I received my Time magazine special Republican Convention edition yesterday. The contrast with last week's Democratic Convention edition was clear. The second and third page of the main article on Barack Obama was populated with odd pictures of pieces of Obama. The article also implied that there were five ways people read Obama if not all those ways together. By contrast, the article on John McCain had one big word up top "hon-or." And the image montage of McCain on the article's third page was that of an "all-American" military son in classic black and white photographs.
I am not blaming Time solely for this. Obviously, we as a public are responsible for our inability to peg Obama down (while assuming first and foremost that he is "a black man," or at least that is what Time's list of Obama facets told me I assume) while we tend to place McCain in a one-stream narrative of honor. The managing editor's note introducing this issue of Time made an important point: McCain and all presidential candidates are more complex than we think. And maybe in some ways it's a privilege of Obama's liberal multiracial self that he gets to be more publicly complex. But Time's own editorial suggested that it is politically expedient to fit a simple singular narrative that eradicates complexity. And I can't shake the nasty feeling that the public inability to navigate complexity, perhaps even a public distaste for complexity, is somehow bound up with that albatross of "race." If it wasn't, why would "black man" be the first descriptor of Obama listed in the article lead?
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images are all of Time, September 1 and September 8, 2008 issues.
