Lynching obama then permitted lunsford to safeguard

was to undo the very notion of America. Lynching Obama, then,
permitted Lunsford to safeguard the nation while at the same time
permitting him to reaffirm his identity as a member of the “citizen
race.” The Obama effigy, then, like Joe’s postcard photograph of
William Stanley’s lynching, is Lunsford’s pledge to a white racial
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Lynching in the Age of Obama
119
Figure 4.2. Kirk Deddo’s front lawn Obama effigy. Clarksville, Indiana. October 2008.
Figure 4.3. Mike Lunsford’s Obama effigy. Fairfield, Ohio. October 2008
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Lynching in the Age of Obama
120
state, his performance of white solidarity, and his endorsement of
white democracy.
That same month two students at the University of Kentucky were
arrested for lynching an Obama effigy on campus, while a Redondo
Beach, California, woman was ordered to remove her effigy that fea-
tured a butcher knife in Obama’s neck.
32
In both instances culprits
exhibited historical amnesia when criticized and sanctioned over
the racist nature of their displays. In the Redondo Beach incident,
the owner deflected accusations of racism by claiming that her dis-
play was simply a Halloween decoration. Legal counsel for Kentucky
students Joe Fischer and Hunter Bush stated that the effigy the boys
displayed on campus was not racist but rather “an ill-conceived
political prank” for which the charges of burglary, theft, and dis-
orderly conduct were “very extreme.”
33
Kirk Deddo in Clarksville,
Indiana, similarly sought to save face when he received criticism
over the Obama effigy hanging from a tree in his front lawn. Deddo
maintained that his life-size Halloween decoration was not racist but
political, explaining that he couldn’t think of anything scarier than
the prospect of Obama leading the country.
34
While the rhetoric of
Deddo’s verbal defense left the nature of his fear unstated, the trope
of the black lynching victim manifest in his rendition of the Obama
effigy enthymematically communicated what Deddo believed to be
the best way to manage white fear over a black presidency.
Conclusion
The rhetorical border contesting Obama’s candidacy reiterated the
link between citizenship and whiteness; so too did lynched Obama
effigies. The heightened presence of Obama effigies as Obama’s tri-
umph grew near invoked a time when objection to the full inclu-
sion of blacks within America’s political imaginary produced
a strange and bitter fruit. In the case of Obama, enactments of
white citizenship were united by a discourse of antiblackness that
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Lynching in the Age of Obama
121
forwarded an appeal to white racial rule by collapsing tropes of the
black threat/enemy with those of the foreign invader to enthyme-
matically demarcate, by way of the Obama effigy, that the White
House was a space for whites only. Claims defending these dis-