Boston.com: Birthers' shameful racist roots

[Montauk6]

Birthers’ shameful racist roots

May 02, 2011
By James Carroll

IT WAS not up to President Obama to label the birther movement as racist in his extraordinary address on the subject last week, but plenty of commentary has done it for him. There can be no doubt that the lurid contempt shown to the president by antagonists who question his constitutional right to hold office is rooted in white-supremacist hysteria. The issue has never been the authenticity of documentation related to Barack Obama’s date and place of birth, which is why the production of birth certificates — first short, then long — has not stilled the controversy.

The issue has been his character as — well, as the issue of a Caucasian mother and an African father. An inch below the surface of this discussion is the perceived offense not just of blackness, but of miscegenation, that peculiarly demonic legacy of a slave system which took for granted the white owners’ sexual exploitation of slaves, while outlawing interracial sex. The biological fact of Obama’s existence, not the bureaucratic fact of government records, is what generates the lunatic rage.

Echoes abound in this affair of a very old story. First, an African-American is elected president, presumably opening a new era of racial equality. Then the racists push back with visceral denial that such a man is even eligible for the office. The pattern is well established. First, freed slaves are promised 40 acres and a mule, but then, forced into sharecropping, they are reshackled to white landowners by debt. First, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishes involuntary servitude, but then Jim Crow laws reinstate it across the South. First, the civil rights movement trumpets the long-postponed end of black subjugation in America, but then a nationwide wave of draconian anti-drug laws sends people of color to prison with wild disproportion. The burden is always on blacks to prove what, in the case of whites, goes without saying. Prove innocence. Prove eligibility. Prove rights. Prove competence. Prove that proof is genuine.

More: http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-02/bostonglobe/29496584_1_birther-blackness-slaves

[checks-n-balances]

1. As usual, James Carroll is spot on

He makes some excellent points. Thanks for posting this.