April 29, 2011--Obama's "Papers"

I know some of my Florida friends will be upset with me when I again assert that the birther business is ultimately about race. How too many Americans cannot abide the idea that they have an African-American president and thus want to delegitimatize him. To declare Barack Obama foreign born and invoke the 25th Amendment and have Joe Biden take over as president. As they so revealingly put it, "take back America."

Yes, I agree with Rona who yesterday convinced me that Obama seems "foreign" to even non-birthers because his early education and socialization did not occur in an American elementary school. But I also agree with her that the birthers are the lunatic fringe of those who have these feelings. Further, Rona is correct that it is this very "foreign" background that positions Obama well to hopefully redefine America's relationship to the Western and especially non-Western world.

But still, continuing to question the "facts" of Obama's birth (as Donald Trump and the other unrepentant birthers did yesterday even after Obama showed his long-form birth certificate--his paper) is more evidence that it is still about race.

Goldie Taylor, contributing editor to TheGrio.com blog got it right. Here is what she wrote:

"Show me your papers!"

Major Blackard, then just 19 years old, dug into his trousers in search of his wallet. He padded his jacket, but could not find his billfold.

"Sir, I done left my wallet..." Blackard said. Before he could finish his sentence, the young man was posted against the brick wall, cuffed and taken to the St. Louis city jail. Unable to prove his identity, he would spend the next 21 days in a cramped, musty cell. That's where his older brother Matt found him, beaten and bloodied. Matt returned with Major's employer later that day, wallet and identification card in hand, to post bond.

The year was 1899. Major Blackard was my great, great grandfather.

The real crime, as Pulitzer Prize winning author Doug Blackmon points on in his seminal work Slavery by Any Other Name, was that my grandfather was a colored man in America.

This morning, as White House staffers released copies of the president's long form birth certificate, I couldn't shake the feeling that something very ugly was going on. For the first time in recorded history, a sitting president of the United States found it necessary to produce his original birth certificate for public inspection. Not once, in 235 years, have we ever demanded proof that our president was born on American soil.