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Disclosure 115 Obama’sDisclosures,ForeverDeferred The power of disclosure to prevent contact sometimes works by demanding that a disclosure be made and, at the same time, postponing it forever. Not unlike unveiling, disclosure is a mandate that cannot be fulfilled without undoing the power of those whose project it is to demand disclosure and transparency.Like any project,this one would cease to exist once completed. The pervasive sense that some people have of Barack Obama’s irreducible otherness, the deeply felt conviction that, somehow, he’s just not like us, is easy enough to account for. The reason that so many Americans feel that way about him is literally plain to see: the man is black. But for most people who harbor such feelings of unease and contempt toward their president, the source of it cannot be stated so bluntly, at least not in public and not in front of just anybody. In some cases such racism may not even be felt at a conscious level. Whichever the case, be it societal norms regulating speech or lack of individual awareness, the feeling must be transformed in order to become utterable.Obama’s perceived difference must therefore be explained not by what can be seen yet cannot be spoken—­ he is black—­ but by what cannot be seen yet must be spoken—­ there is something about him that we don’t know. His supposedly foreign birth and Islamic faith adopted in an Indonesian madrassa, his imagined postcolonial hatred for America and white people, what have you . . . all these beliefs stem from the idea that Obama is hiding something and must have something, anything, to disclose . The fact that he eventually made his long-­form birth certificate public will not change that. No one suspects the president of being a one-­ man terrorist sleeper cell yet, but I’m sure that jump isn’t too big for some. The catch, though, is that Obama’s words may not be believed. Blame it on the duplicity of the Muslim or on the inscrutability of the Orient. The manmakestoomanyspeeches,butthey’resomehowjustalittletooeloquent for a country of plainspoken, tell-­ it-­ like-­ it-­ is folks. He is“overexposed,” but we never quite know anything about the “real” Barack Obama. His words work like veils, always concealing things instead of revealing them. And when Republican leaders make comments such as “When he says he’s a Christian I take him at his word,” they don’t need to add that his word means nothing and that, no matter what Obama reveals about himself, no honest disclosure has in fact ever occurred. If duplicity is a defining feature of Muslims, even when unveiled they cannot be trusted to be showing us the truth. And even after the financial backers of the so-­ called Ground 116 Disclosure Zero mosque became known (and they were never unknown), opponents of the project were still asking who was “behind” it. Muslims cannot not have an ulterior, inadmissible motive, and objective proofs to the contrary are but smoke screens with no truth-­ value whatsoever. From that perspective , revelations conceal the truth, unveiling masks it. Not all forms of social exclusion work in the same ways, of course. Someone’s ethnicity, skin color, or socioeconomic status may be visible enough not to require any other proof of that person’s supposed inferiority . Yet, in certain historical circumstances, especially in disenchanted cultures where the visual plays a central part in the construction of truth and knowledge, the invisible is often an object of fear and a source of anxiety. Jews changing names and light-­ skinned blacks passing have provided, at times, salient examples of this phenomenon. So today have secret bisexual men on the down low, especially if they are men of color toward whom racial aversion may not be too overtly stated and must therefore be displaced. In such cases, unveiling and disclosure (as well as“coming clean,”“speaking out,” “coming out,”etc.) often become associated with the idea of social integration , for which they are said to be a condition. Both, however, are avatars of the same operation: to deny the intractability of inequality by giving the impression that the have-­nots actually have something—­ something to hide—­ and that it must be revealed, unveiled, disclosed for the playing field to be even. And it makes little difference if “have-­ not” isn’t to be taken necessarily in its strictest economic sense. It remains a structuring trope, perhaps the structuring trope, in a...

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