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ABSTRACT
This essay offers a critical rhetorical analysis of neoconservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza's popular political documentary film, 2016: Obama's America. I argue that the documentary's narrative emulates conservative Black Frankenstein stories, whereby a monstrous black slave revolts against his white slave owner, justifying a violent white backlash to restore white supremacy [Young, E. (2008). Black Frankenstein: The making of an American metaphor. New York: New York University Press]. Obama's America re-presents overt and inferential antiblack racist caricatures that depict President Obama as a ruling mixed mulatto monstrosity determined to destroy America. I argue that D'Souza's documentary aimed to revive extreme white conservative resistance to Obama's presidency, specifically by equating Obama's 2012 re-election with America's looming economic collapse and escalating threats of Islamist terrorism. To deflect racist accusations, D'Souza adopts a journalistic persona and re-presents a colonial narrative, which suggests that racism and colonialism no longer exist, thereby sanitizing and idealizing contemporary America neocolonialism. Finally, I argue that the popular conservative depictions of Obama as a menacing mulatto monster destroying America were precursors of a white backlash against America's first black U.S. president and his multicultural coalition, culminating in Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the Editors Brookey and Consalvo and anonymous Reviewers for their thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions. A version of this essay was presented at the 2019 National Communication Association Convention in Baltimore, MD.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 President Obama released his “long form” birth certificate the same weekend that he ordered the raid and killing of 9/11 terrorist mastermind and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The killing of Osama bin Laden is never mentioned in Obama’s America, perhaps because it undermines D’Souza’s argument that Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist or sympathizer. Similarly, Trump has refused to give President Obama credit for ordering the military raid killing of Osama bin Laden on numerous occasions (Shammas, Citation2019).
2 In various media outlets and platforms since Obama’s 2008 presidential election, conservative commentators have expressed existential white anxieties and fears about: (1) Obama’s encroaching liberal healthcare policies (Watts, Citation2013); (2) Obama’s growing “minority majority” multiethnic liberal Democratic coalition (Hsu, Citation2009); and Obama's iconic “mixed race” messenger image (along with a new generation of iconic “mixed race,” ethnically ambiguous, and multicultural stars) invites the reidentification of inherited racial categories and politic to unify diverse American experiences. (Dawkins, Citation2010, p. 11).
3 D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America was co-written and directed by John Sullivan.
4 See Box Office Mojo. Documentary—Political (n.d.). Retrieved from Box Office Mojo https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=politicaldoc.htm.
5 On at least two occasions in the film, D’Souza compares his dark phenotype (color) and experiences to prominent native-born black or African American citizens (e.g., Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama). By doing so, D’Souza claims to perform the role of surrogate and translator of black American experiences for the viewers, while offering negative commentaries and judgements about blacks throughout the film.
6 Obama’s America illustrates the location, migration patterns, and motives of Obama’s father and other family members by using animated world map and indexical photographs, visually reinforcing D’Souza critical voiceover commentary. D’Souza argues that Obama’s father’s mercurial nature and flawed demonic character led to Obama’s abandonment. The animated world maps and indexical photographs also make Obama’s African ancestry, childhood in Jakarta, Indonesia, and adolescence in Hawaii seem exotic, compared to most American viewers.
7 D’Souza reports that in 1959, twenty-three-year-old Barack Obama Sr. met seventeen-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham (Ann) in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii. Soon after, Obama Sr. seduces, marries, and impregnates Ann with Barack II, who was born in 1961. In 1962, Obama Sr. leaves Ann and Barack to pursue an engineering degree at Harvard. Ann officially divorces him in 1964.
8 Vitz is seen repeatedly amending his answers in response to D’Souza’s leading questions. Moreover, Vitz’s psychoanalytic interpretations and explanations for Obama’s childhood motivations are speculative. Vitz never met or talked to Obama, his mother, father, or family members, or talked to his mother, father, and family members.
9 D’Souza contends that Obama is animated by his father’s black rage. Hence, D’Souza’s documentary is based on his best-selling book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Citation2010).
10 Obama’s America re-presents Obama’s audio recording, in which Obama restates his mother’s description that she was infected by his father’s virtues and anticapitalistic ideology (“it’s in the blood”). D’Souza argues that this anticapitalistic ideology led Ann to divorce Obama’s stepfather, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, and send Barack to be raised in Hawaii’s anticolonialist milieu, especially at Punahou Academy School.
11 Chittum (Citation2010) considers D’Souza’s claim that Obama shares his father’s tax policies (e.g., state confiscation of private property or raising taxes up to 100% of income) “smear journalism,” designed to make Obama appear extreme and “anti-American.” President Obama’s actual proposal was to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire, returning the tax rate to 39.6%, from the current 36% tax rate for the top two percent. Chittum places Obama’s economic policies on the middle-right of the modern American liberalism spectrum.
12 D’Souza notes that Granny Sarah is not Obama’s real grandmother, but one of his grandfather’s five wives, thereby suggesting that Obama’s African paternal lineage practices polygamy. Even though Barack Obama married to one woman (Michelle), D’Souza’s commentary works to differentiate, distance, and exoticize Obama’s African patriarchal ancestry from that of most contemporary American viewers.
13 D’Souza claims that Obama’s anticolonialist influences were Frank Marshall Davis, Reverend Jerimiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Edward Said, and Roberto Unger. D’Souza ironically or satirically calls these twentieth-century anticolonialist critics of U.S. foreign policy Obama’s “founding fathers” to highlight that they are obviously not the American Revolutionary Founding Fathers. D’Souza’s ironic statements and satire serve to ideologically subvert of slough-off Obama's maternal lineage, American identity, and birthright.
14 Not all of Obama’s constituents and political opponents were white. Obama was initially elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, from the 13th District (Southside of Chicago and Hyde Park community), which according to the 2000 census was 77% black. In 2000, Obama lost the Democratic primary for Illinois’ 1st Congressional District against four-time incumbent and African American Bobby Rush. Obama defeated former U.N. ambassador and presidential candidate, African American Alan Keyes, for the U.S. Senate in 2004 (70% to 27%; see McClelland, Citation2012). During the senate campaign, Keyes promoted birther conspiracies about Obama’s “fraudulent background,” while other birthers highlighted Keyes’s black identity as proof that their similar birther attacks were not racist (Howell, Citation2012, p. 440).
15 In 2008, many political observers and Obama’s political opponents (including Democrat Hillary Clinton and her surrogates, such as former Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro) criticized Obama for running for the presidency without executive or extensive national legislative experience.
16 Obama’s America repeatedly claims that Obama sympathizes with Muslim terrorists because of their anti-American ideology. For instance, D’Souza argues that Obama sympathized with Jihadists in Guantanamo for their legal rights because he sees them as “freedom fighters.” This statement is ironic given the fact Obama ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda during the 9/11 attack on the American homeland.
17 Walker’s analysis ignores major structural forces and policies that caused the increases the national debt, such as mandatory Social Security and Medicare increases after the 2008 Great Recession. D’Souza’s documentary never explicitly mentions the Great Recession or that it occurred while George W. Bush was president. Kessler (Citation2014) reports that President Obama's largest deficit spending occurred in 2009, in response to The Great Recession. The Great Recession (2008-2010) was the worst, longest, and most severe economic decline since the 1930s. American households lost $16.4 trillion of wealth; 8 million people lost their jobs (on average, the U.S. economy was losing 700,000 jobs per month during the first three months of Obama's presidency); unemployment rose from five percent in 2008 and peaked over 10 percent in 2009; and 7 million Americans lost their homes.
18 Of course, comparing one’s family debt to the U.S. national debt is a weak analogy because the government has multiple ways of managing debt that individuals do not. For example, the U.S. government can borrow from other trust funds at low interest rates and repay the debt in U.S. currency, restructure and roll-over debt, or sell Treasury bonds.
19 D’Souza interviews Barack Obama’s half-brother, George Obama, from Kenya. George was critical of Kenyan policymakers for Kenya’s persistent postwar poverty and Third World status. George Obama expressed regret that white Western capitalists and capitalism were purged from Kenya during the mid-twentieth century by militant black anticolonialists, and the Mau Mau revolution, argues D’Souza. Somewhat like Barack, George Obama never knew his father because Obama Sr. was killed in a car accident before George was born.
20 In response to D’Souza’s accusation, Presiding Federal Judge Richard M. Berman found the U.S. Justice Department’s actions were “insufficient to constitute some evidence of selective prosecution.” Moreover, Judge Berman found no “discriminatory effect nor of discriminatory purpose” by the U.S. Justice Department (Baker, Citation2018, p. 12).
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Michael G. Lacy
Michael G. Lacy (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an Independent Scholar and Professor in Queens, New York.