Patricia A. Turner is a folklorist who documents and analyzes the stories that define the African American experience.

Turner’s book, Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century, published by the University of California Press, is now available.

Trash Talk is a study of the rumors, legends, and conspiracy theories that circulated about Barack Obama and his family from 2004 - 2020.

Using the analytical tools and theoretical frameworks of folklore studies, Trash Talk delves into social media posts and comments, email circulars, and other viral communications. It charts the outbreaks of anti-Obama lore with each election cycle beginning in 2004 and continuing into the 2020 election – two cycles after Obama left the White House. Trash Talk also studies the vehicles and consumers of Obama lore, and what its rise and electoral impacts tell us about American democracy. It examines the contemporaneous, exponential rise of internet communications, and what it means for American democracy to have an electorate that increasingly derive their “truths” from channels not answerable to editorial checks on misinformation.  

>Explore Trash Talk

Photo: Reed Hutchison

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