Why is Birtherism racist?

A bunch of dumb people insist Obama was born in Kenya. There is a ton of evidence that is wrong. I also know a lot of racists did not like Obama.

But I don’t get that really stupid people thinking he was born in Kenya is a part of the racism against him?

If they said he was born in UK, France or Germany ,etc would that also be racism?

Because we know that McCain was not born in the United States. And, by a quirk in the law relating to US citizens and the Panama canal zone, when he was born in Panama, he would not be an American citizen. Congress subsequently passed a statute that said that children of US military in that situation were citizens from birth.

Curious how none of the birthers were upset about a pasty white guy who was not born in the US and whose citizenship was only conferred retroactively.

One was a Democrat, one was a Republican. Why is that not equally a valid explanation?

I’m sure many ore even most racists easily bought into Birtherism. I don’t buy that all Birthers get there because of racism. Partisanship is a strong factor in influencing whether people are antagonistic to a politician or not.

I’m not sure that your example is relevant at all.

Your example is of something real. Comparing a matter of minutiae to something that doesn’t even exist isn’t really a comparison. This isn’t a matter of them using partisan politics in one case to care, and partisan politics in another case to not care, this is about people picking some arbitrary person that they don’t like and inventing, from wholecloth, a giant conspiracy.

If you want to lock up Hillary Clinton for her email server, but not Colin Powell, then that’s partisan politics. If you insist that Hillary Clinton has been molesting young boys in Thailand every year on her summer vacations, then one suspects that this tells us more about you than it does about Hillary Clinton.

It doesn’t have to be racist to say: “Hey, I wanna know if you were really born here. Are you really eligible to run for Pres?” And it doesn’t have to be racist to say “All lives matter.”
But it usually is.

I gather it’s more correlation than causation, i.e. Americans who are already racist would be more inclined to believe the birther position, or to persist in believing it even after presented with counter-evidence. Eventually, it gets to the point where trying to suss out the birthers who aren’t racist becomes a waste of time. I’m not sure how much value there is in telling someone “Okay, I accept you’re not a racist but you are a birther, and therefore a credulous idiot.”
Incidentally, under conventional birther theory (if there is any such thing, i.e. a consensus among birthers) how long did the newborn Barack stay in Kenya after his birth? If he was only there a few days before his mother returned to Hawaii, what difference does it make? It’s not like he was there long enough to have any nonAmerican formative experiences.

I think people who hated Democrats and Obama were more likely to believe he was born in Kenya. They likely thought it was a way to get rid of him though legal means, not via the vote.

It is my opinion that the majority of birthers don’t believe for a minute that he wasn’t born in America. And, that they are racists.

There’s a reason why Obama got a lot of heat about his birthplace, and McCain didn’t get any about his, nor did any other President, of either party, before them. People wondered about Obama’s birthplace because he didn’t look like an “ordinary American”, while McCain did. And guess what trait made Obama look “less American” than any previous President?

Now, there probably are some folks who really have asked for proof of birthplace from every presidential candidate, or at least from every one of the opposing party: Some people are just kooky about that sort of thing. Such a person would certainly have joined with the other birthers, and would have had good grounds for saying that they weren’t racist (or at least, not on that issue). But such folks were a very small minority of the birther movement.

And I suppose that there are probably also some folks who would do whatever it takes to attack the opposing candidate, and who wouldn’t have thought of birtherism until it happened to find traction, and then latched onto it because it seemed to work. Those folks might also have a claim to not be racist (though they’re still fairly reprehensible). But they couldn’t have done it without the racist foundation.

So why wasn’t there a Birtherism movement against any other black guy who has run for president before or after?

How many other black guys have run for President for more than a few weeks? How many have actually made it to being their party’s candidate?

First, Obama had a more different name. As the trolls that have come and gone on this very site, othering his name was pretty popular – Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

Second, no other black guy got as far as he did. I’m not sure when exactly the birther crap started, but it was surely after it was down to only him and Clinton in the primaries.

Third, assuming you mean Ben Carson, the Republican party is where the racists have mostly ended up (not that all Republicans are racists, but most racists are Republican, IMO), and they wouldn’t go after their own.

Fourth, the circumstances of his birth were odd in a way – born in Hawaii to a young American mother and absentee foreign father. It was fine to double-check the circumstance, but once the evidence came out (Hawaiian newspaper announcement, birth certificate, assurances by the local registrars), the only explanation for continuing the birther nonsense is racism, in my view.

ETA: Nava, Ben Carson made it pretty far.

Of a major party? Jesse Jackson got 30% of the delegate vote at the 1988 Democratic Convention, though I doubt anyone but his most die-hard fans saw him as likely to be the nominee. That’s the closest example I can think of.

You are confusing the GOP being the party of racists, with the GOP being a racist party.

No other black person has ever been nominated by either the Dems or the GOP.

As Northern Piper noted in post #2, there was no issue taken with McCain by the birthers.

In 2012 Herman Cain was leading in polls early in the race for the GOP nomination before Romney eventually won the nod.

At one point, every individual in America was leading the 2012 GOP polls. Saturday Night Live even had a sketch about it.

What percent of people voted against Obama due to racism? To hear some people talk it was like 90%.

There’s nothing in and of itself that makes a serious, evidence-based inquiry about someone’s country of birth. The problem with birtherism is that, like so much of what we see coming from the right, it was not at all based on evidence; it was based on wild conspiracy stories coming from people who had no real interest in anything other than de-legitimizing the president. In a democracy, and really in any form of government, authority depends on the perception of not just power but legitimate power. In a democracy, that power comes from popular support and through principles of constitutional law. The attacks on Obama’s origins were intended to whip up right wing antipathy, and to cast doubt on Obama’s moral authority to promote and execute policies that affected them.

The Civil Rights movement was successful in making overt racism messy and socially unacceptable (though that’s up for debate given last year’s election results and its aftermath). The Civil Rights movement made it socially unacceptable to say the n-word, so people like Newt Gingrich can’t call Obama an n----. But he can use terms like “food stamp president” so that his dogs hear his whistle. Giuliani said that Obama doesn’t love America - again, there’s no evidence to support it, but it plays to the popular “Obama’s a Muslim from Kenya” stereotype that resonates among conservatives. During the 2008 campaign there was a woman who confronted John McCain and asked him “Is he (Obama) an Arab?” McCain, to his credit, rightly and unequivocally said no, that he was a good man. Now in 2017? I’m not sure a Republican would have the decency to do that. The innuendo about Obama’s birth certificate might not be anti-black per se, but it definitely sent the message that white conservatives associate the presidency with whiteness, and that when a president isn’t white, that it’s up for debate as to whether his presidency is truly legitimate.

I’m not confusing anything. You,and others, are confusing something that can be caused by racism with something that can only be caused by racism.

Norther Piper offered us what he implied was a controlled experiment, with the only variable being race. But there was, of course, another important variable.

https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/how-racist-are-we-ask-google/

3-5%, apparently.