…about all this “birther” crap, in which fine upstanding folk who are legitimate natural-born citizens of this fine country (the US of A, because we’re all from it or want to be from it, of course) incessantly and illogically question the fact that our president is also legitimately natural-born…
…is that they’re not crazy. They’re just fucking racists.
I mean, it’s obvious with the Republicans. They’re just using this shit (and other shit) to blow smoke over their attempt to scuttle single-payer healthcare. But all these individual teabagging crackpots who jump up at rallies and rant about Obama being from Kenya? They’re not really crackpots. They’re just the same old garden-variety racists we’ve always had, using “he’s not a citizen” as a euphemism for “he’s not completely white OMFG he’s got 50% black cooties straight outta Africa and I bet the White House smells funny now somebody go get a roooope!!!”
See, although African Americans are generally better-off than other racial groups in this one respect — we don’t get the “But where are you really from?” schtick quite as often as Asians and Latinos/as — there’s still quite a bit of feeling out there that we aren’t really Americans. Yeah, even though we built the place. Even though most of the people saying this aren’t really (Native) Americans either, if that’s how they want to play it. It all just comes down to one very simple fact: that “American”, in the minds of these people, equals one thing — white.
So it really doesn’t matter how much proof gets shown to confirm that Obama is too, really, truly, an American. The birthers aren’t going to buy it. Because the only proof these people will accept is a 100% European American genetic makeup, or 99.44% with the incriminating .66 hidden acceptably far back in the family tree. That worked for McCain — don’t see the “birthers” going after him, do you? But since that ain’t gonna happen in Obama’s case, they’re never going to shut up.
We don’t need a new term for the birthers. They’re just the usual plain, boring old racists wearing new clothes and chanting new slogans, because they’ve figured out that slurs and hate speech just don’t have the same cachet these days. But underneath the new trappings, they’re the same old shit. So can we please stop paying so much attention to them and get back to healthcare?
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Thank you for saying this and putting it so clearly.
Every time … every single time … I’ve heard someone go off on some irrational birther theory, they’ve also been the kind of person who consistently excuses (and embraces) racism. This is not coincidental.
—Myca
Great post.
The “birthers” also conveniently ignore that John “Great White Hope” McCain was born in Panama, which never was and never will be a state (unlike Hawaii).
It all just comes down to one very simple fact: that “American”, in the minds of these people, equals one thing — white.
What disturbs me is the number of immigrants I’ve encountered who accept that too. The concept of American = white was so successfully exported as American culture until about the 1980s (thank you, Michael Jackson, at least you familiarized people in the rest of the world with the existence of black Americans), that the immigrants I know, who mostly came in the first couple decades after the 1965 lifting of quotas on brown people, nearly all use the word “American” to refer to white people (“his daughter is marrying an American boy”) and specify race for Americans of color (“her son is dating a Black girl” or “we met a Chinese couple”).
This seems to be fading somewhat among newer immigrants who are both more PC and more familiar with a racially diverse America, but it still exasperates me sometimes with the older folks.
I even have to fight that with my children. They say Canadian, meaning white, and I correct them, saying “You mean of European descent”–especially pertinent because they and other family members aren’t.