Still not good enough for some. (Courtesy of the White House)
We can stop pretending now, right? Seriously?
While the Republicans in power across the country focused their energy on ending Medicare, crushing public sector unions and waging an outright war on women, their apparent frontrunner to challenge President Obama in 2012, Donald Trump (have you stopped laughing yet?) was busy over Easter weekend resurrecting the old rumors challenging President Obama's eligibility to be president based on his supposed lack of a genuine birth certificate documenting that he first emerged from the womb and had his umbilical cord severed on United States soil. And the media that has for so long gratified the right's ever-growing lunatic fringe at the expense of Karl Rove's sanity dutifully obliged once more, giving the non-controversy more coverage than it deserved by a factor of infinity, given the mathematical result of attempting to divide by zero.
President Obama could have sought the political advantage of allowing the coverage to continue unabated and furthering the chasm between the most engaged Republican primary electorate and those who actually care about our country's significant issues. But he took the higher road, choosing, incredulously, to grant the State of Hawaii a waiver to release his long-form birth certificate in the hopes of finally ending this insipid fiasco and convincing both the media and the Republican base to focus on something other than falsely attempting to undermine his legitimacy as president.
Will it work? Not likely. It should surprise nobody that the heart and soul of the birther movement is not satisfied, and is now trying to put forth all sorts of entirely irrelevant constitutional arguments questioning Obama's citizenship in spite of his self-obvious certificate proving otherwise. After all, a birth certificate will not undo the fact that Barack Obama's father was from Kenya, or that he spent formative years in Indonesia; that his name is not derived from Anglo-Saxon roots; that he is, in essence, a fundamentally American product of the increasingly multicultural and multiracial world that makes scared conservatives so eager to turn back the clock. And these conservatives will stretch to whatever lengths necessary to ensure that they don't live in an America in which they must admit that Barack Hussein Obama is a fellow natural-born citizen.
Including becoming un-American.
Consider the case of Rick Perry. Despite being governor of Texas since 2000, when George W. Bush resigned to assume his ill-gotten and equally ill-starred presidency, it took until April of 2009—fewer than three months after President Obama's inauguration—for Governor Perry to stoke the passions of crowds chanting "secede!" in lending his support to a movement supporting an interpretation of the Tenth Amendment that severely limits the power of the federal government as opposed to the states. The whispers of nullification started to be heard once again in the conservative South—echoes of the time when such theories were used to fight desegregation of schools decades ago, and preserve slavery in the face of potential abolition a century before that.
Which brings us back to the original question: Can we please stop pretending? Can we please stop pretending that the furor over Barack Obama's birthplace has nothing to do with his heritage? Can we please stop pretending that secession movements and nullification movements start rearing their ugly heads whenever Southern conservatives think that black folk just might have more power than those good ol' boys are comfortable with? It hasn't ever mattered whether it was freedom, or the right to equal education, or now the assumption of the presidency. The rhetoric and tactics do seem pulled straight from a bygone era.
And while tea partiers everywhere seem to be decrying "government tyranny" while advocating for tentherism to free them from the oppressive rule of a black man in the White House, they seem to have absolutely no problem imposing purely totalitarian measures in the sacred states they control. Governor Rick Snyder in Michigan may have a huge problem with Barack Obama's Washington telling him how to spend free federal stimulus money in a way that gets Michiganders back to work, but he has absolutely no problem whatsoever with laws that grant him the power to appoint "emergency managers" with the authority to nullify the decisions of entire towns and districts. And it should come as no surprise that Rick Snyder's emergency managers have selected economically ravaged districts with a high African American population—the Detroit School District, or the City of Benton Harbor—as their targets in what might otherwise be described as an anti-democratic, neocolonialist power play. (Of course, the conservative penchant for oppressive traditional power that violates the spirit of local control isn't limited to racial concerns: the State of Tennessee just passed a bill designed to overturn a Nashville-Davidson County ordinance forbidding discrimination against the LGBT community by county contractors. In a fitting quote, the bill sponsor said he was concerned about a lack of homogeneity.)
President Obama's election did not prove we live in a post-racial society. His election actually proved quite the contrary. We have a deeply divided society. On one side, we have a substantial percentage of people from a major political party who are so afraid of the very concept of a black man having been duly elected that they must at all costs deny his eligibility, no matter how much truth is in the way; people who will scream about secession while receiving emergency federal aid; people who will decry supposed tyranny from a black man in Washington while imposing a new harsh reality on their black residents at home. And on the other, you have people who are at least theoretically open to what Barack Obama was hoping for by releasing his Certificate of Live Birth: namely, a return to conversation on the actual issues.