Let’s get this straight: I don’t like it when politicians play the race card.  It trivializes an important issue—racism—that is still prevalent in some parts of society.  But there’s no other way to describe the “birther” conspiracy theorists who refuse to accept that President Obama is an American.  Birtherism is racism, period.

            It’s not like this form of demagoguery is a new phenomenon.  In the 1960s, Republican politicians adopted what was termed the Southern Strategy, purposefully appealing to voter racism to win elections.  Richard Nixon attacked issues like school integration and busing to attract the votes of white southerners wary of the Democratic Party’s push for civil rights.  Half a century later, Donald Trump is using similarly disgusting tactics to appeal to the fringes of the Republican Party.  Polls last month showed that Trump held the lead in the nascent Republican field of presidential candidates for 2012, though thankfully his numbers appear to be slipping fast.

            The birther conspiracy was never about President Obama’s birth certificate.  It was about refusing to believe that a black man could possibly be qualified to hold the highest office in this country.  When birthers asked for proof that he was born in Hawaii, the president had hospital officials vouch that he indeed was born in Honolulu on Aug. 14, 1961.  When birthers demanded his birth certificate, he produced it.  When they demanded his “long form” birth certificate, he produced it. Now Trump wants his college records, insinuating that Obama, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, got into Harvard only because of affirmative action.

            If there's anyone who doubts that the birther conspiracy is about race, ask yourself this: would this issue have been raised if President Obama were white?  I think not.  We might have a black president, but racism is far from dead.