Why aren’t birthers embarrassed into silence?
12th March 2012 · 0 Comments
By Tonyaa Weathersbee
Guest Columnist
In Melba Pattillo Beals’ searing memoir on the tortures that she and the rest of the Little Rock Nine endured while integrating Central High School in 1957, she recounts a particular white supremacy moment with one of her tormenters.
“When he failed to answer the question [in class], I raised my hand to recite,” Beals wrote. “When I gave the right answer, he said, ‘Are you going to believe me or that nigger?’”
I’m sure that if Beals’ tormenter hasn’t died and gone to hell already, he’d be proud of people like Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, or Alaska’s Gordon Epperly, or Pennsylvania’s Thomas Barchfeld—or the 37 percent of Republicans who still believe that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
They aren’t much different than him; a racist who believed that Beals’ skin color was enough to delegitimize hard facts.
That’s why, amazingly enough, Obama’s release of his long-form birth certificate last April still hasn’t embarrassed the birthers into silence. In fact, birtherism remains a cottage industry for people who know that if they keep fanning the flames of those prejudices, they’ll catch a spark of attention—and maybe even some cash along with it.
The latest person to capitalize on this nonsense is Arpaio.
Arguably the nastiest lawman since Bull Connor—he’s being investigated by the Justice Department for racially profiling Latinos and punishing Latino inmates for speaking Spanish—he recently announced that he and his team of “volunteer” investigators have determined that Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery made up by computers.
Yeah, right.
Problem is, most of the investigation centers around a theory about “white halos” and “layers” from a digital scan that, according to Talking Points Memo, was debunked by the conservative National Review Online some time ago.
And Arpaio’s lead investigator, Michael Zullo, isn’t exactly volunteering: He’s already co-authored a book with Jerome Corsi, a known conspiracy theorist and wingnut, on his investigation.
The book is selling for $9.99 on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Then there’s Epperly, who, last month, filed a complaint with the Alaska Division of Elections saying that Obama isn’t a “natural born citizen” because he is of the “mulatto race,” and that the 14th amendment didn’t give Blacks political rights, only civil rights.
That’s nothing but neo-Confederate nonsense.
Also, last month, Barchfeld, a Republican, was trying to get people in his borough to sign a petition to remove Obama from the 2012 ballot. His reason? Because Obama’s father wasn’t a U.S. citizen, that means Obama isn’t either—and he’s therefore ineligible to be president.
I’m sure that argument—which a group of Georgia birthers unsuccessfully used to try to get Obama’s name off the ballot—continues to be laughed at in legitimate legal circles.
Still, as laughable as this is, there’s some scariness to it.
What’s scary is that by now, you’d think people would be embarrassed to be spewing nonsense about Obama’s birth certificate being fake. You’d think that by now, most people would be as embarrassed to be associated with birtherism as with the Ku Klux Klan.
But they aren’t.
And the only reason they keep persisting is because they believe they can make people fear a Black man more with their lies than that Black man can make them trust him with the truth—or, for that matter, even when he shows them the truth.
People like Arpaio and Zullo are counting on white law-and-order types, who tend to believe their local police can do no wrong, to buy into their claims, no matter how much those claims have been debunked.
They’re white, after all, and Obama is Black. Like Beals’ tormenter, at the end of the day, the question they’re really posing is, “Are you going to believe me, or are you going to believe that Black guy?”
Sadly enough, a lot of people will believe them.
And pay to read and listen to their lies instead of accepting the truth from the president for free.
This article was originally published in the March 12, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
