This is republished from the current issue of Random Lenghts News.
Racism by Another Name
Wild Claims About Obama's Birth and His Healthcare Plan Have A Pernicious Racial Subtext
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
During the 2008 elections, serious questions were raised about the eligibility of one of the major party candidates to hold the office of President. Born outside the continental US, it was unclear to some if he had been born on US soil. And so members of the opposite party took quick action to lay those concerns to rest.
In May, 2008, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were co-sponsors of Senate Resolution 511, which affirmed that Senator John McCain was a "natural born citizen" as required by the Constitution, regardless of being born in the Canal Zone when its legal status of the Zone was unclear.
Unlike John McCain, Barack Obama clearly was born on US soil. His Hawaiian birth certificate has been posted online, as have birth announcements from two Honolulu newspapers. But Republican lawmakers have done the exact opposite of their Democratic counterparts, not only failing to decry a baseless conspiracy theory ("Birtherism") that Obama was actually born in Kenya, but sometimes actively encouraging it.
Blogger/videographer Mike Stark has produced hilarious tapes of various Congressmembers trying to avoid his straightforward questioning, and a July 31 poll by Research 2000 commissioned by the Daily Kos website helped to explain why. While only 11 percent of all Americans believed that Obama was not "born in the United States of America", 28 percent of Republicans believed he was not, and 30 percent said they were not sure. Only a minority of 42 percent of Republicans said they believed that Obama was born in the US, compared to 93 percent of Democrats and 83 percent of independents. Similarly, only 47 percent of Southerners believed Obama was born in the US, compared to 93 percent of Northeasterners, 90 percent of Midwesterners, and 87 percent of Westerners.
While there could be any number of reasons people might believe such a confused claim, a wide range of scholars, researchers, and activists specializing in race relations readily recognize a racial component, which has also cropped up in the "tea parties" and health care protests as well, in language, symbolism and the persistence of wild fantasies ("death panels", "pulling the plug on grandma", etc.) with a paranoid dimension similar to past racist narratives.
In early August, I wrote a diary, "Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos", in which I discussed two modalities of understanding, "mythos" and "logos." I piggy-backed on Karen Armstrong's discussion of them from The Battle for God. I continued the discussion in a follow-up diary, "Cults And Culture". While a great deal can be said about these two modalities, I want to focus on rather specifically on certain characteristics of the two, and how they can illuminate the specific dynamics of the conservative/GOP "voter fraud" hoax, as well as shedding light on more general pattern of how conservatives routinely out-organize Democrats in framing issues.
As I'll explain on the flip, the mythos/logos duality offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of how rightwing repetition of patent falsehoods comes to overwhelm the sporadic presentation of well-documented facts on the left. This is the subtext of what's going on with the GOP's "voter fraud" fraud, and it should help us learn to be much more effective in fighting back.
Just over a week ago, on Friday, June 6, I promoted a diary that caused considerable controversy and misunderstanding, that I'd like to try to address. The diary was by Pamela Gerloff, The Real Reason Hillary Should Not Be Veep. Pamela is is the co-author, with Robert W. Fuller, of Dignity for All: How to Create a World without Rankism (forthcoming, June 2008, Berrett-Koehler Publishers). Fuller is the originator of the concept of rankism, defined as the abuse of power derived from rank. The opposite of such abuse is respect for human dignity.
Some forms of rank are inherently abusive-valuing men over women, whites over blacks, Jews over Arabs, etc. Other forms of rank are socially useful, but subject to abuse. A great leader will not just inspire others, but develop their capacities to become leaders in their own right. There is nothing inherently abusive in this. Yet leaders throughout history have repeatedly abused those they have lead. Rankism is a way of talking about what these forms of abuse share in common, and how to overcome them. It is a conceptual tool in the ongoing struggle for human liberation.
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