The Rev. Jesse Jackson doubts conspiracy theorists will stop even though President Obama released his long-form birth certificate Wednesday amid questions about his citizenship.
Media and the political blogosphere buzzed as President Obama said making it public was intended to end debate. Activists, religious leaders and scholars also gave their takes on the birth certificate issue via columns, blogs, tweets and interviews.
“This is the most personal attacks on any president ever,” Jackson told Politico about rhetoric challenging the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency is really racially tinged code.
In 1984 and 1988, Jackson sought the Democratic nomination. The current political climate is very different, he said.
“Whose personal religion has ever been challenged before? That has strong racial overtones,” he said.
“Birthers don’t want to lend legitimacy to the Obama presidency. And that refusal is not about policy it is about race,” tweeted Eddie Glaude, Princeton University’s William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies Wednesday. “Obama’s birth certificate will continue to be an issue, even with this evidence, as long as the press lends this nonsense credence.”
“The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country,” said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, in a statement posted on the White House Website Wednesday morning. “It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country.”
The week before Easter Donald Trump was the second leading newsmaker behind President Obama, according to news analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “registering as a dominant figure in 4 percent of all the week’s stories.”
“That is six times more attention than the next most covered potential GOP contender, Sarah Palin, generated last week,” said Project for Excellence in Journalism associate director Mark Jurkowitz, in a press release Tuesday.
The celebrity developer and possible presidential candidate’s statements helped push the 2012 race into the news. But his questions also reflect mainstream Republican belief about Obama’s birthplace, according to a New York Times-CBS News poll released April 21.
Forty five percent of Republicans and 45 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters believe he was born in another country. The poll also found that 57 percent of Americans believe he was American-born, against 25 percent who didn’t.
“The influence of racial prejudice in contemporaryU.S. society is typically manifested in subtle, indirect forms of bias. Due to prevailing norms of equality, most Whites attempt to avoid appearing biased in their evaluations of Blacks, in part because of a genuine desire to live up to their egalitarian standards, but also because of concern regarding social censure,” wrote University of Delaware doctoral student Eric Hehman in a recent study measuring prejudice and opinions of president’s “Americanness” and effectiveness.
“When commentators asked why the president had not done this sooner, I screamed back at my television: ‘Why should he have to do it at all?’ I would be surprised if you did hot hear me screaming at your house, wherever in the world you live,” wrote scholar Valerie Elverton Dixon on God’s Politics blog maintained by theologian Jim Wallis and friends. “That the president of theUnited States had to do this was not only a national embarrassment; it was an insult to every American who voted for him, and a special offense to African Americans.”
A few minutes before the president’s news conference, Glaude tweeted, “I know this is a stretch, but it almost feels like he has been forced to show his papers proving that he’s free.”
“It is not just the birth of President Obama that is at stake. Those leading the charge for states’ rights are against the birth of EEOC,” wrote Jackson in a column posted on Huffington Post’s Website Wednesday night. “They are against the birth of contract compliance. They are against the birth of Title IV. They are against the birth of Affirmative Action. They are against the birth of the Voting Right Act. The attack against the president is really an attack against the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Today we see leaders of this modern-day states’ rights movement trying to use their newfound power as Governor’s and state legislatures to undermine the Civil Rights gains of the 50s and 60s.”
As satirist Jonathan Swift is credited to have said, “One cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into.”
“I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,” President Obama said during a news conference Wednesday. “But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve. And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them — not on this.”
A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that 24 percent of Americans who suspect he was born abroad. Gallupeditor-in-chief Frank Newport said beliefs reflect a partisan connection.
He said 43 percent of Republicans believe Obama is foreign born including “including 15 percent who are definite in their beliefs and another 28 percent who say ‘probably.’”
“Of some concern to the White House and Obama’s 2012 re-election strategists is the fact that 20 percent of independents believe Obama was probably or definitely not born in the U.S. Nine percent of Democrats agree,” said Newport in a report posted on the organization’s Website.
In a Huffington Post column Thursday titled “It’s Time for Donald Trump to put up or shut up,” the Rev. Al Sharpton wrote about how the media scrutinized him when he was a 2004 presidential candidate and that it’s time for Trump to be held by the same standards. He also commented on the Rev. Franklin Graham’s statements aired on ABC’s “This Week” on Easter that raised skepticism about the president’s faith and citizenship.
“Graham not only continued to fuel the flames of ‘otherness,’ but at its very core, his statements went against all the fundamentals of Christianity itself,” Sharpton wrote. “The Bible clearly states: ‘Judge thee not.’ As a minister myself, I was deeply offended that Graham would even attempt to suggest that the president was lying about his religion, or had a different ‘definition’ of it.”
“Many on the left say that birtherism is just racism, but there’s more than simple racial animus behind it. I suspect that part of the problem is that Obama is indeed not black enough; specifically, the president is not sufficiently Negro—the historical variation of blackness that is uniquely and indisputably American,” wrote Melissa Harris-Perry for The Nation.
She writes that it’s not just about his birth.
“When birthers accuse President Obama of not having a ‘real’ birth certificate, they’re telling him to ‘go back to Africa,’” wrote the former associate professor of politics and African-American studies atPrincetonUniversitywho will teach political science and head a new program at Tulane University’s Newcomb College Institute this summer. “It’s a taunt he’s able to dismiss because he knows exactly where and when he’s from. But for black Americans descended from slaves, to question one’s birth raises perhaps a more troublesome enigma: to be born in servitude to someone, but from nowhere.”
