I'm holding a mirror. I need the "birthers" and the other racists in the republican party to look at themselves for a moment, and understand where their racism comes from, and why it is so deeply ingrained in their hearts and minds, and how it ties in to the disgusting racist slur about the President not being a real "American."
See, I'm an old white guy from the south. I know racism inside and out. I can see it even when other whites may not. I was alive when Jim Crow were the rules round here. I was alive when black voters were made to take literacy tests before they were allowed to vote. It simultaneously suggested that blacks weren't "American" and that they were also too stupid to vote. So they were made to take these tests when whites simply walked into the booth and pulled the lever for the racist that best tickled their fancy.
More below.
Literacy tests, along with poll taxes and extra-legal intimidation,[1], were used to deny suffrage to African-Americans in a number of southern states, while allowing many illiterate whites to vote. This was accomplished by making the test inordinately difficult and allowing test-givers to choose who had to take the test and who did not. Most African-Americans in the south were effectively disenfranchised from the 1890s until the 1960s.
African Americans were held to an unequal standard. They were expected to take literacy tests, and to pay outrageous poll taxes from which whites were exempted. See what they did there? They took the citizens their politicians kept uneducated and impoverished and told them that in order to change their social circumstances that they would have to be smarter and richer than their white counterparts.
This has slowly changed, and with the advent of affirmative action laws and equal voting protections, the black community in the south was afforded some small measure of a voice in their society.
Fast forward to America 2011. An America where conservative racists gleefully opine that racism is dead in the same breath with which they use to condemn this President as "the other."
The problem is that no other President in US history has suffered the kind of personal scrutiny and attack that this President has. The problem is that while no white politicians are currently being attacked for being "ferriners", America's first black President is the first and only President whose citizenship is in question. Like a literacy test, this is exclusive to the fact that he is black. Period. Don't let anyone tell you different.
Another problem for these racists is that Barack Obama is one of the best educated, most accomplished academics to be elected to the office of the Presidency. So, of course, that means he was--according to Trump and other racists--actually stupid and lazy and his good grades and accomplishments must have simply been given to him because he was black.
So here's a mirror for all the birther racists. Your minds and tendencies are no better than those that would have literacy tests and poll taxes for blacks voters and politicians. I only mention this because the hatred and ugliness of this has crossed the line from fringe issue to mainstream media 24-7. And no republicans are willing to stand up and say anything more courageous than "I take the President at his word."
This country beat that ideology once. We faced it and fought against it and defeated it. We can do it again. We have to.