awww, you really gonna spend days on no one's asking for my birth certificate? you know, everyone purports to want both candidates, especially romney, to loosen up and act more human and stuff. well, then you're going to have to tolerate stray remarks.
funny thing about birtherism. people think it's straight-up racism. i don't think so, exactly. who can be more american, pretty much according to everybody, than a black dude? know what i'm saying? i never would have thought of african-americans as aliens in our midst, and actually i don't really think this is a trope of american racism. is it? like i often think, if someone doubts that i am american, they should just talk to me for ten minutes. it wouldn't take that long for anyone with, say, chris rock: you'd need less than a sentence. the only rival group for paradigmatic americanism is giterdone rednecks, such as myself. i guess maybe white politicians have wanted to send black folks back to africa; that really hasn't been that popular since the civil war, except among black people. american racism teaches many stupid things, but does it really teach that african-americans are not americans or that they're like illegal mexicans or something? it's interesting, but everyone still implicitly completely understands the difference between people jumping the fence to get in to a land not their own and the middle passage of two hundred years ago. whatever white people might think or believe, they can't be affronted by the presence of black people; no white privilege without it, for one thing. and no america as we understand it.
way late on this, but something is weird all the way round. i don't doubt that many people view obama through the lens of race; but i do sort of doubt the birtherism=racism doctrine. i actually think it's more part of a long history of associating american liberalism with foreign ideologies: turning us into europe etc. then there's the arabic-sounding name, but being anti-islamic is not precisely anti-black racism. i will say this: no one has ever been whiter than mitt romney: he radiates whiteness like a toothpaste. if you want to understand how a white american teenager becomes a wigger, all you have to do is see the emptiness at the heart of whiteness by looking in mitt romney's eyes. i'm surprised his seventeen sons aren't all hip hop artists.
update: actually, melissa harris-perry was good on this this morning on up. she's like: he's not exactly an african-american in the most usual sense; which helped him get elected but makes him hard to read. like, he knows exactly where his family is from in africa, what language they spoke, etc. she pointed out that no one is asking for michelle's birth certificate: look she's just obviously as american as mitt romney. but barack is a hard case. he just doesn't flow smoothly into our little racial dualism, even with all its complexities. but one thing about the dualism: it's american, on both sides, and both sides do at least read it like that. harris-perry is thinking, not just picking up the nearest club or unanimous simplification.
