Birtherism means forever being a foreigner in your own country, forever having to prove you are worthy of the air you’ve been blessed to breathe, forever having to get the approval of white men, which can be taken from you in an instant—a reality that dates back to the antebellum period—no matter what you’ve accomplished, no matter how hard you’ve worked, no matter how much you’ve complied with the demands of a world that forever sees you as suspect until proven innocent, an innocence that has to be proven again and again and again in place after place and situation beyond situation.

And let’s not kid ourselves: Trump, in his phony ploy to win even more white voters by pretending to court black ones, may have technically disavowed birtherism (even as he blamed Hillary Clinton, falsely, for starting it), but it’s not going away. It affects not just Obama but young Hispanic immigrants, though they may be here legitimately, who’ve known no other country but this one, like one of my former students who, through tears, revealed to me she was a “Dreamer” in constant fear of being outed and deported. She didn’t let that burden hold her back and became one of my most accomplished students anyway, reminding me of the everyday black Americans I know who grin and bear daily slights and bouts with bigotry while never revealing the challenges they face.

It means you can be forever an alien in the place where you were born, no matter how far removed you are from the blood of stolen generations that fertilized the ground and made America’s prosperity possible. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.