The Sneaky Bigotry of the Birther

By TRB

Yesterday I was invited to join a television network panel discussion on the so-called "birthers" those people who believe that the President with the most documented American birth might have been born elsewhere. The news show was based on an article I wrote several weeks back called "The Dred Scott Case and Obama Birthers - Racism Alive and Well."

Recently I have not been in good health, so I decided not to fly to NYC for the news program. But I gave them permission to use all of the article if need be. This is an important conversation that Americans have to have. But first they have to know all the facts.

Most know who Donald Trump is. He's that super wealthy guy with the ridiculous hair who can be drawn like a magnet to metal to anything he believes might enrich or lend credibility to Donald Trump. Recently Trump discovered that 51 percent of registered Republicans do not believe President Barack Obama was born in the U.S.

This 51 percent of Republicans are vapid in an almost serene way. They are also mostly racists. That is the big "secret" of the "birther movement," a secret that is not a secret. The birther movement's desire is to change Mr. Obama into "the other." In white person terms - and I am one of those - depicting Barack Obama as something other than what he says he is demonizes him, hurts his chances for election, and tells the world that our President is bogus.

All of this is a lie. But the Republicans know how to tell the big lie, Remember Iraq? Remember Reagan's "trickle down" economics? Yes it is known - the bigger the lie, the more likely people, especially unthinking people, will believe it. That is what Donald Trump, the white trash version of a wealthy man is hoping will happen.

One of the problems he must overcome is that Obama's birth in the U.S. is the most documented of any on Presidential record. So is Trump saying we should have special rules for the President because he is black, or is he just saying, look, I will do and say anything to get my foot in that White House?

No matter what he is saying I believe it is safe to state that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is one piece of real estate this obnoxious Real Estate Czar can take off his list of possible domiciles.

Apparently Trump doesn't know too much about the history of racism and how all these chickens have come home to roost, just outside the door of White America. He probably believes that Dred Scott is some kind of disease his race horses might get. Mr. Scott was a person, a so-called " free man" when his "master" moved into a "free state." Still Scott worried that White bounty hunters would take him back into a state where slavery was legal. He wanted his freedom in writing.

So he sued

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, at the time led by a well-known racist named Justice Roger Taney. He ruled that Scott wasn't even a citizen. Why? because of his color. He ruled that people of the United States who were here simply because their ancestors were sold into slavery on these shores, had absoletely no protection under the U.S. constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

Did you know that the Taney court decision against Scott was never overruled? It has never been taken off the books, rather it was "made null" by the passage of the 14 amendment that made all slaves free, with rights and with citizenship. Still, it makes you wonder why the present Supreme Court might just have a small burning ceremony for the Taney decision. Doesn't it make you wonder?

So this is what the so-called "birther's" are offering us. A new, more modern, and with absolutely no evidence, Dred Scott Case II, the sequel, starring casino owner and trash TV host Donald Trump, whose mind is so big it can see beyond all the evidence of Obama's birth in the U.S. into some hazy birth conspiracy that goes back nearly half a century.

I was on the phone most of the morning with the cousin of my friend William Worthy, one of America's greatest journalists in history. We were talking about how almost boringly obvious the racism is in the "birther movement." It is, in fact a racist movement. The major news outlets still have not taken their journalistic responsibility to call these people who they are, the new racists. Would white robes help CBS's Katie Couric refer to these people as racists? Is that what she needs?

These are those racists who don't want to come out of the closet and reveal their hatred of non-white people, because they don't have the courage - because courage is never found near warped convictions.

We were talking about William Worthy, as a reporter for the Baltimore Afro American covering the murder trial of the racists who shot civil rights leader Medgar Evers to death on the street in front of his home, while his family looked on in horror. So years ago Bill was off to some courtroom in the Southern Jim Crow sticks covering the court case.

Bill noticed the court officials had opened the bathroom up to use by African Americans, something they wouldn't normally do. But they wanted to look good for the press. They did not want it badly enough, however. to open the snack bar to Blacks and Bill had to walk a mile and a half every day to reach a place that would serve him lunch. He recalled how hot it was and how the heat would bring the sweat up onto the back of his shirt ruining it for the next day.

I thought about that sweat he had to give just to get some place to buy some food and that heavy sun just following a wonderful journalist and man down the hot tarmac. And I thought about Trump and what, if anything, he has ever done for the United States. And I thought about the racism from which he now hopes to benefit.

But mostly it occurred to me that Donald Trump is not worth one of those drops of glistening sweat that would rise up on William Worthy's neck on his long journey to purchase a simple sandwich.

Not one.