I call to your attention this interview on National Public Radio:
2010 In Review: The Year For White Americans
This in-depth interview with Professor Douglas Brinkley discuss how white people are impacted by social change and even delves into the birther phenomenon.
All I simply am trying to point out to people is that it was a big change and we did hear a lot of rhetoric, you know, cartoons of Obama in African garb in major magazines. And then the question about the birther movement. Where is his birth certificate? He wasn’t really born here. A man who’s a Christian that constantly has to explain to people he’s not a Muslim, well, I don’t know who’s doing it. It’s a minority of white people. But they’re out there and it certainly dominated a lot of our news cycle and energies of the past year. And we got to get over that. It’s not a good trend. And the new governor of Hawaii is trying to clear this up, because it’s been such an annoyance, this birther issue.
And I would say, anybody who’s promoting the birther issue has some kind of animosity towards Barack Obama’s lineage. There’s no other way you could accept it, because it’s kooky to be pushing this notion that the president is not an American and is lying about being born in Hawaii. And the newspapers of Hawaii were wrong about his birth. And this movement, birther movement, got a lot of credibility on mainstream, you know, cable networks and on the Internet. And even newspapers have had a – serious newspapers have had to confront it, and it’s coming from somewhere.