Trumps Wants to Walk Away from Birtherism now, But What Is It?
What is Birtherism? It is asking of a black president a question of legitimacy when you would not ask a white presidential candidate nor president the same. It is a question of fairness; If You demand something of me, you will demand of others. If you don’t why? If we are both qualified, What is the difference then? Skin color
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| You need to watch not the mouth but his deeds |
was a stranger in a strange land—even though I was an American in the United States of America. That’s what it felt like recently as I was jogging through Surfside Beach, South Carolina, a mostly white area known for its beachfront homes, and stopped on a sidewalk for a few moments to turn my GPS watch on. A young white cop pulled up and asked me politely what I was doing, saying, “We got a call saying someone was just urinating in public.”
“I don’t know anything about that. It wasn’t me,” I responded.
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“Well, you know we have to check these things out,” he said.
The cop was nonconfrontational, and I thanked him. Indeed, before returning to my jog and as he turned to get back into his car, I almost apologetically reached to give him a handshake. I felt compelled to do whatever possible to make sure he believed me when I said I belonged where I said did, on a street in the country where I was born and where citizens are supposed to be able to move around freely, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. A part of me was grateful, even, that he didn’t ask me for my papers (I didn’t have my wallet), because I was half-expecting to be treated like a black man who had wandered into the wrong area at the wrong time during Apartheid South Africa.
That scene came rushing back into my mind this week as Donald Trump once again began resurrecting the “birtherism” that made him so popular among white Americans for the past five years—and then, on Friday, without apology, without explanation, as TV hosts hung on his every word, just dropped it all, declaring in a single sentence that he now believes Barack Obama was born in America. Only a day ago, he was still playing the birthed card, evading the question of Obama’s nationality in an interview with The Washington Post.
Before that moment, it had always been hard for me to articulate why birtherism was such a big deal—though I’ve always known it was—and why that single, benign, incident-free interaction with a white cop ruined the rest of my day and made me feel ill.
Now I think I understand better. Birtherism, like a criminal justice system with racial disparities at every level, means that to be black in America is to forever be suspect. It means that someone like Trump can arbitrarily raise questions about your identity without evidence or justification—and it will stick. To many white voters, even the many who despise Trump and dismiss birtherism as nonsense, this issue has been little more than an unsavory campaign tactic. But to black Americans like me, it is deeply personal. It has confirmed things about the United States we had hoped were no longer true.
Birtherism means forever being a foreigner in your own country, forever having to prove you are worthy of the air you’ve been blessed to breathe, forever having to get the approval of white men, which can be taken from you in an instant—a reality that dates back to the antebellum period—no matter what you’ve accomplished, no matter how hard you’ve worked, no matter how much you’ve complied with the demands of a world that forever sees you as suspect until proven innocent, an innocence that has to be proven again and again and again in place after place and situation beyond situation.
And let’s not kid ourselves: Trump, in his phony ploy to win even more white voters by pretending to court black ones, may have technically disavowed birtherism (even as he blamed Hillary Clinton, falsely, for starting it), but it’s not going away. It affects not just Obama but young Hispanic immigrants, though they may be here legitimately, who’ve known no other country but this one, like one of my former students who, through tears, revealed to me she was a “Dreamer” in constant fear of being outed and deported. She didn’t let that burden hold her back and became one of my most accomplished students anyway, reminding me of the everyday black Americans I know who grin and bear daily slights and bouts with bigotry while never revealing the challenges they face.
It means you can be forever an alien in the place where you were born, no matter how far removed you are from the blood of stolen generations that fertilized the ground and made America’s prosperity possible. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
This isn’t only about Trump and a crackpot theory that would have gotten no attention in a rational world. It strikes at the heart of what it is to be American, and who gets to decide.
There is no rest, no place for respite. Obama was born into a chaotic life, battled the tentacles of poverty and discrimination, and used education and hard work to attain the most powerful office in the world—all the while following the conservative mantra of getting married first then having kids in a committed, loving relationship—and still it wasn’t enough to qualify him as fully American in the eyes a significant amount of his fellow Americans.
Consider Trump, on the other hand. A white man who was born into so much wealth he lies about having received only a “small” $1 million loan from his father and rose to national political prominence by excluding the nation’s first black president from his definition of America—and tens of millions of white Americans followed his lead, which is why nearly three-quarters of Republicans either doubt or don’t believe Obama was even born here, and that more than half believe he is Muslim, their term for dangerous foreigner.
Add black or brown skin to normal dissent and you become even more suspect. Gabby Douglas’ poise and grace and gold medal weren’t enough to make her immune to it when she committed the sin of standing on the podium during the Olympics with reverence but not a hand over her heart. The bigoted stew Trump used as fuel to shoot to the top of the Republican Party has also been used to un-Americanize San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who decided to kneel during the national anthem as a peaceful protest.
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That’s why birtherism has hit me the way I was hit by Travyon Martin’s death and being stopped by that Surfside Beach cop. Because despite the real progress we’ve made—the country my 14-year-old son was born into is more equal than the one into which me or my father grew up in—I know I’m only one uncomfortable or calculating white person away from having my American Card revoked.
What my fellow Americans, white Americans, don’t realize is that people like me daily waste enormous amounts of energy trying not to think about that reality. We don’t want to believe Martin’s death had anything to do with the color of his skin, don’t want to believe so many of our fellow citizens are OK with the level of bigotry Trump has trumpeted during this campaign, don’t want to believe one false move by our children might end with them in handcuffs or a cemetery even if they did nothing wrong.
We make excuses for our white friends who fiercely cling to their own comfort even if that means injustice will be harder to root out because those white friends become barriers, unwitting adversaries, in our war against it.
That’s why I was eager to shake that white cop’s hand. It was easier to do that than to ask him why he stopped me. Was he really responding to a 911 call? Did the caller describe a black man about 6 feet tall and 220 pounds wearing shorts and knee braces? Was the call made within the 3-minute time period since I had left my car? Was I the only person on the sidewalk he decided to stop?
It was easier than allowing my mind to imagine the worst, to wonder what would have happened if at the moment he was pulling over to stop me my GPS watch kicked in and I immediately entered into one of the near-sprints I occasionally break into during my morning jogs? I left my headphones in the car that morning. What if I had worn them that morning and didn’t hear him at all? Would I have been the next Walter Scott, with the numerous Trump supporters in my area lamenting my death but excusing the cop because I hadn’t properly complied?
Birtherism has put us in a similar bind. To acknowledge the obvious bigotry, and how much of the media seems incapable of properly dealing with it, is to be accused of being too sensitive about race; to deny it would mean once again swallowing a lie to make excuses for the white people who refuse to see the full you, to allow them to remain in their comfortable ignorance.
I don’t even know if the cop bothered noting his interaction with me in an official report. On one level, that makes perfect sense. He did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. There was no ugly incident. I imagine it is even the kind of peaceful interaction cops throughout the country would use in training sessions, about how to affect a professional police stop, the kind they’d like the media to report on more often than the comparatively infrequent encounters that end with a dead black man or woman.
I get that. But I also know why it bothered me anyway. Because it was a reminder that no matter what I had done up to that point in my life, my fate was in someone else’s hands, and even if he abused his power, he would be more likely to be rewarded than held accountable.
That’s why Trump’s playing the media for fools on Friday, simultaneously forcing them to give him outsized coverage that amounted to a multimillion-dollar TV ad and an infomercial for his new hotel, was illustrative. He rose to national political prominence on the bigotry of birtherism, used it to garner the support of millions of Americans who would be offended if that label is ever used to describe them, told a few lies while pretending to walk away from the fire he set— then had pundits wondering aloud if he could now put this all behind him.
Because he knows that he is more likely to be promoted for having used the image of a black man to his own ends than punished, just like so many wealthy white men before him, because he knows his fate isn’t in the hands of people like me, but instead people who’ve found a thousand ways to excuse raw bigotry, even this deep into 21st century America.
Birtherism is both backlash—white America’s way of trying to deal with a country in which they may soon no longer be the majority— and American heritage, a 21st century version of the bigoted stew that once fueled white Americans as they turned lynching into family picnics.
If Trump successfully uses it to become president, what will be the next form it takes?
ISSAC J. BAILEY
@politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
Jill Saloway believes Trump to have the same flaws as H
Jill Saloway believes Trump to have the same flaws as H
Transparent creator Jill Soloway called out Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump backstage at the Emmys, referring to him as "the inheritor to Hitler."
Soloway won best directing for a comedy series for Amazon's Transparent and stood next to star (and best-actor winner) Jeffrey Tambor backstage.
"(Trump) needs to be called out every chance we get as one of the most dangerous monsters to ever approach our lifetimes," Soloway said. "He’s a complete dangerous monster. Any moment I have to call out Donald Trump as the inheritor to Hitler, I will.
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