I want to ask you about something that's been a challenge for your campaign over the past week. This, of course, is referring back to New Hampshire. You were asked to explain the cause of the Civil War. You obviously did not mention slavery. And afterwards, you came up, you said that was a mistake. In fact, you said it should have been the first thing that you said. So you did come out and say that. Chris Christie, though, came out and said that you gave that answer, not because you're, in his words, dumb or racist, but because you're, quote, unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth. What What do you say to that?

No one's ever said that I am unwilling to offend. I offend plenty of people because I call people out when they do something wrong. What I will tell you is Chris Christie is from New Jersey. I should have said slavery right off the bat. But if you grow up in South Carolina, literally in second and third grade, you learn about slavery. You grow up and you have... I had black friends growing up. It is a very talked about thing. We have a big history in South Carolina when it comes to slavery, when it comes to all the things that happened with the Civil War, all that. I was thinking past slavery and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward. I shouldn't have done that. I should have said slavery. But in my mind, that's a given that everybody associates the Civil War with slavery.

When you talk about slavery being a constant point of discussion, being a point in where you go. My children growing up in New York, they learn about slavery in first grade, too. Can you share what the discussions about slavery were like? In your household, you've talked about experiencing humiliating discrimination when you were a little girl, things you remember. What were the discussions about slavery like for you?

I think that no different than anyone else in South Carolina. The time that I came and grew up, we were the only Indian family in a small rural Southern town. We weren't white enough to be white. We weren't black enough to be black. They didn't know who we were, what we were or why we were there. So we dealt with our own challenges. And I remember when I would get teased on the playground and I would come home, my mom would always say, your job is not to show them how you're different. Your job is to show them how you're similar. And it's amazing how that lesson on the playground played throughout my life. Because whether it was in the corporate world or as governor or as ambassador, when you're first faced with a challenge, if you talk about what you have in common, people let their guard down, and then you can get to a solution. When you talk about slavery, it was not just slavery that was talked about. It was more about racism that was talked about. It was more about we had friends, we had black friends, we had white friends, but it was always a topic of conversation, even among our friends.

In the South, we're very comfortable talking about it because we know that's what it is. But the goal was always to make today better than yesterday. Even though there was a lot of hardened thoughts on that there, we went through it. I had I dealt with my share of dealing with race issues. We had the tragic shooting of Walter Scott. He was an unarmed black man that was shot in the back seven times by a dirty cop. This was on the heels of Ferguson. South Carolina could have caught on fire, but we didn't do that. I talked to the Walter Scott family. I talked to law enforcement. And a month to the day at the bill signing, we had them both there, and we signed the first body camera bill in the country. A month later, we had the horrific shooting at Mother Emmanuel Church when a white supremacist went into a Bible study and took nine amazing souls. The entire national media came in wanting to make it about gun control and racism and death penalty. I said at the time, there will be a time and place we have those conversations, but right now we have nine souls we need to lay to rest.

I didn't have that luxury because two days later, the killer came out with his manifesto, and he was draped in the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag had always been either on top of the Statehouse or right in front of the State House since the year 2000. It is incredibly sensitive and a personal issue in South Carolina. I focused that next day. I said, I want to have four meetings. I want to call Republican leadership. I want to call Democrat leadership. I want to call the Congressional Delegation, and I want to call Community Leaders. I told my staff, Don't tell them what this is about, because I knew they wouldn't show up. When they came, I said, At three o'clock today, I'm going to call for the Confederate flag to come down. If you will stand with me, I will forever be grateful. If you won't, I'll never let anyone know that you were in this room. It was a tough thing, Erin, because we had to have two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate. To bring a divided state together and avoid riots and protests, the way we did that was I knew half of South Carolinians saw the Confederate flag as heritage and tradition.

The other half of South Carolinians saw it as slavery and hate. My job wasn't to judge either side. My job was to get them to see the best of themselves and go forward. And South Carolinians showed what true strength and grace looked like, because we didn't have protests. We had vigils. We didn't have riots. We had prayer. And South Carolina led the way. But that is the way we have to work on issues that try and divide us, is don't go and pick who's right and who's wrong and who's good and who's bad. That's what leaders are doing now, and it's caused us to be completely in political disarray. A leader doesn't decide who's right. When you serve the people, you serve everybody. And your job is to give them all the information you have and let them know where you want to go going forward.