Trash Talk

"Patricia Turner is a venerable scholar of American rumor, and Trash Talk is a brilliant examination of the conspiracy theories, legends, myths, and national lies that attended the rise, election, and governance of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president. Her book also ingeniously unmasks the folklore, ideology, and logic of anti-blackness that seethe at the heart of white supremacy. Trash Talk is a tour de force of American culture criticism."—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America

"Patricia Turner is the perfect scholar to undertake such an eye-opening project. Trash Talk provides an in-depth but accessible documentation and analysis of anti-Obama lore in context. It not only helps make visible the shocking quantity of anti-Obama lore but also highlights its troubling persistence over nearly two decades. In this masterful book, Turner has produced a work that illuminates a body of material we might have otherwise overlooked and forces us to look critically at it even as we might rather pretend it didn't exist."—David Todd Lawrence, coauthor of When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri

"This is an important and timely piece of research, building on Patricia Turner's established insights into the dynamics of legend and rumor in both African American and white supremacist culture as manifested during a critical moment in American history. She explains but does not excuse the dynamics of anti-Obama belief, showing how they are not the sole domain of irrational actors. The world needs this book."—Ian Brodie, coauthor of Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories: QAnon, 5G, the New World Order and Other Viral Ideas