The movement among Obama dissenters to question his American citizenship is motivated by racism and needs to stop.

Tyler Bilbo, Staff Writer
Ideology: Democrat | Writing From: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961. He has the birth certificate to prove it and a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser confirms the official account of his birth. Yet a disturbing number of Americans cannot accept that a black man can legitimately be elected President. Concocted from the ugliest depths of American racism, the campaign to render Obama’s election illegitimate insists that the President is a natural-born citizen of Kenya. Unlike other equally atrocious conspiracy theories, however, mainstream culture does not automatically discard skepticism of Obama’s birth as the craziness that it is.

From a small town hall meeting in Delaware to the Halls of the United States Congress, Americans from a wide array of backgrounds have challenged the official account of Obama’s birth. In a widely circulated youtube video, a constituent of Delaware Congressman Michael Castle appeared at his town hall meeting to yell about how “Obama is a citizen of Kenya” to which a majority of the crowd applauded (to the Republican Congressman’s credit, he readily dismissed the woman’s racist claim). Roy Blunt, the second highest ranking member of the Republican leadership until this current Congress, remarked that he couldn’t understand “why the president can’t produce a birth certificate.” In addition to comments from Representatives like Blunt, eleven Republicans are sponsoring legislation that would require future Presidential candidates to provide a copy of their original birth certificate. The seemingly innocuous attempt to validate a constitutional requirement, however, only perpetuates conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth.

The racist nature of this movement to delegitimize Obama’s American citizenship parallels the anti-Semitic structure of holocaust denial. Conspiracy theorists who insist that the holocaust never happened refuse to accept the reality that upwards of six million Jews died at the hands of a fiercely anti-Semitic despot. In the same way that their anti-Semitism disables them from accepting that reality, Obama’s skeptics are blinded by racism. While some Holocaust deniers are open about their anti-Semitism, many of Obama’s skeptics follow the lead of the woman in Delaware in rambunctiously expressing their racism. On the other hand, many holocaust deniers cloak their anti-Semitism as mere historical revisionism in a more marketable pseudo-scholarly package. That more attractive message corresponds to the approach of the members of Congress who issue statements and craft legislation that perpetuates conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth without the blunt tenor of Congressman Castle’s constituent.

The type of racism in the Obama conspiracy theories is not as outwardly hateful as the anti-Semitism of Holocaust denial. Like most contemporary racism, it is largely subtle and outside of our nation’s cultural conscience. Tim Wise, the author of Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, describes the racism in these conspiracy theories as the natural product of a White-dominated culture:

“ to wake up every day and see a man of color basically running the country … is psychologically debilitating to white folks who all their lives weren’t necessarily bigots or racists in any overt sense, but had simply gotten complacent with the way things were. They had internalized these notions of entitlement and superiority.”

Those internalized notions of white privilege define the structural makeup of the movement to delegitimize Obama’s election. The irrational suspicion that Obama is not a legitimate American is bourn of the same attitude in American law enforcement officers that are three times more likely to search the car of a black driver. This suspicion of black people is precisely why such a large segment of the American populace has subjected the official account of Obama’s birth to so much scrutiny. Such biases, however, easily slip away from our national conscience because of the false notion that society is increasingly post-racial. If Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan, was Barry O’Brien, the son of an Irishman, conspiracy theories about his birth would be appropriately marginalized. A black man in contemporary America, however, is not afforded with the same privileges of a white man.

While it is nauseating to dignify the anti-Obama conspiracy theorists with the attention they have received, it is absolutely critical that their racism is exposed. The notion that Obama is not a natural born American has already gone mainstream. A Reasearch 2000 poll conducted last month indicates that upwards of one in ten Americans believe Obama was not born in the United States (in the South, that percentage is doubled). To extinguish this conspiracy theory from the mainstream, however, is to fundamentally reverse the type of racism that manifests itself in a White-dominated society. That requires a comprehensive confrontation of contemporary racism in general. Only then will we be able to prevent the type of attitudes that give rise to these conspiracy theories in the first place.