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The Fragility of Post-Racial Ideology in American (Visual) Culture

Obama TIME Cover

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Tracing Post-Race Through Raced Eras: O.J.'s Changing Face
These are the two magazine covers that were both published in the week of June 27th, 1994 after O.J. Simpson was arrested as a suspect in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ron Goldman. The TIME cover is notorious because the artists darkened OJ’s face in his mugshot photo, making his corporeal skin blacker, in comparison to the Newsweek cover that revealed his true complexion. News and visual medias, “tapped into the mounting white racial frenzy reinforcing the notion that the trial verdict had deepened the racial chasm afflicting the collective psyche of the country” (Giroux 15). O.J.’s face became a visual marker of blackness which was immediately intensified as soon as O.J. was rejected from white America.
Prior to the O.J. trial and case, O.J. was America’s symbol for a post-race and colorblind mentality. His body transcended his racialized identity and was valued as a bonified star in America’s living rooms, iconized for marrying a young, beautiful white woman. O.J. himself even diminished his own blackness, famously stating “I’m not black, I’m O.J!” His adoption into white America, promoting a colorblind society himself, was all disrupted as soon as O.J. was the subject of a media circus. O.J.’s blackness all of the sudden became the subject and he became “An American Tragedy”. His body became a spectacle, “a metaphor for America’s fixation with celebrity justice, lurid violence, interracial sexuality, and tabloid psychobabble” (Giroux 15), which ultimately revealed that America couldn’t possibly overlook or transcend his blackness. When O.J. was historically acquitted on prime-time televisions across the country, the relentless public dissatisfaction and white unrest led to the reliance on exposing O.J.’s “race card”, much like the media’s fascination with Obama’s “race card”. Highlighting society’s constant modification of its own racial projects, Anna Everett speaks to Obama’s visibility as “an unstable signifier of black masculine otherness...who troubles the privileged status of the white Western subject” accounting for media’s distorted obsession with his body. Connecting to the precedent of O.J. Giroux states, “the ‘race card’ serves to remind white America that blacks in a position of power [are] likely to seek racial revenge...to reinvent racism as a practice that victimize[s] whites” (16).