I am sympathetic to the argument that we need to stop talking about the birthers, because in talking about them, we just perpetuate their inanity. But in a recent interview on the topic, Markos Moulitas, of Daily Kos fame, stated, correctly I think, that it’s high time to start talking about the whole birther movement in terms of its underlying (barely – very thinly veiled) racism. During the interview, Moulitas and his interlocutor noted that older, white southerners were the group that was most likely to credit the theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore should not be president.
Now, many of these folks are Christian conservatives, which tells us that they have no compunctions substituting their wishes for reality, so long as reality doesn’t hit them in the head with a two-by-four.
These are people who no doubt still believe that all black men live to rape white women, and that all black women are highly promiscuous. They will, in short, believe the most egregious sorts of stereotypes about African Americans.
Equally important, they have a strongly proprietary attitude toward the United States. These are the folks who talk about taking "their" country back from the people who stole it. Never mind that every African American has a stronger claim on this nation on the basis of ancestral sweat equity than a lot of older, white southerners.
What it comes down to is that these folks just don’t believe it’s possible for a black man to be President of the United States. Since it’s impossible in their minds, the fact that a black man won the election, was inaugurated, and now lives in the White House with his black wife, her black mother, and their two black children simply cannot be real. Since it does in fact seem to be real –they cannot completely ignore the evidence that comes to them every day via the televisions that they probably sit in front of all day long – then the man whom everyone says is the nation’s first black President must not really be President, by dint of some flaw in his eligibility.
Actually, the whole birth certificate issue is tailor-made for theses folks, because it allows them to gussy up their racism in a seemingly legitimate complaint. But why do we suddenly need legislation specifying how the president must demonstrate his citizenship eligibility? We've got on just fine for two hundred twenty years without.
Ultimately, the only flaw in Obama's eligibility to be President is the simple fact that he is black. That’s all that’s going on here. Plain and simple. Call a spade a spade.