Birtherism of a Nation

Photo-illustration by Chinwe Okona

Perhaps the biggest irony of birtherism is that the guy who created it didn’t mean to.

In 2004, as Barack Obama’s star was rising following his speech at the Democratic National Convention, the columnist Andy Martin declared that Obama was a fraud, that he had “spent a lifetime running from his family heritage and religious heritage.” But Martin insists that, rather than questioning Obama’s birthplace, he was accusing him of embellishing his life story in his memoir, Dreams From My Father.

“I always maintained Obama was born in Hawaii,” Martin complained to a New Hampshire outlet in 2016. “Later, crazies took over the movement and proposed increasingly irrational and unfounded claims [like] Obama was born in Kenya. I never supported those claims in any way."

The matter surfaced in the 2008 Democratic primary, through the preferred medium of conspiracy theorists of the late George W. Bush era, the chain email, circulated by frustrated Hillary Clinton supporters. One such email described in 2011 read, “Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth.” No amount of official government documentation—not even a pair of contemporaneous newspaper announcements—could dispel what was becoming a kind of religious dogma about the nature of Obama’s birth. Other accounts, particularly in conservative media, incorporated Martin’s original observation that Obama’s father was born a Muslim, which meant Obama was secretly a Muslim, which in the logic of conservative media also meant he was secretly a terrorist.