A South Carolina legislator faced calls to resign on Friday after using a racial slur against President Barack Obama and an Indian-American candidate for governor.
“We already got one raghead in the White House. We don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion,” Republican state senator Jake Knotts said on Thursday on a talk show, according to local media.
Mr Knotts was referring to state representative Nikki Haley, who is considered a front-runner in Tuesday’s election to become the Republican candidate for governor in the conservative southern state.
Ms Haley’s parents were Sikh immigrants from India, although she says she is Christian. Mr Obama’s father hailed from Kenya.
A “raghead” is a derogatory term in the United States directed mostly against West Asian Muslims. Sikh men customarily wear turbans.
Mr Knotts, who supports a rival Republican candidate, said he made the remarks in jest on an Internet talk-show, which was not available online on Friday.
“Since my intended humorous context was lost in translation, I apologise,” Mr Knotts said. “I still believe Ms Haley is pretending to be someone she is not, much as Mr Obama did, but I apologise to both for an unintended slur.”
South Carolina’s Democratic Party called the legislator’s remarks “completely unacceptable” and said his excuse was “lame.”
“If he has any shame at all, he will resign from the Senate. There should be no room in government for hate speech,” the party’s chair, Carol Fowler, said in a statement.
Tim Pearson, a spokesman for Ms Haley, called Mr Knotts “an embarrassment to our state and to the Republican Party.”
“South Carolina is so much better than this, and the people of our state will make that quite clear next Tuesday,” Mr Pearson said in an email. —AFP