Long-discredited rumors repackaged
In a video presentation by Mike Zullo to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association on June 1, pretty much everything he said was false besides his name. Zullo has made the claim that Obots don’t understand vital records. I have over 30 years professional experience with vital records, and I can assure the reader that Zullo is the one who is clueless in this area.
Let me give an example of a fast one that comes at around 49:00 in the video of the presentation. Here’s the transcript:
In 1961, the term used to describe black people on a birth certificate was “negro.” In order to document this we obtained the 1960 vital statistics instruction manual containing the instructions for coding race on a birth certificate that where followed by every health department in the United States, including the Hawaiian Health Department. As you can see, if the parents race was reported as “colored,” “black,” “brown,” or “Afro-American” the Department of Health Services was required to consider the parents a “negro.” For those of you who may be wondering why the 1960 manual was consulted instead of the 1961 manual, it’s because the 1961 manual wasn’t published until 10 days after Barack Obama’s birth…
In a prior press conference, Zullo showed a code manual that he said was from 1961 and claimed that penciled notations on Obama’s form were in error, not matching the codes in this manual. I caught Zullo in the lie. His two manual screen shots were from 1968 and 1969 and the codes were wrong for 1961: fake manual, false conclusion. This time, he has abandoned the fraudulent codes and fallen back on a much older and long-discredited Internet myth (I debunked this in 2009 and 2012), that Obama’s father’s race says “African” where regulations require “negro” bolstered by what he calls a 1960 manual1. Whether his manual was from 1960, 1961, 1968 or 1969 doesn’t matter because his citation is inapplicable, misleading, and in a fake context.
Note the verbal slight of hand: the Zullo video says, “if the parents race was reported as ‘colored,’ ‘black,’ ‘brown,’ or ‘Afro-American’ the Department of Health Services was required to consider the parents a ‘negro.’’’ Barack Obama’s father reported his race as “African.” Is that “colored?” Is that “black?” Is that “brown?” Is that “Afro-American”? No, no, no and no. Is Zullo trying to trick the sheriffs? The instructions do NOT say to consider the race “negro” instead of “African,” and for the ethnographically impaired, not all Africans (and not all Kenyans) are black. Zullo’s 1960 manual on screen was illegible, but the same section in the 1961 manual says: “If the birth place of the parent is not in the United States consider the parent’s race as “other non-white.”2Even that really doesn’t apply because “African” was not in the list.
Now again, listen to exactly what Zullo said: “if the parents race was reported as “colored,” “black,” “brown,” or “Afro-American” the Department of Health Services was required to consider the parents a ‘negro’.” Now, look at that carefully. What is the “Department of Health Services?” It’s not the 1961 Hawaii Health Bureau. Is it the later federal Department of Health and Human services (in 1960-61 it was the Department of Health, Education and Welfare)? Zullo would have the slow-witted reader to gloss over this ambiguity about a manual that was not intended for vital records processing for the State of Hawaii; the federal manual’s purpose is to tell the federal government how to key in the data from microfilmed records received from the states. I don’t know the precise manual that Zullo is citing, but it may well not even be a manual for use by states at all.
Let’s look back at what Zullo said one more time: “if the parents race was reported as “colored,” “black,” “brown,” or “Afro-American” the Department of Health Services was required to consider the parents a ‘negro’.” Note that the manual says “consider the parents a negro.” It does not say “change the race to negro” but “consider” it negro. In fact, “changing” it would be nonsensical because parents’ race was NOT PART OF THE 1960-61 FEDERAL DATA SET. The context of the quotation from Zullo (and you can see the same thing in the Federal manual from 1961) is that when determining the race of the child, one looks at the race of the parents, and for that purpose a colored/black/brown/Afro-American person is considered negro. Continue Reading →
