the birthers and the race card

The race card

So….now can we finally pull out the race card?

Republicans and conservatives have spent years demonizing anyone who doesn’t look like them. Arabs and Muslims? Demonized them.  Mexicans? “They’re all criminals – where are your papers, Pedro? You’re going to jail.” Blacks? Day after day they get pulled over and searched, just for Driving While Black.

“Alright, boy, get out of that car, where’s your ID? Where’d you get your hands on that fancy ride?” Nightsticks and Tasers at the ready.

Only this time, the “boy” they dragged out of his car was our Commander In Chief. Because he’s not a Real American. Real Americans are…white. “Where’s your papers, boy?...Sorry, still not good enough.”

“Blacks and Mexicans actually want to vote? Didn’t You People learn your lesson when we shut you out of the polling places in Florida in 2000?” When Republican leaders were out in the streets in Florida screaming ‘don’t count the votes!’ – imagine saying such a thing in a democracy – they were really saying “don’t count the votes, because they are black votes!”… “And now we’re going to Voter-ID your lazy butts out of the polling places for good. Only Real Americans get to vote.”

And now the birthers are doubling down their bets, implying that Obama couldn’t have been smart enough to get into Harvard, because, of course, he’s black. Just like they wouldn’t publish Frederick Douglass’s autobiography until a white man could attest that Douglass wrote it himself, almost two centuries ago. Progress! Just like Douglass, they are claiming that Obama couldn’t have written his own autobiography. The fact that our most noted jurists have said Obama was one of the brightest legal minds in the country, and he got the Harvard Law Review job and the magna, both of which you have to earn regardless of skin color: “nope, he must have cheated somehow. He’s black. You know how they are.”

And the birthers are shifting, without pause, into the theme that any document Obama produces must be a fraud. Because any black man who beats a white (foreign-born!) man in an election must be a fraud. Guilty until proven innocent. And after all that, they will move on to “Obama is a Muslim until he proves he’s a Christian! Let’s give him a quiz on the twelve apostles!”

They are just begging the rest of America, just to be willing to believe the worst about a black man. Just to dip our toes into the quicksand of fear and hate. “That racism is deep inside you, let it out! Indulge your worst instincts! Go wild! You know you want to!”

All those have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too Republicans who remain silent, who flirt with this racist nonsense, are complicit. “I take the Muslim socialist at his word, wink wink, nudge nudge.” You’re allowing it to happen. With your silence, you’re telling America that racism is okay, that this “find the black boy’s birth records” nonsense is more important than a terrible recession, more important than a trillion dollar deficit, more than two wars, more than health care. And the mainstream media, letting the racists lie about the President for two years and doing virtually nothing to shoot them down, and then criticizing Obama because he was forced to do the media’s job for them, shooting down the lies the way real reporters used to do in the old days: your hands are dirty too.

A real leader would step forward and say “this is wrong, and it’s not what America is about.” So where is that Republican leader? Who has the guts to condemn racism in today’s GOP? The oddsmakers have identified some 30 Republicans who are potential presidential contenders. How many of the 30 have condemned this racist nonsense? Zero.

It is entirely relevant that the Republicans have no policy program of their own, and haven’t had one for two years, others than attacking anything Obama does. And next year they will continue down that path: their nominee will essentially have only one policy aim. To be white, unlike Obama. Because for the GOP base, that will be enough. Because only white Americans are Real Americans. Notice how quickly they ran away from their flirtation with Piyush Jindal, former Hindu, and threw Michael Steele to the wolves?

This birther rubbish will be a permanent stain on American history, like McCarthyism, like Jim Crow, like Watergate, a time when America forgot what America is supposed to mean. A couple of years ago everybody jumped on Michelle Obama for implying that she isn’t always proud of her country, but I understand the implication entirely: the America we profess to be, doesn’t exist anymore. All that stuff about justice and equality is a myth from the past. So then what’s to be proud of? What do we stand for? One of our two major political parties is openly espousing racism, and the media are not calling them out on it. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, we at least pretended to oppose racism.

So, no, I don’t imagine Mrs Obama is proud about this, watching her husband standing at the side of the road, pulling out his wallet, forced to prove he’s not an illegal president, a criminal. Just because he’s black, guilty until proven innocent: no white president would ever have to do that. And it’s all the more astounding in that Obama’s predecessor was, in every conceivable sense, an illegal president. But he of course was white.

And the world, after watching Bush spend eight years betraying everything America stands for and getting reelected for it, now knows that the American example is no longer worthy to be followed. Because we have lost our way. We are no longer the standard against which great nations are measured.