Introduction: Public Property

Abstract

By now, the image has been firmly lodged in the cultural lexicon of international politics and in the minds of countless individuals here in the United States and abroad. The illustration is startling: Michelle Obama is depicted being tortured and branded by the Ku Klux Klan in a disturbing artistic rendition posted on the “progressive” liberal blog site The Daily Kos. For fear of giving too much room for the devil to play, I will not reproduce the visual image here, but I will provide the props for you to stage an image of this picture in your own mind’s eye: Michelle Obama is shown tied to a tree by her hands in a scarlet dress unzipped (or torn) to the tailbone, just below the small of her back. Her face is tilted toward the viewer in fear as she feels the heat from a branding iron that will soon be applied to her scarless back. The red dress she is wearing is form fitting, and the Klansmen appear in the same frame in typical attire—white hoods and robes—only their lustful eyes and hands are visible. The top of the poster reads “Fear Mongering and Race Baiting.” The next line, “Our New Hi Tech Southern Strategy” appears in bold yellow and red lettering, as if emerging from a smoldering flame. The phrase “To Burn the Middle Class” appears above a burning cross. The poster states that this advertisement is “sponsored by the David Duke Fan Club.”

Identity often comes down to the meanings that are attached to bodies when they are rendered as objects of vision … Vision and the visual are western tools of social ordering.

—Charmaine A. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America