern part of the US, where there was deep-rooted racism, and went on to the cabinet. She achieved these as a member of the republican party that is often criticized as being conservative and hostile to non-Whites, women and immigrants.
Haley is mentioned as a prospective presidential candidate. One of her acts as governor was to remove a racist symbol from the state’s legislative complex the flag of the American Confederacy, the group of southern states that rebelled against the abolition of slavery and fought the civil war to retain it.
