Jim Crow Born Again in Brazen Legislative Bigotry Attack on President Obama

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Jim Crow Reborn by Birthers Abusing the Law-Making Legislative Process

By a vote of  31 to 29 on Wednesday of April 21, 2010, the Arizona State House of Representatives passed a proposed law requiring President Barack Obama to show the State of Arizona his birth certificate in order for him to register as a candidate qualifying his name to be listed on the voting ballot there in the next presidential election.  The legislation now goes to the State Senate and thereafter, if passed there as well, it will go to the desk of the governor Jan Brewer of Arizona for her signature to enact it into law. This law, and its requirement, specifically, by legislator intention, relates and applies to President Obama and no other presidential candidate — that is, it is a special law in intention limited to him, although it sets requirements for documentation from all presidential candidates applying to qualify for ballot listing and for the documents to be submitted to the State secretary of state for review and judgment as to candidate eligibility for listing on the presidential ballot.  As such,  it prejudicially and discriminatorily singles out the President for unequal, unfair, disparaging, suspect and harassment treatment as a matter of state law in violation of the 14th amendment of the federal United States Constitution, the supreme body of law governing all of the United States.  The 14th amendment of the U.S. or federal Constitution accords all citizens of the United States equal treatment under and before the law and legal due process at any and every level of government of the United States.

Following slavery and the assassination death of President Abraham Lincoln, Jim Crow laws were enacted throughout the United States to deny emancipated slaves entry into particularly skilled employment as well as unsegregated educational institutions and housing as a means of precluding them from competing with white labor and business, and of achieving educational, political, economic and social equality with white people — on the plantation system from which black slaves were emancipated, they were trained carpenters, furniture makers, clothing makers, iron and other metal smiths, et cetera,  in addition to being agricultural, dairy and household workers; indeed, free black man and technical intellectual Benjamin Banneker reproduced from memory the departed architectural designs for construction of Washington D.C. and black slaves were the largest labor pool that actually built the the nation’s capital.  As a result, in the aftermath of the Civil War, for the most part black people in the U.S. were relegated to menial, grunge and unskilled hard labor, and theirs unpracticed otherwise marketable and commercial skills largely were not passed on from generation to generation and so disappeared over a relatively significant passage of time — until recent decades there always remained a small black elite class in major black communities, consisting primarily of doctors, dentists, attorneys, clergy, musicians, athletes, teachers, scholars, writers and politicians educated and trained, in the main, by  a network of black colleges, and churches for non-academic elites, with other non-academic high achievers self taught and taught by aquaintances.   Similar laws and practices were respectively passed and instituted against the immigration of and qualification for citizenship of Asian people, particularly the Chinese, for the usurpation of Native American territory and the reservation internment of Native Americans and the xenophobic internment of Japanese Americans and the confiscation of their property during WWII, for the usurpation and annexation of the whole of the southwestern states of the U.S. from Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 — technically, although not academically speaking according to U.S. history books, these laws and practices, and more, also were Jim Crow laws and practices, as were legal practices denying women and non-white males the right to vote, or obstructing,  inhibiting or circumventing their right to vote (with poll taxes, poll tests, Congressional district gerrymandering of highly populated largely black residential geographies , and so forth) or denying Jews the right to reside in or purchase housing in communities in which they otherwise could afford to live like other white people.  Economic redlining against black communities particularly was a very common such practice until its supposed outlawing very recently.  White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan (racial terrorist militias utilizing gun raids, massacres, arson, lynchings, bombings, assassinations and beatings) were and have been Jim Crow enforcement agents for the preservation of white supremacy and economic monopoly and comprehensive black subordination (keeping blacks in their totally subordinate and dependent place).  Likewise, the pre-Civil War federal Constitution that designated slaves to be 3/5ths human, without U.S. citizen rights per se, was a Jim Crow document and affirmative-action body of law favoring and promoting white advantage, privilege and total societal control in the U.S. Jim Crow laws and practices have been a centuries-long preferential treatment and affirmative-action program for white people, something hard to give up for many of the beneficiaries, although black people have been present in the original Anglo-Dutch colonies since 1619 and in the Caribbean and Central and South America and on the west coast of our North America as Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) colonist subjects and slaves beginning in 1501, more than a hundred years before Dutch, Anglo-Saxon and French colonists initiated colonies in North America.  To date the largely white judicial systems, so often utilizing all-white juries or juries excluding black citizens,  and discriminatory and abusive law-making legislatures and law enforcement agencies and departments (including attorneys general and districts attorney) , at every level of government have been and are the rule as opposed to the exception.

President Obama’s inflexible and staunch adversaries do not believe in and are opponents of civil and political egalitarianism (equal opportunity) between white and non-white peoples and don’t want our society moving any further in the direction of multiracial and multi-ethnic egalitarianism in the future; they want to squish such egalitarianism while it still crawls.

Despite repeated publications of President Obama’s birth certificate by the State of Hawaii, where the President was born, publication of the certificate by the President’s campaign staff on the Internet, and re-publication of the notices of his birth originally reported and published in two different Hawaiian newspapers days after his birth in 1961 and despite federal courts’ dismissal of lawsuits, as frivolous, challenging the place of the President’s birth, in light of the prima facie evidence showing that he was born in the U.S.  State of Hawaii, people who are termed birthers — essentially fanatical, obnoxious  and extreme political partisans and combatants — have nonetheless persisted in declaring that President Obama was born in Kenya, the native home of his University of Hawaii and Harvard University-educated father, long deceased, with whom he virtually had no relationship, and in arguing that he therefore is ineligible to be President because the U.S. Constitution stipulates that only a citizen born in the U.S. may hold the office of President of the U.S.  They have instigated partisan law-makers of other state legislatures and Republican members of the U.S. Congress to consider like legislation.  If any state, on its own, can secure a copy of the President’s birth certificate directly from the State of Hawaii and copies of the 1961 newpapers notices of his birth from there, why would the State of Arizona, the last state in the nation to observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday, require by legislation a copy of it from President Obama himself?  The apparent objective of this legislation is to administratively entangle, encumber, disrupt and foil the President in the next Presidential election, and deny his name on one or more state Presidential election ballot/s to the extent they can and create a crippling election controversy over this issue and force it into federal court, by petition of the U.S. attorney general in behalf of the President, and use the federal court system as a forum to make publicly high-profile, stalling, long drawn-out scurrilous and specious arguments, while keeping the President’s name off of the ballot/s, as to the true place of the President’s birth as well as use the federal court system as a national political stage to raise false doubts  (win or lose) on a mass scale in the voting public mind as to the Constitutional eligibility of President Obama to hold the office of President (somewhat reminiscent of the way the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court handled the massive voting irregularities grossly mishandled by Republican state attorney general Pamela Harris of and in Florida in the year 2000 presidential vote in favor of the Bush candidacy) that caused Democratic Presidential candidate Al Gore, the decisive popular vote winner, to narrowly lose that Presidential election by the electoral vote count, due to the voting irregularities in Florida alone — this is called cognitive dissonance making (creating critical information conflict that causes anxiety, doubt and insecurity or weakened confidence in one’s beliefs and allegiance or commitment).  Lies told often enough and argued strongly can do the job, as they did in the Swiftboaters for Truth campaign broadcast/televised ads against Senator John Kerry (D-MA) in his 2004 presidential campaign and in the campaign ads against multiple-limb amputee former Democratic U.S. Senator and Purple Heart medal recipient Max Cleland of Georgia, two Viet Nam War heroes re-caste as battlefield slouches and scoundrels in Republican partisan ads (where neither of their respective Republican warmonger opponents had set foot on a battlefield) —  both Democratic senators were defeated in their campaign bids for political office.  There is an often tried and found-true political axiom that holds that if you say something often enough with conviction many people will come to believe it, however false and absurd it may be.  If you couch it in logic and pseudo-facts or partial truths and testimonials, that is even better.  This strategy is being pursued because it has worked again and again and again, ad nauseam, in the past, as Nazi propagandist Dr. Josef Goebbels and his acolytes Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Russ Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Fox Media and their vile propaganda records and capers can attest.

Their and their followers’ clamoring to the effect “We’re taking back America” is nostalgia code talk for we are undertaking to restore a predominately white Anglo-Saxon protestant (morphed to include in large measure a white Judeo-Christian) populated and controlled government and dominated economy, society and culture, a position supported by some outsider wannabe such people of historically victimized minority groups, at odds with other or another racial or minority group/s and/or their own and believing in white superiority and sole rule at the top in every unit and at every tier of society and groveling to be better treated as exceptions and rewarded with quisling opportunities, as has always been the situation with some such individuals from time immorial.  I’m sure that a significant factor contributing to and accounting for the sustained general under-achievement of the black population of the U.S. is the presence of this mentality in the administrations and offices of all industry and government, viscerally and reflexively negatively reacting to black people — imagine the likes of Jefferson Davis, President Andrew Johnson, President Woodrow Wilson,  Adolph Hitler, Ian Smith, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, civil-rights-era Governor Ross Barnett of MS, civil-rights-era Governor Lester Maddox of GA, civil-rights-era Governor Orval Faubus of AK, George Lincoln Rockwell, David Duke, Tom Metzger, Frank Rizzo, Nobel Prize physicist branched-out eugenics intelligence theorist William Shockley (who volunteered that his eugenics theory of intelligence failed on his own offspring, where his wife, their mother, also was a Ph.D.,  unwittingly suggesting in an unexpected and inverse way they validated his dysgenics theory, though not for black people), Arthur Jensen, Paul Erlich (lately questionably making donations to a mostly black-people-disease Sickle Cell Anemia remediation charity — PC rehabilitation of his public image in late life?), Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray, Marge Schott, Ward Connerly, Rudolph Giuliani, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Nobel Prize geneticist James Watson (found by Icelandic genome researchers to have had a black ancestor within the last four generations of his lineage), Reverend Pat Robertson, and so on and so forth, in the positions of major employers, governors, mayors, police rank and file, and school administrators and teachers in the classroom at all levels, which is the case, and that in view of this, and as a consequence of it, it is reasonable to postulate that you have at least a collaborative prescription for substantial achievement failure for the black population, with an already high incidence of dysfunctional households and communities.  (There is an intense feud between black historians, formal and informal, and defending white feminists as to stark racist attitudes and views expressed and reflected by Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Sanger in their words, including writings and documented speeches, and deeds.  Margaret Sanger, a eugenics adherent and founder of Planned Parenthood, is documented unquestionably to have made a few solidarity speeches to women’s chapters of the KKK.).