When Ron DeSantis was asked on Tuesday night in a televised town hall in New Hampshire if he agreed with Nikki Haley that “America has never been a racist country,” as she had said earlier in the day, it seemed like an easy opportunity to hit his rival.
But Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, avoided answering the question directly, saying instead that America is not currently a racist country. He also alluded vaguely to “things in our history” that America had overcome.
Wolf Blitzer, the CNN moderator, again asked if Mr. DeSantis agreed that America was never a racist country. He again answered indirectly, taking a stance that neither agreed or disagreed with Ms. Haley’s claim.
“We had challenges with how race was viewed,” he said, pointing — as he often has on the campaign trail — to the Dred Scott decision in 1857, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Black people could not be citizens of the United States. He added, “That was wrong — that was discriminating on the basis of race.”
The back-and-forth provided another reminder of how carefully the Republican candidates have navigated racial politics on the campaign trail.
Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, made the claim while being interviewed on Fox News on Tuesday. She drew the distinction between “racism” and being “racist,” saying that she had faced racism when she was young but that America was “not a racist country” and had “never been a racist country.”
Mr. DeSantis, who as governor waged a public crusade against a high school African American studies course he said promoted a “woke agenda,” has often been criticized by Black Floridians for his stances on race. During his first run for governor, he warned voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his opponent, who was Black. Earlier in his presidential campaign, he drew condemnation even from Republicans for suggesting that enslaved people had benefited from their servitude.
And he refused to answer late last year when a New York Times reporter asked him if Ms. Haley had done the right thing by removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds in South Carolina.
Ms. Haley, in her Fox News interview, made a distinction that Republican candidates of color have drawn when speaking on the campaign trail: denying the existence of systemic racism while speaking of their personal experiences with racism.
But Ms. Haley’s claim on Tuesday went even further than her usual stump speech material, asserting that legalized slavery, the Trail of Tears, the internment of Japanese Americans and racial segregation through Jim Crow laws had never made America a racist country.
And it echoed an earlier gaffe she had made when she neglected to mention slavery as a cause of the Civil War. She later apologized, saying, “I should have said slavery right off the bat.”
Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting.