As we see in the video below, candidate Nikki Haley complains that as a child in rural South Carolina, she was disqualified from a mystery beauty pageant due to her being of Indian heritage.
But here’s the rub… Haley was born in 1972. I’ll go out in a limb, especially in light of Haley being short on details, but I’ll take a wild guess that Haley probably didn’t compete in any sort of pageant until she was at least 10-years-old. At least.
I’ll emphasize that this is just a guess on my part, but I’ll take a SWAG that if she really did participate in any beauty pageants, it wasn’t until the 1980s.
With that said, even though I was raised in a military family, the only time I ever lived in the South was as an infant. Not until I joined the Marine Corps was I ever stationed there (1979).
Even in the late 1970s, even in the Deep South… racially segregated beauty pageants were a thing of the past.
Yes, racially divided beauty pageants were a thing in the South. But things like that died before Haley was even born.