Bob Somerby has been arguing for some time that birtherism has little to do with racism. Today, citing copious examples of Republicans demonizing previous Democratic presidents, he writes that “White liberals live for one thing—for the chance to call conservatives racists.”
Those polls suggest that tens of millions of Republican voters believed this latest tulip mania. Did they believe this ludicrous nonsense because Obama is black—or did they believe it because he’s a Democrat? When so many people believe crazy things, it isn’t easy to figure out “why” they do.
Presumably, some of those voters believed this foolishness due to some sort of racial animus. But did they all believe for that reason? Was race even a major cause? Did race affect most of these voters? It’s very hard to know such things, unless we just enjoy calling names—especially since these same Republican voters have behaved in such ways before.
Somerby fails to consider the most obvious answer–that birtherism caught fire because Obama is a black Democrat. Certainly previous Democrats have been characterized as Machiavellian, un-American villains, but there’s nothing about that history that precludes birtherism being a function of both partisanship and racial animus at the same time. Any Democratic president, Somerby implies, would have been subject to craziness. But the nature of this particular strand of craziness is motivated in part by race. If Hillary Clinton had been president, I don’t have any doubts that the treatises on Obama’s “Kenyan anti-Colonialism” would have been replaced by broad generalizations about the nature of women. But the fact that the craziness is transferable and specific doesn’t change its underlying nature in this context. Nor does it change the fact that birtherism demands of its adherents that they make ugly, qualitative assumptions about what it means to be American.
Somerby also cites conservative affection for Herman Cain and Marco Rubio as evidence Republicans are incapable of possessing racial animus. This is barely more sophisticated than saying that Republicans “have black friends,” and in particular, it ignores, Cain’s public attacks on Obama not being a “real black man,” and his generalizations about non-conservative blacks being idiots, to the delight of some conservative audiences. One needn’t believe in racism as doctrine, or maintain the inherent superiority of one race over another to succumb to racial animus toward an individual, particularly in anger. Racism of the former kind is largely extinct. But in its latter, it remains a collective assault on a group of people rather than an individual person.
More frustrating is that Somerby, in broadly asserting that “White liberals live for one thing—for the chance to call conservatives racists,” mostly ignores the views of black people who have understandably felt that birtherism reads broadly as an attack on the fundamental un-Americanness of black people in general. I tried to explain this some time ago, but Ta-Nehisi Coates said it best:
But when broad sections of this country foolishly follow a carnival barker in the ugly tradition of attacking black citizenship rights, when pundits shriek that Obama’s successes are simply the result of the misguided largess of white people, they undermine our most intimate war. They undermine the notion that someone familiar to that kid on the corner could legitimately reach the highest levels of the country, that someone like that kid’s Aunt could be the First Lady. They undermine this country’s social contract, and the “hard work pays” message of my parents. And to that we object.
For if they will not take as legitimate a magna cum laude from their highest institutions, if they will not accept a man who tells black kids to cut off the video games and study, who accedes to their absurd requests one week, and slays their demons the next, who will they accept? Who among us would they ever believe?
Did American Catholics regard criticism of John F. Kennedy as a tool of the Pope as an implicit attack on all Catholics? I’m pretty sure they did. Does it really matter, at base, if those accusations were animated more by partisanship than bigotry? Does it matter if birtherism uses race as a vehicle for partisan anger?
