Birthers’ shameful racist rootsPosted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2011-05-11 21:44Z by Steven |
Birthers’ shameful racist roots
The Boston Globe
2011-05-02
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…
Read the entire editorial here.