Birtherism Isn’t Going Away

Iwas a stranger in a strange land—even though I was an American in the United States of America. That’s what it felt like recently as I was jogging through Surfside Beach, South Carolina, a mostly white area known for its beachfront homes, and stopped on a sidewalk for a few moments to turn my GPS watch on. A young white cop pulled up and asked me politely what I was doing, saying, “We got a call saying someone was just urinating in public.”

“I don’t know anything about that. It wasn’t me,” I responded.

“Well, you know we have to check these things out,” he said.

The cop was nonconfrontational, and I thanked him. Indeed, before returning to my jog and as he turned to get back into his car, I almost apologetically reached to give him a handshake. I felt compelled to do whatever possible to make sure he believed me when I said I belonged where I said did, on a street in the country where I was born and where citizens are supposed to be able to move around freely, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. A part of me was grateful, even, that he didn’t ask me for my papers (I didn’t have my wallet), because I was half-expecting to be treated like a black man who had wandered into the wrong area at the wrong time during Apartheid South Africa.

That scene came rushing back into my mind this week as Donald Trump once again began resurrecting the “birtherism” that made him so popular among white Americans for the past five years—and then, on Friday, without apology, without explanation, as TV hosts hung on his every word, just dropped it all, declaring in a single sentence that he now believes Barack Obama was born in America. Only a day ago, he was still playing the birther card, evading the question of Obama’s nationality in an interview with The Washington Post.

Before that moment, it had always been hard for me to articulate why birtherism was such a big deal—though I’ve always known it was—and why that single, benign, incident-free interaction with a white cop ruined the rest of my day and made me feel ill.

Now I think I understand better. Birtherism, like a criminal justice system with racial disparities at every level, means that to be black in America is to forever be suspect. It means that someone like Trump can arbitrarily raise questions about your identity without evidence or justification—and it will stick. To many white voters, even the many who despise Trump and dismiss birtherism as nonsense, this issue has been little more than an unsavory campaign tactic. But to black Americans like me, it is deeply personal. It has confirmed things about the United States we had hoped were no longer true.


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Birtherism Isn’t Going Away - POLITICO Magazine