In an interview with CNN conducted after the conclusion of his eight year presidency, Barack Obama, the first black President of the US, claimed that his reception among certain sections of the American society—especially Southern whites—was mediated through racism.1 A few months later, his wife, Michelle Obama, made the same allegation. “Knowing that after eight years of working really hard for this country,” she asserted in an interview with Lauren Casteel, the President of the Women’s Federation of Colorado, “there are still people who won’t see me for what I am because of my skin color.”2 Even a cursory web search reveals the Obamas were the targets of vicious anti- black racism, of the sort one would think the First Family of United States of America would be exempt from. Within digital popular culture, Obama’s visual representations often recycled age-old stereotypes of apes and thugs.3 In keeping with contemporary global Islamophobia, Obama’s images have also been juxtaposed with Osama bin Laden, thus signifying him as a Muslim terrorist. Scholars invested in studying the media iconography of the Obamas, have commented, “. . . Obama images must be read as indelibly racialized representations that, for some readers, express and reflect a discourse of sometimes explicit, sometimes coded twenty- first century anti- Black racism.