I couldn't agree more with what Jesse Taylor has to say here:
The narrative that the birther brigade has adopted is simple: Barack Obama is alien. Because he is alien, both in terms of his nationality and his race, his accomplishments cannot be his, and must be the result of a vast conspiracy of white Americans who wanted to use him (in the most contrived scheme of all time) to do...something. At some point. The reason this smacks of racism to so many minorities is because it's the same thing that every minority goes through when they succeed. If you're young and black, you're sent the message that you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and succeed, and stop whining about how you're such a victim. If you do succeed, however, you've inherently victimized some cohort of white person, probably because someone gave you a leg up that they didn't have. You can never win and never succeed on your own merits, unless you happen to pull a Bill Cosby and savage your brethren for not having your success. Merit, particularly for blacks, is not a matter of what you've done, but a matter of what you're willing to let your success say about the unwashed hordes who trail behind you.
Barack Obama is suspect in the eyes of birthers because he is a prominent minority who refuses to burn the bridge behind him. Whatever his failures as a President and as a leader, he is not willing to turn his race into a badge of shame in order to curry favor. And because of that, we'll be talking about the Photoshop layers on his birth certificate until January of 2017.
This is why Obama is never more loved then when he tells black fathers to take care of their children, and never more hated when he chastised the Cambridge police for arresting a black man in his own home.
Taylor's piece put in mind something that Touré wrote years ago, before people really thought Obama had a chance:
One day we will elect a black president. But I fear, nay, expect it will not be the glorious moment we want it to be. Convincing millions of white Americans, especially red-state white Americans) to vote for a Black candidate will require he or she convince voters they will not give special privileges, benefits, or attention to Black people. If that social contract is not made clear—if white Americans suspect they're voting for a Black president, instead of a president—the candidate won't stand a chance. Anyone who can make that social contract with white America will have Black America deeply conflicted, the way we are about Clarence Thomas and Condoleeza Rice, proud of their achievements, but cringing about their politics, their clunky personas, the lame way they inhabit the public stage. We are undermoved (as in, not completely unmoved, but moved less than we would’ve liked) by them. Colin always had a sense of cool about him, and Barack seems to have that same post-Black cool. But the Black man who slides into the White House will not have Black America dancing in the streets. He’ll have us undermoved.
At the time, this was a plausible outcome. But when Obama was elected, black people were dancing in the streets, because here was a black man who had managed to get elected president while rejecting the Faustian bargain that Taylor and Touré describes. He is black without apologizing for it. For some people, that is utterly unacceptable.
