The post-racial imaginary: Visual logics of race in the Obama and Trump eras

DeVinney, Daniel James

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121488 Copy

Description

Title

The post-racial imaginary: Visual logics of race in the Obama and Trump eras

Author(s)

DeVinney, Daniel James

Issue Date

2023-07-11

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Finnegan, Cara A.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Finnegan, Cara A.

Committee Member(s)

• O'Gorman, Ned
• Valdivia, Angharad N.
• Cisneros, Josue D.

Department of Study

Communication

Discipline

Communication

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Rhetoric
• Visual Rhetoric
• Post-racial
• Imaginary
• Racial Rhetorical Criticism
• Graphic Design
• Photography
• Corporate Memphis
• Humanae Project
• National Geographic

Abstract

This dissertation examines the visual culture of what I term the post-racial imaginary during the Obama and Trump presidencies. This period did not move society beyond race, but instead was a time in which the social knowledge of race was in flux, racial anxieties were high, and power struggles over the meaning of race were constant. My project explores these uncertainties by analyzing images that visualized race in the public sphere from 2008 to 2020. I argue that the post-racial imaginary directs viewers’ eyes in particular ways. These visual logics ask us to look some places and not others, to see some features and ignore others, to recognize some bodies and disregard others. In doing so, the post-racial imaginary laid the rhetorical grounds for new forms of racism, bolstered White supremacy, and disempowered people of color. This project identifies three post-racial visual logics that encouraged viewers to reimagine the idea of race. First, I offer the term colorwashing to describe a practice in graphic design that changes realistic skin colors to non-realistic skin colors such as purple, blue, orange, and green. I analyze the use of this practice in Big Tech aesthetics and demonstrate how these designs communicate commitments to diversity and inclusion without having to show race. Second, I identify a practice I call hyper-categorized color, which argues that because skin tones don’t match the traditional racial color categories of Black, White, Yellow, and Red, society can dispense with racial categories. I examine this project in a photographic project called Humanae which asked people to find their “true colors” in the Pantone Matching System. Third, I track a visual genealogy of what I call futureface images, which appear throughout U.S. visual culture to imagine what future members of the nation will look like. I examine a set of National Geographic photographs of mixed-race individuals who, in circulation online, became symbols of a post-racial future. I argue that each of these post-racial visual logics asks viewers to reimagine race in ways that protects Whiteness and diminishes people of color. Throughout this project I explicate White anxieties over race in the post-racial era, particularly under a Black president. I demonstrate how each of these visual logics makes invisible the privileges and history of Whiteness while erasing, softening, or altering Blackness. This project also explores the violent White anxieties that interpreted a post-racial society as a post-White society. In this way, this dissertation offers insights into the evolution of the post-racial myth, the backlashes against it, and how post-racial ideas fueled the rise of Donald Trump. Overall, this project demonstrates the strange contradictions of post-racialism and how its accompanying visual culture asked people to see race in the Obama and Trump eras.

Graduation Semester

2023-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Daniel DeVinney

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