Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S

Abstract

Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the u.s. Authors: H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman Oxford University Press, 2012 Price: $24.95 ISBN: 978-0-19-981298-1 Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., written by H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman, copiously and informatively address the racial politics of language in the United States. Employing their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, these authors brilliantly provide an indispensible perspective on the relationship between language and race in America. Alim and Smitherman, utilizes a sociolinguistic methodology in their circumspection and analysis of President Barack Obama's language use and speeches to insightfully expose and question U.S. conceptions about language, race, education, politics and power. They express the lack of interest and inability of the United States majority group to understand African American culture. In this book, Aim and Smitherman impressively anatomizes the politics of language as embedded in the American politics of race. The book contains six chapters, covered in 205 pages. The authors begins the book by providing an introduction to the event that took place when the president said to a restaurant server, we straight. In chapter one, Nah, We Straight: Black Language and America's First Black President, the authors discuss President Obama's extraordinary ability to speak several different forms of the same language, and his effective styleshifting abilities, that is, to move in and out of linguistic styles. Based on the analysis of their conversations with and surveys of Americans, the authors concluded that most Americans regard Obama's language and language use as eloquent, dynamic, intoxicating, and rhythmically hypnotic. In other words, Obama infuses the standard American English with black language style, with such an outstanding flexibility, in pronoucetion to effectively relate to Americans of all ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds, and across racial lines. Chapter two, A.W.B. (Articulate While Black): Language and Racial Politics in the United States, discusses how Obama's speaking ability fits along a continuum of Black expression to proper or popular expression with ease, and from formal to informal. Aim and Smitherman authoritatively explain Black speech and Obama's place in the Black rhetorical and linguistic macrocosm and conclude that Obama's Black speech has now become America's way of speaking and being heard by the world. While the media refer to White men as articulate all the time, these authors brilliantly argue that Black people, mostly, view the word articulate, when used to refer to Blacks, in regard to speech, as a form of racism. They view it as a negative euphemism, as a way to negate the Black person's intelligence, who managed to sound articulate by accident. This is so because most people know little about Black dialect, which is also known as Black English. …