Apparently Nikki Haley checked her race as “white” in some form in 2001. The horror! First, Nikki Haley kind of looks on the white side. Second, though I check “Asian” I do so because of its cultural valence, and that valence is socially constructed. The “Asian American” category as encompassing South Asians is an artifact of the 1970s, and even today there is some discussion about the role of South Asians in the broader Asian American movement, where being East Asian, in particular Chinese, Japanese and Korean, is normative.
Nikki Haley as white