{"id":18480,"date":"2011-11-25T20:45:20","date_gmt":"2011-11-25T20:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=18480"},"modified":"2015-02-13T19:16:54","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T19:16:54","slug":"18480","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=18480","title":{"rendered":"Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007\u20132008"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007\u20132008<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Communication Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 62, Issue 4<\/a>, 2011
\nSpecial Issue:\u201cRace Matters\u201d in the Obama Era
\npages 389-405
\nDOI: 10.1080\/10510974.2011.588074<\/a><\/p>\n

Ralina L. Joseph<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Communications
\nUniversity of Washington<\/em><\/p>\n

In this article I analyze eight Internet images of President Barack Obama<\/a> from the election campaign period of 2007\u20132008. These images were largely user-generated and disseminated and fall into two camps that each represent a form of anti-Black racism: overtly racist images and inferentially racist images. While representations of Obama as an ape, thug, or terrorist were generally recognized as clear forms of anti-Black racism, images I identify as inferentially racist operate within a postracial ideology in which Obama is figured as a messiah, whites’ \u201cBlack best friend,\u201d or a mythical creature. For some viewers, these inferentially racist images did not incite the controversy of those read as overtly racist because the former were read as positive portrayals of uplift and progress. Yet, these inferentially racist images are reliant upon the same stereotypes of Blackness as the explicitly racist pictures, as Obama becomes a positive figure only when he can metaphorically transcend his Blackness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Within a week of moving to an area of South Seattle designated by the 2010 U.S. Census as the most diverse in the country, I was cautioned by a well-intentioned, liberal White neighbor about the frequent incidence of car burglaries in the neighborhood. In our shared parking lot the neighbor told me, gesturing to her Obama\/Biden bumper sticker, that her car was burgled “even though we have an Obama sticker!” I was so baffled by this comment that I mumbled a goodbye, got into my car and drove away, my mind exploding with questions. Did my neighbor think that car burglars were united in their proclivity to be Obama fans? Was she really assuming that all car vandals in South Seattle were Black? Did she mean that since she was \u2018\u2018down with the cause\u2019\u2019 by publicly endorsing Obama, her car should have been immune from what she imagined to be Black-perpetrated crime? Was her bizarre performance of Obama-fandom intended to make her appear antiracist for us, the new family of color next door?<\/p>\n

Since Obama\u2019s presidential election campaign I have come to intimately understand that signifiers of our first African American president are deployed by some people to express anxiety, desire, guilt, discomfort, and, oftentimes, fear of Blackness. Such fear, which I read in the case of my neighbor as an assumption of Black criminality, must be seen as part-and-parcel of a more coded, more polite, but still virulent and destructive racism against African Americans that occurs, confusingly, through a celebration of Barack Obama. This complicated performance of support, when accompanied by controlling ideas of Blackness, reveals a barely sublimated anti-Black racism that flourishes in popular discourse because, in the words of Henry Giroux, \u2018\u2018since it is assumed that formal institutions of segregation no longer exist,\u2019\u2019 racism against Black Americans also no longer exists (Giroux, 2003, p. 193). I use the phrase “anti-Black racism” as opposed to “racism” or \u2018\u2018prejudice\u2019\u2019 not just to signal discriminatory feelings of Whites towards people of color but instead to signify the institutional, structural, and cultural forces<\/em> that foment the inequality of people of African descent in our society.1 The featuring of Obama images, whether on a bumper sticker, t-shirt, poster, mug, or Facebook profile picture, is not a simple matter of one\u2019s displaying political affiliation. As Obama is the first African American U.S. president, the production, consumption, and circulation of his image denotes conflicting emotions of race, identity, Blackness, belonging, and, yes, sometimes entrenched-yet-coded anti-Black racism…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007\u20132008 Communication Studies Volume 62, Issue 4, 2011 Special Issue:\u201cRace Matters\u201d in the Obama Era pages 389-405 DOI: 10.1080\/10510974.2011.588074 Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications University of Washington In this article I analyze eight Internet images of President Barack Obama from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8413,8,26,20],"tags":[8414,1980,1444,4749],"class_list":["post-18480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-communication-studies","tag-ralina-joseph","tag-ralina-l-joseph","tag-ralina-landwehr-joseph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}