Patricia Turner: Don’t Call Them Crazy

 Here is a guest post by Patricia Turner, Ph.D., folklorist on the faculty of the University of California, Davis. She is the author of several books including I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African American Culture, and, with Gary Alan Fine, Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in American Culture.

Today is President Barack Hussein Obama’s 48th birthday. Since his 47th birthday on August 4, 2008, he received the Democrats’ nomination as the party’s candidate for the presidency, won the 2008 presidential election, and was inaugurated with more pomp, splendor and support than any president in recent decades. Although his domestic and foreign agendas are advancing more slowly than he projected, this ought to be a year for him to really party hearty. Too bad an increasing number of Americans dispute the story of his birth and refuse to believe that he is a citizen of the land over which he now presides as commander-in-chief.

Accusations that Barack Obama and his supporters have manufactured a distorted and dishonest depiction of the real man date back to his historic speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. Within two weeks after he mesmerized the public during his nominating speech for John Kerry, hard-core opponents initiated efforts to discredit him with claims that he was not, as he professed to be, a Christian. Before long, the inventory of rumors assaulting his identity included the beliefs that he is a Muslim who refuses to wear a flag pin, sing the national anthem or allow the image of the American flag to be displayed on his campaign plane. Other rumors held that he wasn’t a real American because he was not born in Hawaii, as his mother, grandparents and birth certificate attest, but in his father’s homeland of Kenya. Oh, and when he took the oath of office as senator from Illinois, he chose to be sworn in on the Koran.

Before the election, rumors focusing on his religious affiliations were the most prominent in the blogosphere and in chain e-mails that sought to rally opposition to his candidacy. But after his victory in November, attention to his citizenship credentials began to dominate. It’s easy to see why. Even if someone managed to find a videotape of Obama praying in the direction of Mecca, that pesky little First Amendment entitlement of freedom of religion would protect him from impeachment. But what if he isn’t a citizen? Of all of the rumors intended to cast aspersions on him, only the ones that accuse him of falsifying his citizenship credentials could, if proven, establish grounds for removing him from office.

Now known as birthers, those who promote the perspective that Obama is not a citizen have grown in number since the election. An online petition demanding that President Obama make his “real” birth certificate available to birthers for scrutiny has hundreds of thousands of signatures.

The birthers’ story functions like a classic urban legend. It exists in multiple versions. Some birthers reject Obama’s citizenship because they interpret his birth certificate — images of which are online — as fraudulent. Others believe that he renounced his citizenship when he attended school in Indonesia. Still others concede that he was born in Hawaii but claim his birth predates Hawaiian statehood. Like all classic urban legends, these tales resonate so strongly with people who are dissatisfied with the status quo that denials only tend to generate even more believers.

Because the mainstream media has paid little attention to birthers and their claims, adherents have almost as much disgust for reporters as they do for Obama and his supporters. Journalists who probe the claims of the birthers find the evidence so insubstantial that they tend to condemn the birthers as “paranoid,” “stupid,” “evil” or, most commonly, “crazy.” Similar invectives have been used to minimize those who, like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, claim that the AIDS virus was intentionally distributed in areas with black populations as a mechanism of genocide.

Although Presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is probably correct in his conclusion that no amount of evidence will convince the most hard-core of the birthers that the president is a U.S. citizen, he contributes to the dissemination of the belief by rejecting it as “nonsense.” To partially stem the spread of the beliefs, those who support the President must tackle the task of methodically refuting all permutations of the beliefs. The refutations should be enumerated in the even-tempered style associated with “no drama” Obama. By responding to the rantings of the birthers with respect, the administration may ensure that when Obama’s 49th birthday rolls around, the ranks of those who reject the legitimacy of his presidency will have withered away.