{"title":"The White Power of White Space: Rhetorical Collusion and Discriminatory Design in the Obama-Trump Inauguration Photo","authors":"L. Pierce","doi":"10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.2.0001","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When side-by-side photographs of the 2009 and 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration crowds circulated after President Trump’s inauguration, few doubted what they saw: the crowd in 2017 was significantly smaller than it had been eight years earlier. Whereas popular discourse around the photo obsessed over size of the crowds, I argue that differences in contrast, color, and clarity suggest a different narrative than the logic of quantity: Trump will return an orderly, white national body, cleansed of Obama’s unruly, sepia swarm. This essay re-reads a key moment of recent U.S. visual politics, turning what came to be read as either a joke or a preview of the “death of facts” as something more sinister: a visual harbinger of Trump’s white supremacist program.","PeriodicalId":45013,"journal":{"name":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","volume":"25 1","pages":"1 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Rhetoric & Public Affairs","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.2.0001","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
Abstract:When side-by-side photographs of the 2009 and 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration crowds circulated after President Trump’s inauguration, few doubted what they saw: the crowd in 2017 was significantly smaller than it had been eight years earlier. Whereas popular discourse around the photo obsessed over size of the crowds, I argue that differences in contrast, color, and clarity suggest a different narrative than the logic of quantity: Trump will return an orderly, white national body, cleansed of Obama’s unruly, sepia swarm. This essay re-reads a key moment of recent U.S. visual politics, turning what came to be read as either a joke or a preview of the “death of facts” as something more sinister: a visual harbinger of Trump’s white supremacist program.
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