Rhetorical Amnesia in Time Magazine’s Retrospective on Civil Rights and Barak Obama

• In Event: Discourses of Stability and Change in the Post-racial Rhetoric Surrounding the Election of President Barack Obama

Abstract

In the month following Barak Obama’s presidential election, Time magazine released an historical retrospective special issue entitled “Obama: The Dream Fulfilled.” This retrospective issue offers an extended example of popular media discourses that have inscribed President Obama’s election into the history of civil rights struggles in the United States. Time constructed a chronology of civil rights protest that framed Obama’s election as the culmination of a broader social transformation in which racial justice had finally been won. I contend that this myth of social transformation rests upon the exclusion of politically contentious events following the civil rights era including Malcolm X’s condemnation of nonviolence as a strategy for racial justice, urban race riots, and the emergence of the Black Panther Party during the late 1960s. These figures for Black Power highlighted ongoing instances of structural racism. By excluding these figures from its narrative of racial struggle, this retrospective functions as a site for the production of rhetorical amnesia, a form of remembrance that functions to obviate the need for contentious protest of contemporary politics.

Author

• Kristen Hoerl, Auburn University