The Birthers and Reality (Not!)

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m just going to cut to the chase and get at what’s really pushing the Birthers: racism. Why don’t they just wear t-shirts with the following inscription:

“Can’t You All See He’s BLACK?!!”

If you’re a birther, not only are you stupid beyond measure, you’re also very likely a racist.

Period.

* * *

-=[ Birthers: Reality & its Discontents ]=-

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In 1957, social psychologist Leon Festinger published a paper that would be one of the most influential on human behavior. The paper, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, proposed a simple theory. We all hold a variety of beliefs, ideas, and thoughts, which scientists call cognitions. For the most part, our cognitions are unrelated to one another. For example, a love of the music of Lawrence Welk has nothing to do with the election of our current (African American) president.

However, when our thoughts or actions are related to each other, there is a deep-rooted need for them to be consistent. Some evolutionary psychologists attribute this need as an artifact to earlier times where not being consistent meant being ostracized and shunned from your tribe (and thereby ensuring death). Whatever the case, when contradictions result in a state of dissonance the mind cannot tolerate, one of two things must happen: the conflicting cognition or behavior must change in order for the individual’s brain to bring back a sense of balance or equilibrium. Since thoughts are easier to change than behavior, we are more likely to change our thoughts.

In the language of cognitive linguists, through cognitions we develop frames of reference. When faced with evidence refuting our frames, we most often trash the evidence and keep the frame.

Festinger used the example of smoking, but I will use racism. Let us say a white man experiences cognitive dissonance when he hears a black individual or person of color has achieved something of note. So, why don’t such people just stop being racist? That’s just one solution, changing the behavior. It’s also the harder one because behavior, especially deeply conditioned behavior (and frames), is difficult to change. What happens is the individual will most likely adapt his beliefs about people of color in order to reduce the stress of cognitive dissonance.

For example, he might choose to focus on affirmative action as being the main reason some people of color excel. He might think, “That individual has been handed an unfair advantage and that is why he did well.” The individual might think to himself, “Blacks got it made with all these programs that helps otherwise unqualified candidates to rise to positions they don't deserve.” Such rationalizations allow people to stay stuck in denial by keeping their behaviors consistent with their beliefs, thereby reducing cognitive dissonance.

I will use the underlying racism of the “Birther Movement” to better illustrate cognitive dissonance. Let’s start off with the poll showing that while around 90 percent of people in the Northeast, Midwest and West know that Obama was born in in United States, only 47 percent of people in the South believe this. Twenty-three percent think he was born somewhere else; 30 percent don’t know; 70% of white southerners do not belive Obama is a citizen. In the same way, blacks and people of color have been deemed “un-American” since the early history of our nation. The birther movement is the literal manifestation of good ole American racism. They believe (literally) that Obama isn’t an American.

By now it seems everybody and their mother has put in their two cents (ad nauseum) about the birthers. But while most media coverage has treated them as a “lunatic fringe,” the “truth” of Obama’s birth seems to fall into a different category.

Like all conspiracy theories, it arises from a foundation built on denial. Unlike all conspiracy theories, this one thrives on a deep-rooted, racist belief: that a black man with a foreign name could never have won the presidency in the United States through anything other than trickery, deception or fraud (this line of reasoning weas even more evident during the Sotomayor confirmationn hearings).

Obama isn’t a “real” American...if you are a person of color, you are not a “real” American. If you are a white progressive, you too are not a “real” American (and most likely a traitor).

If you’ve gotten used to seeing people who look like you in almost every position of authority, having to wake up every day and see a man of color basically running the country is psychologically debilitating to white folks who all their lives weren’t necessarily overtly bigoted or racist, but had simply gotten accustomed with the way things were. And it is this sense of entitlement that fuels the cognitive dissonance.

Let’s be clear here: if Barack Obama was an Irish American or a Polish American or a German American, there would be no discussion anywhere in this country about his citizenship. This is because many people in this nation cannot still accept the fact that a brilliant African American is the commander-in-chief. The blatant ethnic slurs on Sotomayor, the frenzy over Obama’s criticism of the Cambridge police, and the persistent rumors about Obama's origins seem indicative of something larger, something I believe is the culmination of centuries of ingrained privilege and control.

How else to explain the outright refusal of a mass of (mostly white) Americans to accept incontrovertible proof of Obama’s birth? In fact, I am not even interested in discussing that part. Obama’s birth isn’t at question here. What’s at the core of this phenomenon is the overt racism of the people who refuse to accept the evidence in their mad, desperate attempt to cling on to their (racist) frame of reference.

And for those who want to diminish the racism embedded in this movement? It’s a lot like arguing or parsing the reasons for the lynching of a black man. And let us noit fool ourselves, the birther movement is a warped form of the psychological lynching of a black president.

Given how deep such notions of entitlement and superiority can run, it’s hard to know to what degree the birthers are fully conscious of the racist impulses behind their crazy allegations -- or whether they are in such denial that they actually believe their own bullshit.

Love,

Eddie