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Monday, July 27, 2009

What It Means to be a "Birther"

A "Birther" is a white racist who cannot accept the fact that an African-American is President of the United States. The protestations about Obama's lack of a "birth certificate" have been debunked endlessly as a factual matter, of course, but the deeper quandary of the "Birther" is scarcely susceptible to factual debunking at all. The crisis provoked by Obama's Presidency for white racists (as by his middle name "Hussein" for the loosely overlapping set of Christianists in the US) is that the white racist patriarchal muscular-Christianist theocracy they imagined they were born to prevail over, the nation they fancy their own birth certificates testify to the existence of and to their privileged place within it, cannot exist so long as Obama is our President and President because the American people wanted him to be. If Obama's citizenship is certified theirs is thereby decertified in their own eyes, the validity of his birth certificate casts the validity of their own into terminal crisis, it is their hateful imagined birthplace they must relinquish as a mirage to confront the multicultural America of reality.

4 comments:

jimf said...

> A "Birther" is a white racist who cannot accept the fact
> that an African-American is President of the United States.

I was at one of the two diners I usually frequent late one
evening a few weeks ago, and was sitting within earshot of
a couple of white guys, one middle-aged and one youngish,
who were having an animated conversation about politics and
life.

Snippets of their conversation, which was mostly of a religious
bent, indicated to me that they were fundamentalist Christians
of one sort or another.

But the thing that made me smile was overhearing the younger
guy say "President Obama. I just can't get used to that name."

Jarrett said...

Is this going in your anthology "Mythologies II"?

Anonymous said...

Cognitive dissonance rules, so close to Rome. But away from Rome the loathing and seething contempt is palpable. Yes, "birthers" are so obviously racists it makes me retch with loathing. But that isn't the most important feature they exhibit. I consistently label them "tantrumists", hoping this term will catch on.

Dale Carrico said...

Folks who throw political tantrums are legion (I've thrown my share myself, come to think about it), but it is the ugly racism that distinguishes the tantrums of the birthers from others so I still think that's the useful thing to highlight in them.