Articulate While Black

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Articulate While
Black
BAR ACK OBAMA, L ANGUAGE,
AND R ACE IN THE U. S.

H. SAMY AL IM

and

G E N E VA S M I T H E R M A N

FORE WORD BY MICHAEL ER IC DY SON

1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alim, H. Samy.
Articulate while Black : Barack Obama, language, and race in the U.S. /
H. Samy Alim & Geneva Smitherman ; foreword by Michael Eric Dyson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-981296-7 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-19-981298-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Black English–United States. 2. Race awareness–United States.
3. Obama, Barack–Language. 4. Obama, Barack–Oratory.
5. African Americans–Languages. 6. English language–Social
aspects–United States. 7. Language and education–United States.
8. Sociolinguistics–United States. I. Smitherman, Geneva II. Title.
PE3102.N42A43 2012
306.440973–dc23
2012010289

ISBN 978-0-19-981296-7
ISBN 978-0-19-981298-1

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 None of us—black, white, Latino, or Asian—is immune to
the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed us, especially
stereotypes about black criminality, black intelligence, or the black
work ethic. In general, members of every minority group continue
to be measured largely by the degree of our assimilation—
how closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform
to the dominant white culture—and the more that a
minority strays from these external markers,
the more he or she is subject to negative assumptions.

—Barack Obama

Every conversation about black speech is a conversation about

black intelligence and ultimately black humanity.

—Michael Eric Dyson

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 CONTENTS

Foreword: Orator-In-Chief by Michael Eric Dyson ix

Showin Love xv

1. “Nah, We Straight”: Black Language and

America’s First Black President 1

2. A.W.B. (Articulate While Black): Language and

Racial Politics in the United States 31

3. Makin a Way Outta No Way: The “Race Speech” and

Obama’s Rhetorical Remix 64

4. “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World”: How

Black Communication Becomes Controversial 94

5. “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue”: Hip Hop, Race,

and the Culture Wars 130

6. Change the Game: Language, Education, and the

Cruel Fallout of Racism 167

Index 199

vii
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 Foreword: Orator-In-Chief

I chuckled in amusement in the Spring of 2012 as President Obama regaled

the audience with his humor in what has to be one of the most enjoyable
roles for the commander-in-chief: standup comedian at the annual dinner
for the White House Correspondents’ Association. Obama’s pace and timing
were a lot better than those of the professional comics charged with bring-
ing down the house that night. Jimmy Kimmel rushed through his jokes
a bit too nervously and even stepped on some of his lines. Obama, on the
other hand, was smooth and effortless, confident that his zingers would
find their mark. His swag quotient was also pretty high that night. He let
it be known that his musical prowess consisted of more than a melodically
accurate one-off rendition of a line from Al Green’s R&B classic “Let’s Stay
Together,” which he had delivered at an Apollo Theater fundraiser three
months earlier. Obama’s version of the soul legend’s tune went viral in
Black communities as a sign of the president’s effortless embrace of Black
Culture despite the criticism that he keeps Blackness at bay. At the Apollo
fundraiser, after drawing huge applause from his largely Black audience,
Obama addressed the Rev. Al Green, who, along with India Arie, had sung
at the affair, by saying: “Don’t worry Rev., I cannot sing like you, but I just
wanted to show my appreciation.” At the Correspondents’ dinner, Obama
showed his appreciation for Hip Hop and proved his Rap bona fides, and
not just by citing the easy or apparent fare. To truly strut his stuff, he’d
have to display an aficionado’s grasp of Rap Culture’s range and appeal and
flash a little insider savvy.
The set-up for Obama’s Hip Hop coolness was a perfect storm of con-
spiracy theory and Black cultural signification. “Now, if I do win a second
term as president,” Obama teased his audience, “let me just say something
to all my conspiracy oriented friends on the right who think I’m planning
to unleash some secret agenda.” He paused for a few seconds, then hit

ix
x Foreword: Orator-In-Chief

them with the affirmation of the right’s worst nightmare: “You’re absolutely
right!” Obama had a mischievous look on his face and lowered his voice in
a faux ominous fashion to clinch the conspiratorial conceit. “So allow me to
close with a quick preview of the secret agenda you can expect in a second
Obama Administration. In my first term I sang Al Green,” the president
deadpanned in drawing a contrast between his unfinished first term and
his hoped-for follow up. “In my second term, I’m goin’ with Young Jeezy!”
He accented the second syllable of Jeezy and stretched it out a bit in dia-
lectal deference to Black street pronunciation, so that it sounded like Gee-
zeeee. The audience roared its approval of his self-confident reference to his
Harlem debut, as much out of the desire to be hip right along with him as
to reward his surefooted grasp of Hip Hop Culture. To drive home his hip-
ness even more, he ad libbed a line that garnered a nod of approval from
his adoring wife, whose approval ratings, the president noted that night,
are higher than his. To be sure, it was in part the politics of romance,
but there was a deeper story to his playfulness. Turning to First Lady
Michelle Obama as she smiled broadly and signaled her affi rmation at the
head table, Obama humorously exclaimed, “Michelle said, ‘Yeahhh!’” After
the laughter rippled across the room, Obama bragged, “I sing that to her
sometime.” Michelle Obama bent her head and blushed at the public con-
fession of private affection. President Obama fl ashed his famous pearls for
the crowd in the hotel and across the globe.
Obama’s gesture dripped with meaning. It was more than a fetching
moment of affection between him and his wife played out for the world to
see, an inside joke inside the joke. (Let’s not forget that not all such inside
knowledge was gleefully accepted. During the ’08 campaign, their infamous
“fist-bump,” a love-tap of camaraderie and an affectionate gesture of “We’re
in this thing together babe,” made the cover of the well-heeled New Yorker
magazine and earned the enmity of even the limousine liberal set as a sign
of some kind of kinky Black—and for some terrorist—code). This may have
been an even more veiled message to Hip Hop’s constituency in the hood
that America’s first Black president, despite the claims otherwise, hadn’t
really forgotten about them or their needs. Even though he was joking, the
first thing Obama suggested about his Administration’s second term was
an explicit embrace of Hip Hop by the commander in chief. The humor
couldn’t ultimately dim the spotlight Obama gave to the culture.
Obama’s reference to Young Jeezy carried even more weight. Jeezy was
not simply a protégé of Obama favorite Jay-Z, but he was the rapper who
famously touted Black pride during unofficial Inauguration ceremonies
with his anthem “My President is Black,” a tune he originally recorded
with rapper Nas six months before Obama’s election. Given the racial lay
of the land, Obama could hardly embrace all of Jeezy’s sentiment without
 Foreword: Orator-In-Chief xi

blowback and complication. (After the national tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s

death in 2012, Obama couldn’t even say that if he had a son, he’d look
like Martin, without the bellicose and belligerent rhetoric of the right wing
bellowing forth). In a harmless context where even plausible deniability
seemed unnecessary, Obama returned the favor to Jeezy. It was if to say,
“Yeah, beyond narrow views of race and Blackness, and beyond the hate
of the ignorant, your president is black.” The president didn’t have to think
that for the president to mean that. Such is the nature of Black signifying,
such is the nature of political speech, such is the nature of Black rheto-
ric—and such is the nature of the oral traditions of Blackness that often
invisibly ramify in a culture where there’s always a grammatical ram in the
linguistic bush.
The beautiful thing about Articulate While Black is that it breaks down
Obama’s speech making and oral signifying, and his talkin and testifyin
and a lot more besides with far greater skill, depth, and insight than I’ve
shown here. This book is an erudite primer on the protocol and etiquette
of Black rhetoric, its rules and regulations, its sites and sounds, its glo-
riously labyrinthine and infinitely interpretable practices, its complicated
meanings, its bedazzling variety and undulating cadences, and its cerebral
intensifications and interruptions along the borders of what’s seen as lin-
guistically “proper” and “standard.” In the process, Alim and Smitherman
leave little doubt about the cogency of their argument: that without being
a past master of Black (American) rhetoric, Obama wouldn’t be president
of the United States of America.
To say that he spoke his way into office is not to reduce Obama’s
achievement to his ability to speak “proper” or “standard” English. It’s a lot
more complicated than that. Language is as big as politics, as large as the
geography that encompasses the American populace and the demography
that dots the national landscape. Obama’s achievement, likewise, is bigger
than adding up the parts of speech he uses. It’s also about understand-
ing the cultural traditions that feed and shape his linguistic appetites. It’s
about knowing the racial practices against which that speech is pitched.
It’s about engaging the racial environments in which speech is formed. It’s
about knowing how Black speech is always much more than about what
things are said, but about how those things are said. And how those things
are said involves, of course, the mechanics of grammar, the intonations,
the pace, the cadence, and the flow of Black rhetoric, but it includes as well
the political and social realities that weigh on the tongue as mightily as
the local dialects and accents that mingle in the mouths of citizens.
How Black folk are heard makes a big difference in how Black folk are
perceived. Beliefs about Black folk invariably get focused on what we’re
talking about, and how we’re talking about it, and all of that is seen as
xii Foreword: Orator-In-Chief

an index of our intelligence and humanity, or our stupidity and savagery.

Sure, language means that for other folk too, just not as intensely, or with
as much weight as for Black folk, at least here in the United States. Our
social horizons widen or narrow through words that flow from our mouths;
our destinies are shaped by how those words are heard in the ears of those
with the power to make decisions about our existence.
That’s why Obama is unavoidably representative of Blackness beyond what
he says about his, or our, Blackness. How he speaks is talking too, beyond
the substance, or at least the content, of his speech. His style of speech is
a substance of sorts too, perhaps not as independent of the political machi-
nations into which it pours as some might hope or believe, but a substance
that must be grappled with nonetheless. Too many folk make the mistake
of believing that Black style is a substitute for substance, something set in
opposition to substance, when in truth it’s a vehicle for substance. Black
style is a substantial indent on the national psyche that houses, and helps
to form, its expression at any given time and place. Whether in Bahia or
Brooklyn, or in Milan or Michigan, the accents of Black speech are about
more than the accents of Black people; they’re also about the accidents
of identity and history and the particular marks that Black folk leave on
language and culture. Our Blackness accents both sentences on the page
and sentences in the pen – fi lled with black ink or Black flesh. The line
between linguistic and political practice can’t even be separated in how we
might imagine our imprisonment in the words spoken of us or by us. Our
Blackness is linguistic and political practice rolled into one.
The paradox is that even the most powerful (Black) man in the world
can’t escape how Black speech is heard and read. Th at signals the democ-
racy of language when it refers to Black folk. Death may be the great equal-
izer, but language is a close second. No matter how high Obama ascends,
he’s brought back down to the inescapable fact of his Blackness and the
way he speaks it fluently in contexts not used to hearing Blackness as
much as they are used to exploiting it. No matter what folk think of Black
Language and its rudiments and permutations, when they hear it spill from
Obama’s mouth, they hear it invade their televisions and radios; they also
hear it fi lter through their politics, infi ltrate their legislative bodies, and
get fidgeted over and exasperatingly parsed by the Supreme Court. Obama’s
Black speech has now become America’s way of speaking and being heard
by the world. That’s why there’s such resistance to Obama’s policies—those
policies are rooted in Black speech. There’s a lot of resistance to the uppity
character of Black speech not knowing its linguistic place, no matter how it
is shorn of “Negro dialect,” as Senator Harry Reid memorably phrased it.
The Tea Party and the Birthers despise Obama so much that they want
to banish him from Americanness. They want metaphoric sovereignty, well
 Foreword: Orator-In-Chief xiii

perhaps, they really want the sovereignty of metaphor, over Obama’s body:
they want to unbirth his existence, uproot him from American soil, fore-
close against his house of American identity and offer him a sub-prime
loan of American political capital. The big problem is that Obama has set
the terms, symbolically, and sometimes literally, for how America behaves
(mind you, that’s not a small problem for progressives who accuse him of
rubberstamping imperialist agendas), and thus they must challenge his
legitimacy to act in such an authoritative fashion. But Obama has to bail
them out – financially and linguistically! Despite the claim of the right
wing that it’s pro-life, it wants to retroactively abort Obama’s existence,
purge him from the record as unofficial and illegitimate, remove his leg-
islation from the books and repeal “Obamacare,” and wipe the slate clean
of his political speech. Wiping away his political words also means wiping
away his cultural and racial words, the way his body and mouth have left
their marks all over America. Obama not only politically beat his oppo-
nents (and not a few of his ideological “allies”), but he beat them culturally.
He not only licked his opponents with his politics, but he licked them with
his tongue. The thought is just too ugly for most of them to abide.
Articulate While Black brilliantly dissects the politics of language as
embedded in the politics of race, and the politics of race as tied to the
politics of language. It helps us understand just what Obama is saying
because the authors understand so well what Black folk are saying, and
how we say it, and thus, they help the nation to put what Obama is saying
in a broader, Blacker context. That Blackness is not limiting but freeing;
not closed but open; not rigid but fluid. Obama fits along a continuum of
Black expression, and depending on the circumstance or condition, slides
easily from one end to the other, from vernacular to “proper” expression,
from formal to informal, from high-tone to gutter-dense, from specifying
to signifying in the blink of an “I.” The authors show how that “I” is not
the beginning of isolation, but the start of a new quest of identity joined
to the long pilgrimage of identity that borrows from centuries of speak-
ing and existing. In the process, a lot of switches are being fl ipped: codes,
styles, media, frames, cultures, and races. In fact, Alim and Smitherman
do a great deal of switching themselves, sliding from dense academic prose
to streetwise vernacular at the drop of a hat, proving they are brilliant
examples of the very practice they dissect.
Alim and Smitherman are supremely capable of explaining Black
speech and Obama’s place in the Black rhetorical and linguistic universe.
Smitherman is a word warrior and ancestral diviner whose pioneering
examination of Black discourse has helped us to understand and accept
the Blackness of our speech without excuse or apology. Her vibrant prose
has sung the story of our linguistic adventures into self-defi nition and self-
xiv Foreword: Orator-In-Chief

knowledge for more than a generation, and her elegant depositions in the
court of public reason as a witness to our struggle for self-expression on
the front lines of linguistic battle are both legion and legendary. Alim has
raised the stakes of ethnographic examinations of Black rhetoric. His criti-
cal work has shed valuable light on the rhetorical practices of young Black
folk whose speech in urban cultural settings has yet to be honored for its
immense contribution to American rhetoric. His brilliant reflections on Hip
Hop Culture provide a powerful example of rigorous academic investigation
linked to a savvy street-based understanding of the culture and its rhe-
torical innovations. His important examinations of linguistic profiling, and
his valiant insistence that teachers fully grapple with Black speech in the
classroom, are crucial resources for experts and laypeople alike.
Alim and Smitherman help us to comprehend the complexity of Black
articulateness in both senses: they help us to unpack the adjectival char-
acter of the word, to be articulate while Black, and they help us to under-
stand the word as a verb, to learn how we articulate while Black. Articulate
While Black brings what Obama says, and how he says it, into sharper view
and helps us to navigate the complexities of Black linguistic habits and the
complications of Black rhetoric writ large.
And perhaps most pressing on the pop cultural front, they challenge
seventies Scottish blue-eyed soul group Average White Band for the most
creative use of the acronym AWB. The group’s biggest hit single was 1974’s
“Pick Up the Pieces,” and its B-side was “Work to Do.” In these song titles,
Alim and Smitherman’s AWB, and the rest of us too, find powerful objec-
tives: to pick up the pieces of Black linguistic practice and show how the
shards of Black speech, and the fragments of Black rhetoric, are broken off
from cultural traditions and racial practices to which they must be con-
nected in order to be understood. And we all have work to do in under-
standing, explaining and enjoying the richness of Black Language as it
flows not only from the mouth of our First Orator, but as it sings in the
throats of millions of Black folk the world over who have little idea of the
brilliance and beauty in their tongues. I’m glad to join their band and to
play my part in amplifying their mighty music.

Michael Eric Dyson

University Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University
June 2012
 Showin Love

Alim
I’ll never forget the day that big care package came to me in the mail
more than fifteen years ago. There I was, an undergraduate student at the
University of Pennsylvania—being schooled by the likes of Farah Jasmine
Griffin, Ira Harkavy, William Labov, James Peterson, and James Spady
(both Jameses had introduced me to Docta G’s classic Talkin and Testifyin:
The Language of Black America)—sittin on the floor of my dorm room, tearin
through that package as quickly as I could! I had sent Geneva Smitherman
my senior honors thesis on Black Language, and she responded! I was
blown away by her generosity of spirit—in that package were numerous
articles and copies of her books, including her latest at the time, Black
Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (hardcover too!).
What I’ll most remember about that package was the inscription: “Stay on
the case. We need your work.” It’s difficult to describe all that those few
words meant to me. The “we” made me feel like I could become a mem-
ber of a strong community of scholars, and the fact that anyone would
“need” scholarly work was a sign that academic scholarship can and should
be marshaled for the purposes of social justice.
Over the last decade and a half—whenever I may have gotten weary
of the academic enterprise—G’s words stayed with me and kept me goin.
Since then, we have worked together in multiple capacities and developed
a strong, nurturing relationship. So, for me, the first person I gotta show
love to is Docta G, a.k.a. Geneva Smitherman. G, I would tell you that the
opportunity to coauthor this book with you is like a dream come true, but
you already know. . . . Thanks for being my conscience and a true guiding
light for more than two generations of scholars. . . . Much love and much
respect, now and always.

xv
xvi Showin Love

Gracias también a toda mi familia de Nayarit. Les dedico este libro a

ustedes con mucho amor, cariño y respeto. Muchísimas gracias a todos ust-
edes por su apoyo y por quererme sin condiciones. Un abrazo fuerte.

G
Much love and respect to you, too, L.T. (a.k.a. Alim), my brilliant, creative
friend and coauthor, who was blessed with the vision for this work. Also
gotta show some love to my Midwest Fam—Austin Jackson, Kyle Mays,
Jeff Robinson, and AJ Rice. Thanks so much for the technical support, for
sharing yall knowledge, and especially for all dem late night intellectual
battles! Last, but mos def not least, sendin special love to my son, Tony
Smitherman, and my grands, Anthony and Amber Smitherman for bein
there when I need yall.

Alim and G
In writing this book, we also benefited from the work of a growing criti-
cal mass of language scholars working on race and ethnicity. We thank all
of the scholars who participated in these two conferences: UCLA’s “Race &
Ethnicity in Language, Interaction & Culture,” where we delivered the
earliest ideas on Barack Obama, language, and race (co-organized by
H. Samy Alim and Candy Goodwin with the Center for Language, Interaction
& Culture in 2009) and Stanford’s “Racing Language, Languaging Race”
(co-organized by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball with
the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language in 2012). Together, we are
coming to a new understanding that language varieties are not just lists
of features that belong to a given race; rather linguistic features can be
employed by speakers as they shape their identities or, more accurately,
engage in processes and projects of identification. President Barack Obama’s
use of Black Language, for example, is very much a conscious racial project
or, at the very least, a result of secondary language socialization (becoming
an adult in a Black community). In the same way that the President
selected “Black” on the US Census to mark his racial identity, he also
selects particular linguistic resources to be employed in the multifaceted
racial project of “becoming Black.” And as we show later in the book from
Rush Limbaugh’s harping on ask versus aks, his language is sometimes still
racialized as “Black,” even when he doesn’t use features typically associated
with Black Language.
 Showin Love xvii

We have also benefited from sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropologi-

cal work on the relationships between race, ethnicity, and language—from
folks like Mary Bucholtz, Elaine Chun, Jane Hill, Paul Kroskrity, Rosina
Lippi-Green, Adrienne Lo, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Angela Reyes, Jonathan
Rosa, Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Bonnie Urciuoli, and Ana Celia Zentella, among
others. In particular, we also benefited from the brilliant insights and con-
stant support of a whole crew of Black scholars of language, all of whom
have taken the sociolinguistic analysis of Black Language to new heights:
John Baugh, Renee Blake, Jennifer Bloomquist, Charles DeBose, Keith
Gilyard, Lisa Green, Lanita Jacobs, Sonja Lanehart, Marcyliena Morgan,
Django Paris, Elaine Richardson, and Arthur Spears, among others. And of
course, a big shout out to our homie, John R. Rickford (Co-director of the
Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language at Stanford), whose work has long
inspired us and who we thank in particular for his close reading of the
manuscript. To all: We need yall work! Keep it comin . . .
In addition to the language folks, we’ve also leaned on the insights
of another group of scholars—the whole cadre of new (and some not so
new, hey now) Black intellectuals who are steadfast in their commitment
to raise the level of the discourse on race in America: Ta-Nehisi Coates,
William Jelani Cobb, Davey D, Michael Eric Dyson (special thanks for
lacing us with that brilliant foreword!), dream hampton, Melissa Harris-
Perry, Marc Lamont Hill, Jay-Z, Bakari Kitwana, Joan Morgan, Nas, Mark
Anthony Neal, Imani Perry, James Peterson, Mark Sawyer, Tracy Denean
Sharpley-Whiting, James Spady, and Cornel West, among many others. You
have all, through your work and inspiration, impacted this book.
For Alim, many colleagues at Stanford University have been helpful
during the writing of this book, especially those in African and African
American Studies (AAAS), the Center for Comparative Studies of Race and
Ethnicity (CCSRE), and the departments of Anthropology and Linguistics.
And, of course, Alim is grateful for the support offered by Dean Claude
Steele and colleagues in the School of Education, particularly those affi li-
ated with the new Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) pro-
gram. This work has also greatly benefited from many critical conversations
with the homie and Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the
Arts (IDA), Jeff Chang (Can’t wait to read your next book, Who We Be!),
Program Administrator Ellen Oh, the “IDA RIDAS,” and all of da bomb stu-
dents in “Race, Ethnicity, and Language,” and “Hip Hop, Youth Identities,
and the Politics of Language.”
Lastly, there are two people who deserve stupid, phat shoutouts for
their critical readings of early, in-progress drafts of this manuscript. First,
Kate Geenberg, who suffered through many conversations with Alim and
read very drafty chapters with the closeness and criticality matched only
xviii Showin Love

by a few senior scholars in this game. (We talkin on some Bucholtzian-type

level of close reading!) Kate, despite the demands of your own research
agenda, you somehow managed to be critical reader, editor, and research
assistant all in one! Thanks for pushing us on so many levels. Second, to
Dee, thanks for printing, reading, commenting, and discussing/dee-bating
many critical points as these chapters were being written. And for always
being there to lend a ear—and a heart—to every situation. Thank you for
bein a frieeeeeend. Much love.
Lastly—forreal this time—in Articulate While Black, we’ve integrated
three bodies of knowledge on language and identity, Black Language, and
race in an effort to language race, to view the racial politics of the United
States through the lens of language. We’ve taken Barack Obama as both
our subject and our point of departure at this critical moment in American
history. At the start, we were faced with many questions: How does the
language use of a very public figure—the POTUS—impact our understand-
ings of Black Language, race, and ethnicity in the United States? Given
Black Language’s marginalized status in dominant culture, what are the
social and cultural implications of the United States having its first Black
Language−speaking president (not to mention one that can get that dirt
off his shoulder like Jay-Z, give his wife a Pound, and croon like the oh-
so-smooth Al Green)? How would looking at the language of Barack Obama
help us understand why major debates about language, race, and education
erupt into moments of racial crisis in America—from the Martin Luther
King Junior Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board
(the “Black English” case) to the Oakland “Ebonics” controversy, to racial
gaffes and blunders (from many Republicans and Democrats), to even well-
intentioned compliments about President Obama’s “articulateness”? Rather
than being in constant crisis mode, how can we think differently—more
critically—about the relationships between language, race, and power in
American society?
President Obama’s race, together with his use of language, often evokes
a volatile mixture of emotions, inciting an enormous amount of media
discourse. But as we roll into the 2012 elections, we need more than a
quantitative increase in our “race talk.” We need clarity. It is our view
that linguists are uniquely positioned to push and to problematize how we
think and talk about race. On that measure, we hope we have achieved
some modicum of success.
P.E.A.C.E.

Alim & G
1
“Nah, We Straight”
Black Language and
America’s First Black President
[Barack Obama] speaks with no Negro dialect, unless he
wants to have one.1
—Harry Reid

You go to the cafeteria . . . and the black kids are sitting

here, white kids are sitting there, and you’ve got to make
some choices. For me, basically I could run with anybody.
Luckily for me, largely because of growing up in Hawai’i,
there wasn’t that sense of sharp divisions. Now, by the
time I was negotiating environments where there were
those kinds of sharp divisions, I was already confident
enough to make my own decisions. It became a matter of
being able to speak different dialects. Th at’s not unique
to me. Any black person in America who’s successful has
to be able to speak several different forms of the same
language. . . . It’s not unlike a person shifting between
Spanish and English. 2
—Barack Obama

I still get goose bumps thinking about it. It was that moving of an exp-
erience. I remember being in Miami on Memorial Day weekend in 2008, six
months before America elected its first Black president. It was hot, and for
anyone who’s ever been to Miami, yeah, it was humid. The kind of humidity
that made you feel like you was swimmin instead of walkin. Some folks had
taken like three different buses just to get there. When the last bus finally
pulled up to the stadium, madd people rushed out. We waited for hours,
but it didn’t matter. The air had that electrified feelin to it. Then, outta
nowhere, the afternoon thunder rolled in and dropped buckets of water on
thousands of people who had already been waitin outside for hours. Instead
of complainin, folks huddled under umbrellas with strangers, engaged in
political conversation, and broke out into chants of “Yes we can! Yes we

1
2 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

can!” Couldn’t nu’in break our stride that day. Not even the rain. We were
here to see Barack Obama for ourselves. We’d seen him on TV, heard him
in interviews, and now it was our turn. As the doors to the stadium swung
open, thousands of people packed the house, runnin for they seats like it
was a Rick Ross concert or something!
Anyone who’s ever been to an Obama rally remembers that excitement
well. The energy of the 20,000 racially diverse folks gathered that day,
screaming in a frenzy as Barack Obama was introduced, was unforgettable.
He stood there at the podium for a good five minutes, unable to speak over
the roar of the booming crowd. He just looked out and smiled—and folks
went wild! He slowly moved to pick up the mic but couldn’t find it. He
searched the podium, as if deliberately building up the suspense, and the
crowd went even wilder. Then Barack leaned back like he was Hip Hop artist
Fat Joe (“lean back, lean back”) and tilted his head all calm and cool-like into
the podium to take a look. Finally, he picked up the mic, looked back out
into the crowd, laughing, “But I ain’t even say anything yet!” As the crowd
went bananas, Barack worked the predominantly Black section in front. “Oh,
the hardcore is over here in the front, huh?” [Crowd roars! Barack moves to
the side] “Oh, no wait, the real hardcore is over here!” [Crowd is outta con-
trol by now, and it lasted for several minutes!] Caught up in the frenzy of
the jam-packed arena, I thought to myself, “This guy is a legend in his own
time . . . and will be our next president.”
As a linguist, of course, I couldn’t help but think about how Barack was
using Black Language to connect with this racially diverse crowd. It struck
me that, for the first time, despite all the hootin and hollerin about Bill
Clinton being our first “Black” president, America may have its first Black
Language−speaking president. As the campaign marched on, folks from across
the political spectrum began commenting on Barack’s language, from linguist
John McWhorter’s playful use of “Blaccent” to Hip Hop icon Snoop Dogg’s
observation that Obama had “the right conversation.” And as it was later
revealed, Harry Reid’s racialized comments about Barack Obama’s language—
that he “speaks no Negro dialect, unless he wants to have one”—gave us all
pause. What exactly did that mean? As we (me and Geneva) talked about the
many language-related moments of the campaign, the idea for this book was
conceived. It occurred to us that, despite this being some Americans’ most
poignant “postracial” moment, there was much work to be done.

Languaging Race: Viewing Race through

the Lens of Language
While numerous books on President Obama have focused on the racial
politics of his presidency, none has examined these issues from a critical
 “Nah, We Straight” 3

linguistic perspective. Notable works, such as William Jelani Cobb’s The

Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (2010) and
Randall Kennedy’s The Persistence of the Color Line: The Racial Politics of the
Obama Presidency (2011), provide insightful historical and political analyses
yet make only passing mention of language. In Articulate While Black, we
complement these insights by viewing language as central to racial poli-
tics in the United States. This is especially important to us since, despite
the constant monitoring and mocking of Black Language, we maintain that
Barack Obama’s mastery of Black cultural modes of discourse was crucial
to his being elected America’s forty-fourth president. For some obvious and
not so obvious reasons, we argue that the “brotha with the funny name”
(as some Black folks called him) wouldn’t have gotten elected if he couldn’t
kick it in a way that was “familiarly Black.”
In this book, we provide a much-needed contribution to discussions
on race and Barack Obama by languaging race, that is, by examining the
politics of race through the lens of language. Though language remains
relatively unexamined by scholars of race and ethnicity, it plays a crucial
role in the construction of racial and ethnic identities. As University of
California, Santa Barbara professor of linguistics Mary Bucholtz notes in
her White Kids: Language, Race and Styles of Youth Identity, “Language is
often overlooked as an analytic concern in research on race, yet it is none-
theless central to how race is culturally understood.”3
The same holds true for the nonacademic world. We have a far more
developed conversation on race than on language. For example, whether we
agreed or disagreed with Attorney General Eric Holder when he famously
said that we are “a nation of cowards when it comes to race,”4 we were able
to engage the dialogue. But when was the last time you heard anyone say
that we are a nation of cowards when it comes to language? Unlike race,
we have no national public dialogue on language that recognizes it as a
site of cultural struggle. In American public discourse, language is often
overlooked as one of the most important cultural tools that we have for
distinguishing ourselves from others. Language, no doubt, is a significant
form of “symbolic power.”5 Yet its central role in positioning each of us and
the groups that we belong to along the social hierarchy lies largely beneath
the average American’s consciousness.
Viewing race through the lens of language, Articulate While Black: Barack
Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. provides new insights about the rela-
tionships between language and racial politics in the Obama era. Throughout
this book, we analyze several racially loaded cultural-linguistic controversies
involving Barack Obama. In the process, we reveal and challenge American
ideas about language, race, education, and power in order to help take the
national dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same sense that
Black philosopher and Union Theological Seminary professor Cornel West
4 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

wrote that (and about) “race matters” nearly two decades ago, this book does
the same for language.6 By theorizing language and race together, we show
how “language matters” to the national conversation on race.
Since language is one of the most salient yet least understood means we have
for creating our identities, we open up with an exploration of the way Barack
Obama uses language in his speeches, interviews, and everyday interactions.
More than just providing a sociolinguistic perspective on Barack Obama’s lan-
guage use, though, we provide a sociolinguistic perspective on Black Language
more generally. The linguistic perspective on Black Language varies drastically
from the general public’s perspective—just about everything you thought you
knew (or “thought you thought,” as the brothas out East useta say) about Black
Language couldn’t be further from the linguistic facts.7

“The Most Powerful Speaker of Our Age”:

The Obama Generation on Obama
Throughout our conversations with and surveys of Americans of the Obama
generation (mostly 18−24, with a few in their early thirties), it became clear
that he was extremely highly regarded as a speaker and communicator. As
one respondent put it, Barack Obama is “the most powerful speaker of our
age.” The word used most frequently to describe Barack Obama’s language
and language use was eloquent. Folks also often remarked that he spoke
“with conviction” and regularly used words like confident to describe his lan-
guage. Beyond his eloquence and confidence, Barack came off as “poised,”
“composed,” and “always in control of the situation.” He struck listeners as
being “highly educated” but “not in a way that patronizes his audience.”
To many, despite the Republican framing of him as “elite” and “too pro-
fessorial,” he was “able to communicate complicated ideas in a straightfor-
ward manner.” He was often described as “clear,” “direct,” “down to earth”
and also as “careful,” “measured,” and “deliberate.” More than that, he was
“inspiring,” “empowering,” and “motivating,” and while using language to
“build up a sense of community,” he also managed to “speak as if speaking
to individuals (as if he was speaking to me).”
Barack Obama struck a chord with this generation like no other presi-
dential candidate. As one White respondent commented:

Dignified yet humble, assertive yet calm/collected, stern yet com-

passionate, and formal while authentic, President Obama’s lan-
guage transcends the typical blandness of modern politicians (at
least the old, white, male variety) and I believe that he is truly
able to inspire hope and confidence through his speeches.
 “Nah, We Straight” 5

As compared with previous presidents, his language was described as

“dynamic,” “captivating,” “intoxicating,” and “rhythmic almost to the point
of hypnosis.” His speeches were seen as “vibrant, charismatic” and “replete
with imagery,” as “prose that flirts with the boundary of poetry.” In short,
Barack Obama was viewed as one helluva gifted orator, quite possibly the
most effective and powerful that this generation has witnessed.

“Nah, We Straight”: Styleshifting from

Ben’s Chili Bowl to Ray’s Hell Burger
Our conversations and surveys further revealed that, in Barack Obama,
America heard a speaker who was “strategic” and “hyperaware” of his audi-
ence. While being cognizant of your audience may come with the territory
as far as politics go, what distinguished Obama was his successful stylistic
performance. It’s one thing to know that you gotta say “the right things” in
terms of content but quite another to be able to say “the right things” in the
right way in terms of style. Barack was seen as someone who could speak
directly and comfortably with folks across regions, generations, socioeco-
nomic divisions, racial and ethnic groups, and political and religious views.
Barack Obama’s global family history, diverse life experiences, and
socialization within multiple cultures within and beyond the United States,
along with his biracial background, surely helped him hone his styleshift-
ing skills.8 At the beginning of this chapter, we quoted Obama’s descrip-
tion of his experience as a young man of Color growing up in American
schools as one where you had “to make some choices.” In an American
context, in which sharp racial divisions in friendship groups are still the
order of the day, Barack had to learn to speak “several different forms of
the same language.” In much the same way that many bilingual/bicultural
Americans codeswitch between two languages (English and Spanish, for
example), many bilingual/bicultural Americans styleshift—move in and out
of linguistic styles—between varieties of the same language (Puerto Rican
English and White Mainstream English, for example).9
While Barack Obama’s ability to styleshift is one of his most compelling
and remarkable linguistic abilities, it is also par for the course for many
Black Americans who travel in and out of Black and White social worlds
and work environments. In fact, Black Americans in our conversations and
surveys were more likely than Whites and others to note Obama’s style-
shifting abilities. Further, although many Americans clearly noted his lin-
guistic flexibility, only non-Black Americans described Barack’s language as
static, or as “simply White English.” One White respondent, speaking for
all Americans, went so far as to say, “His language is seen as white across
6 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

racial lines.” Along the same lines, a self-described “Latina with Mexican
immigrant parents” offered these observations:

When Obama addresses other groups, specifically communities

of color such as African-Americans, we would expect . . . the use
of more casual language and a different pronunciation of words
to be shown. Instead, he uses the same language style for this
group as well. Th is is due to the fact that . . . he cannot code-
switch between the dominant white-american language variety
and the African-American one.

Another respondent, a self-identified “Hispanic & Caucasian Chicana,”

commented, “I’ve never heard him deviate from normative English.”
Compare these observations to this Black woman’s response from Philly,
“President Obama’s language is ever changing as a reflection of his envi-
ronment and the racial or political composition of his audience.” Black
Americans, more than any other group, were most sensitive to Barack’s
styleshifting and offered more complex and layered descriptions of his lin-
guistic steez (style). Black Americans not only noted the range and ability
of Obama’s styleshifting, many also distinguished between his language
(grammatical structure) and his style (language use).10 Or as one Chi-Town
brotha put it: “Barack Obama may not sound ‘black’ in a transcription of
his speeches, but he definitely sounds black over audio recordings.” Let him
explain:

I think that I would describe President Obama’s language and

speech as Standard American English. Based off of my observa-
tions, there is nothing particular about the language that he uses
that would separate him from the Standard American English
model. However, I do feel that the way that he speaks is particu-
larly African American. Th is refers more to his rhetoric, intona-
tion, and style. However, his speech or the extent to which he
plays up his Black manner of speaking varies depending on his
setting. I feel that he possesses a good balance and mix between
the two manners of speaking, and pulls it off successfully, where
it doesn’t seem unnatural for him. [emphasis in original]

A Black woman echoes these observations:

If I had to describe Barack Obama’s language in one word, I’d

describe it as interesting. . . . He’s able to tiptoe the line between
Standard English and a semi-African American type of dialect. It’s
 “Nah, We Straight” 7

not really African American in terms of the way he uses gram-

mar (he doesn’t use “be” . . . ), but his mannerisms and his style
of speech—the way he draws certain vowels out and some of the
slang terms he uses—is somewhat characteristic of Black speech.

While these two respondents differed in terms of their view of the degree
to which Barack Obama sounded “Black,” both made critical distinctions
between his language and his style. Both also noted that his grammar, for
the most part, was pretty much “standard.” By contrast, a sista from Cali
makes observations about instances of Barack Obama using Black Language
style as well as syntax. Noting both the range of Barack’s styleshifting and
distinguishing between his language and style, she notes that he reserves
“the nonstandard grammatical structure” of Black Language for “settings
that are primarily Black.” She then offered an example of Barack’s language
from his visit to Ben’s Chili Bowl, which she described as “a racially mixed,
very informal location in the heart of D.C.”
This now famous example was captured on YouTube.11 In the clip, Barack
Obama is seen interacting with a Black cashier. When offered his change,
he declined with the statement, “Nah, we straight.” While this may seem
like a simple phrase, in these three words we have three different linguistic
features that are aspects of Black Language.

(1) Barack Obama says “nah” rather than “no.” Th is is a big deal for
linguists for a number of reasons. Whereas the vowel in “no” is a diph-
thong, the vowel in “nah” is a low monophthong. In other words, the vowel
sound in “no” is like the one in “note,” whereas the vowel sound in “nah”
is like the one in “not” (which is not to be confused with the way some
White speakers may pronounce “nah” like the vowel sound in “gnat,” or
the way some southern speakers pronounce “naw” like the vowel sound in
“gnaw”). All of this work on vowel sounds has actually led most linguists
to consider “nah” a lexical variant of “no,” meaning that it is a different
way of saying the same thing but which might mark social difference. In
this case, although “nah” is used to some extent by speakers throughout
the United States, it is more often than not associated with the speech of
Black folks.
Varying between lexical variants and different pronunciations are lin-
guistic hallmarks of Barack Obama’s styleshifting. For instance, in a South
Carolina speech with a racially mixed audience, which we analyze later in
this chapter, Barack says “wit mah Bahble” for “with my Bible.” In this
case, the diphthong in my and Bible was rendered as ah. (This phonological
process is known as the monophthongization of diphthongs—say that shit
five times fast).
8 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

(2) Despite some hilarious misinterpretations of the word straight (nah,

he wasn’t talkin bout his sexual orientation!), Barack Obama used the
word in its Black, now-crossover youthful sense to mean he was “OK,”
“fine,” “alright” with not getting his change back. Many observers have
noted Barack Obama’s use of Black slang in relation to Hip Hop Culture,
using such words as flow or tight.12 Other than its ever-evolving slang, the
lexicon of Black Language is not as widely known outside the Black com-
munity. Barack Obama also uses words and phrases from this less widely
known dimension of the Black Lexicon, which have survived for genera-
tions in the Black community, such as “trifling,” “high-yella,” “Tom/Uncle
Tom,” and “house nigger.”13
(3) In addition to words, phrases, and pronunciation, the third Black lin-
guistic feature in Barack’s “Nah, we straight” is known as copula absence.
The copula refers to is and are and other forms of the verb to be. Now,
while this might be TMLI (too much linguistic information), this feature is
actually one of the most important and frequently studied features of Black
Language. Leading sociolinguist and Stanford University professor John R.
Rickford once described the copula as Black Language’s “showcase variable,”
because it is a feature that gives Black Language its distinctiveness, set-
ting it apart from other varieties of American English.14 In the twenty-
first century, the Black Language copula has blown up all over the Black
Twitterverse in TTs (trending topics) and hashtags such as #uknowuugly.
While this has actually confused many non-Black tweeps, it can be ren-
dered simply as: “You know you are ugly.”15 Non-Black tweeps sometimes
call out this use of copula absence as a sign of “Black people’s ignorant
ways” or “their lazy, ungrammatical speech.” Black tweeps, on the other
hand, respond by noting that Twitter is all about being concise. Rather
than “deficient,” one could argue that copula absence is “efficient.” (You
only get 140 characters to say what you need to say!) Yet when Barack
and other Black speakers use this form, it’s actually rarely about efficiency
and most definitely not about Black people’s “lazy, ungrammatical speech.”
Contrary to popular opinion, Black Language actually has a more complex
verbal system than any other White American variety of English. Th is is
due mostly to its origins as a Creolized form of African and European lan-
guage varieties.16 Now, before explaining further, we warn you it’s about to
get real linguistic up in here. But, yo, these next five points are necessary,
though, if we’re gonna understand why breakin down Barack’s linguistic
steez is so important. Aight, here we go . . .
The first point is that while speakers of White American varieties of
English only have two ways of representing the copula, speakers of Black
Language have three. In Black Language, you can say all three of these,
depending on the situation: (1) “We are straight,” (2) “We’re straight,” or
 “Nah, We Straight” 9

(3) “We Ø straight.” In White varieties of English, you are restricted to the
first two forms. Black folks can shift between these three variants, all of
which have the same literal meaning but differ in social meaning.
Speakers of Black Language don’t just be leavin the copula out whenever
they feel like it, though. The second point is that copula absence follows
a very well-documented set of linguistic constraints. That means that you
can’t just decide to always use the zero copula form (as in “We Ø straight”).
Take this example from a Black minister in San Francisco: “The Black Man
Ø on the rise, and the White man, he Ø runnin scared now, because we
Ø wide awake today and he know we Ø not just gon lay down and accept
things as they are.” While the copula can be absent before prepositional
phrases and locatives (“The Black Man Ø on the rise”), progressive verbs
(“he Ø runnin scared”), adjectives (“we Ø wide awake”), negatives, and the
future marker gon (“we Ø not just gon lay down”), it cannot be absent when
it is in sentence-final position (“as they are”). The copula can’t be absent in
the first-person singular form either. Like, if Barack had said something
like, “Nah, I straight,” that’d be a bad look cuz it’s ungrammatical in the
Black Language system.
Now if that wasn’t complicated enough, the third point is that these lin-
guistic constraints on copula use are also ordered such that the copula is
more likely to be absent in decreasing order before gon (“She Ø gon do it”),
a verb + ing (“She Ø doin it”), locatives (“She Ø at the bus stop”), adjec-
tives (“She Ø happy”), and noun phrases (“She Ø the boss”). Fourth, copula
absence also depends on phonological (pronunciation) constraints, such as
if there’s a vowel or a consonant before or after its use. Lastly, as shown in
great detail in Alim’s You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic
Study of Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community, Black folks also
shift their use of the copula in regularly patterned ways depending on the
race, gender, and cultural knowledge of the person they’re speaking to.
For example, on the one hand, Black youth display high levels of copula
absence in their peer groups and when talking with Black male Hip Hop
heads. On the other, they are much more likely to use the copula (is or are)
when speaking to White women who know nothing about Hip Hop. All of
this is what linguistic experts mean when they say that Black Language is
“rule-governed” and “systematic” like any other language variety (told y’all
it wasn’t nu’in simple about Barack’s use of “Nah, we straight”).
Now, if we compare Barack’s language use in Ben’s Chili Bowl with his
language use in Ray’s Hell Burger, we can get a really good sense of how
Obama shifts styles. One of Obama’s favorite spots, Ray’s Hell Burger is
located in Arlington, Virginia, and has a predominantly White clientele. In
the nearly eight-minute clip of his appearance there, Obama’s language is
informal (“How’re you doin, man?” “We’ll check that out”), but he does not
10 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

use features of Black Language.17 Obama is seen, however, interacting briefly

with a Latina employee, whom he winks at and says, “Hola,” in a form bet-
ter than el español típico de la mayoría de los gringos. His Spanish greeting
was taken up by the employee who responded right away, “Hola!”
Revisiting Barack’s Ben’s Chili Bowl experience, we have generally
the same speech situation (lunchtime at an informal restaurant), speech
event (a service encounter between customer and employee), and speech
act (ordering food).18 We see Barack Obama in a crowded restaurant with
a multiracial crowd in Washington, D.C. The interaction went down like
this:

Barack: [Handing over his money to the cashier] You just keep
that. Where’s my ticket. You got my ticket?
Cashier: [Offers Barack his change]
Barack: Nah, we straight. [Reaching over to take his soda]
Customer: You got cheese fries, too?
Barack: Nah, nah, that’s you, man . . .
[Video cuts away and returns after Barack receives his chili dog]
Barack: Now, do y’all have some Pepto Bismol in this place?
All present: [Laughter]
Barack: [Walking back up to the counter, addressing cashier
again] Hey, how come he’s got some cheddar cheese on his and
I don’t have any on mine?
All present: [Laughter] Woahhh!
Cashier: Whatever you like, sir.
Barack: We got some cheese, you can sprinkle on it? [Gesturing
the sprinkling of cheese, then signifyin] Not, not, not, not the
Velveeta but the . . .
Customers: [Laughter]
Customer: The cheddar cheese!
Barack: The cheddar cheese.

In addition to the three main features we discussed in “Nah, we straight,”

we can see here that Barack’s language is generally informal with phrases
like “You got my ticket?” and “Nah, nah, that’s you, man.” We also see his
use of other features of Black Language (and southern varieties of English),
which folks often use in more casual environments. Barack’s use of y’all
(“Do y’all have some Pepto Bismol in this place?”), for example, is the pre-
ferred way to mark the second-person plural on such occasions.
In addition to Barack’s language (grammatical structure), we can also
look at his style (language use). The Pepto Bismol joke shows Barack’s use
of humor, which flows into a type of banter that many African Americans
 “Nah, We Straight” 11

know well. In this case, Obama expresses his discontent about not getting
cheese on his chili dog in a lighthearted and humorous example of signi-
fyin.19 “Not, not, not, not the Velveeta” is characteristic of a sometimes
subtle mode of discourse in Black communication that includes acts such
as snappin, bustin, crackin, playin the dozens or dissin someone through
wit and humor. Here, the president of the United States wanted some real
cheese, not that fake Velveeta stuff !

“As for Your Greasy-Mouthed Self”: The Art of

Signifyin and Talkin Trash
Other examples of Barack’s signifyin abilities include his “roast” of
Donald Trump at the White House correspondent’s dinner in 2011. The
roast included some classic signifyin that, although lighthearted and
entertaining, was incredibly witty and cutting. In the weeks before the
dinner, Donald Trump was all over the media championing the Birther
Movement, insinuating that he’d make a run for president, and directing
some pretty pointed questions at the president. Well, the president had
some answers:

Donald Trump is here tonight. Now I know that he’s taken some
fl ack lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this
birth certificate matter to rest than Donald. And that’s because
he can [letting out a laugh under his breath] fi nally get back to
focusing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon-
landing? [Crowd laughter] What really happened in Roswell?
[Crowd Laughter] And where are Biggie and Tupac? [Big laughter
and applause] All kidding aside, obviously we all know about
[gesturing out towards Trump] your credentials and breadth of
experience [Crowd laughter] . . . um, for example, um . . . [Donald
Trump is shown uncomfortably scratching the side of his neck
with his index fi nger]. . . . No, seriously, just recently in an
episode of Celebrity Apprentice [Crowd laughter], at the Steakhouse,
the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha
Steaks, and there was a lotta blame to go around, but you,
Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of lead-
ership. And so ultimately you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf
[Crowd laughter], you fi red Gary Busey! [Crowd laughter] [Then
matter-of-factly, Barack adds] And these are the kinds of deci-
sions that would keep me up at night. [Uproarious crowd laughter
and applause]
12 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

First, Barack Obama made out the conspiracy theory that somehow the
president of the United States is not a citizen of his own country to be
completely foolish. Second, he framed Trump as inane and inept for being
preoccupied with making calls for the president to “prove” his citizenship
instead of focusing on more serious issues. Third, the president cut deeper
into Trump’s rump by highlighting his lack of legitimate political expe-
rience. He framed him as nothing more than a reality show star, busy
makin “serious” decisions like who was to blame for “the failure of the
men’s cooking team.” Then in a one-two punch, he “praised” Trump for
firing the right chef on his show and quickly followed with, “And these
are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.” With this one-
liner, he underscored the enormous difference between him and Trump in
terms of their political experience and capacity to govern. Stay in your
lane, son.
Another example of Barack’s siggin was when he and Hip Hop mogul P.
Diddy got into it. Four years before Barack’s election as President, Diddy
described an exchange he had with him in these terms: “I had the privilege
to meet Barack Obama, interview him . . . and also joke around with him,
have some, you know, we had some funny banter back and forth. We was
really like snappin on each other.” 20 In the clip, Obama, after wiping the
sweat off of his forehead repeatedly throughout the interview, is urging
young people to vote (for John Kerry, at the time, instead of George W.
Bush):

Barack: Well, some people just gotta remember what happened

in Florida, you know, when George Bush won the Presidency,
he thinks, based on just a tiny [pronounced “tahny,” there
goes the monophthongization of diphthongs again] margin of
votes. . . . And like I said, don’t let people overpromise what you
can do through politics. It’s not gonna solve the problems of
the entire world, but it makes a little bit of difference. . . . You
get registered, you vote—that takes about 15 minutes. And if
you can’t spend 15 minutes on deciding what your community’s
gonna look like and what your country’s gonna look like, then
you don’t have any cause to complain.
Diddy: He makin sense [No copula needed]. Th at’s what we need.
We need people to make sense. We applaud you. [Then the sig-
nifyin begins] . . . And I wanna apologize for not sweatin, but I
do this so much . . .
Barack: [Begins to protest and takes off his suit jacket] [Unseen
staff start laughing]
 “Nah, We Straight” 13

Diddy: . . . I’m so cool. I just want y’all to see. Everybody I’m inter-
viewing is sweatin. I’m not even touchin my brow. [Laughter
from staff continues]. I’m so cool. [Barack still wiping sweat off
his face] And I wanna apologize. [Then he really begins clownin]
I ain’t tryna make you look bad or nu’in like that but I’m just
so cool. Um, we, we . . .
Barack: [Talking to the camera, pointing at Diddy] He, he wearin
a T-shirt . . . [No copula needed]
Diddy: [Bent over laughing]
Barack: . . . I tell ya, if he was wearin one of those fancy designer
clothes he’s designin, he’d be sweatin just like me.
Diddy: The guy’s good. The guy’s good y’all. Let’s give it up for
him.
Barack: [Slapping Diddy on the back, smiling] I appreciate you
guys, thank you.
Diddy: Peace, peace, thank you.

Barack has proved himself to be a pretty skilled signifier but Diddy was
a fool wit that one! Layin it on Barack. And hammin it up for the
camera too.
Now, there are two things of interest here in terms of styleshifting. One,
of course, is how Barack was able to engage the Black cultural mode of
discourse known as signifyin. The other is how he accommodated his lin-
guistic style closer to the style of P. Diddy throughout the interview. What
began as extremely formal and reserved, with mostly “standard” English
responses, ended with several examples of Black phonological and gram-
matical features. Diddy, generously using copula absence throughout the
interview, finally gets one back from Barack (“He Ø wearin a T-shirt”), as
Barack shifts his linguistic steez structurally to match the Black discourse
genre. That right there—shifting between discourse modes and linguistic
forms in the same interaction—is a prime example of styleshifting.
These few examples (and there are many others) show that Barack
Obama can hold his own when it comes to the art of signifyin and talkin
trash. Obama talks about learning these skills in high school while playing
on the university basketball courts “where a handful of black men . . . would
teach [him] an attitude that didn’t just have to do with the sport. That
respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you
could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up
if you couldn’t back it up.”21 Further, in his high school years, Barack writes
about an illustrative exchange between him and his homie Ray, who intro-
duced him to “the black parties that were happening on the army bases.”22
Ray and other Black friends “eased [Barack’s] passage through unfamiliar
14 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

terrain” in the process of his becoming Black or becoming well versed with
Black American cultural signs, symbols, tropes, practices, and worldviews.23
Language use was central to the cultural socialization process.
The following signifyin exchange between him and Ray provides a
glimpse into the ways that Barack became socialized into Black linguistic
ways of speaking:

[Ray talking] “I mean it this time,” he was saying to me now.

“These girls are A-1, USDA-certified racists. All of ‘em. White
girls. Asian girls—shoot, these Asians worse than the whites.
[You should recognize that as copula absence now, “these
Asians Ø worse”] Th ink we got a disease or something.”
“Maybe they’re lookin at that big butt of yours. Man, I thought
you were in training.”
“Get your hands out of my fries. You ain’t my bitch, nigger . . . buy
your own damn fries. Now what was I talking about?”
[The exchange continues with Ray claiming racism across dat-
ing and sports practices and Barack denying that it’s always
racism]
. . . [Ray talking] “Tell me we wouldn’t be treated different if we
was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or fucking Eskimo.”
“Th at’s not what I’m saying.”
“So what are you saying?”
. . . [Barack signifies on Ray, claiming that his poor diet and train-
ing, rather than racism, are more likely the reasons why he wasn’t
starting on the football team] “As for your greasy-mouthed self,”
I added, reaching for the last of his fries, “I’m saying the coaches
may not like you ‘cause you’re a smart-assed black man, but it
might help if you stopped eating all them fries you eat, making
you look six months pregnant. That’s what I’m saying.”24

“Y’all Know about Okey-Doke, Right?”

Black Sermonizing—Barack Obama’s
Communicative M.O.
Despite his ability to flex Black Language across many contexts and signify
with the best of em, Americans in our survey most often described Barack
Obama’s speech as “mirroring” that of a Baptist preacher. In fact, one could
say that “the Black preacher style” was seen as Barack’s communicative M.O.
Black Americans, in particular, were not only more likely to frame Barack
as a Black preacher, but they also usually provided more nuanced and
 “Nah, We Straight” 15

descriptive readings of his “preacher style.” Collectively, Black folks touched

on Barack’s cadence, timing, effective use of pauses, metaphors, rhythm and
repetition, as well as Black discourse modes of signifyin and storytelling.
They described Barack’s “preacher-like” speech as

—having a slow and pointed cadence . . . words intermittently

separated with pauses pregnant with meaning
—he uses the passion and rousing speech tools of preachers in
Black churches . . . such as signifyin’, using words that have dou-
ble meaning that blacks pick up
—he uses repetition . . . altering pitch and stress
—he adopts a more Pastorial African-American vernacular and
references more Biblical verses
—bringing . . . citizens along with storytelling and narration . . . his
storytelling ability usually wraps around to connect to a larger theme
—often he uses metaphors and stories. . . . His ability to tell stories is
one of his greatest strengths . . . through persuasive storytelling,
he taps into the unconscious mind where we make decisions,
making it that much easier for him to influence the audience
through his language
—he consciously uses sophisticated code-switching and rhythmic
patterns

Generally, White Americans didn’t go into as much detail, but almost all
of those who noted his preacher style linked him to iconic Black preachers
and ministers, such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. Having pre-
sumably less experience worshiping in Black churches, some White folks
went way out and described Obama as “singing” in his speeches. While
Black folks often refer to a “sing-song” quality in Black speech, the Black
survey respondents did not describe Barack this way, probably due to the
relative flatness of his speech when compared to the best Black preachers.
One White male respondent compared Barack Obama’s style to that of a
“preacher” and then immediately made the direct link to “MLK’s . . . sing-
ing” or “chanting”: “At his best, he has the deliberate and enthusiastic
pace of a talented preacher. It’s almost as if he’s singing or chanting as
opposed to talking. This, of course, is not unlike how other talented ora-
tors, like MLK, sound.” The next example is the most detailed descrip-
tion of Barack Obama’s preacher style provided by the survey’s White
respondents:

Obama’s composure always remains cool and collected with a

strong sense of inner peace—he never lets emotional intensity
16 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

take over his speeches. At the same time, he is also the 21st cen-
tury echo of African-American preacher style characterized by
such strong orators as MLK. . . . Additionally, his speech is effec-
tive because his delivery is not boring or monotonous, but rather
like a song. The way Obama alters his pace, tone, and rhythm is
similar to the way a preacher speaks, which is essentially close to
singing. The intonation, emphasis, and pauses and silences that
characterize his speaking style are churchy and religious.

Obama is indeed particularly well versed in a mode that draws on Black

preacher style. No doubt his time at Trinity was a firsthand language
immersion experience in the Black Church’s ways with words. In his “A
More Perfect Union” speech (a.k.a. “The Race Speech”), for example, Obama
painted a vivid picture of Reverend Wright’s Trinity services and connected
with many Black churchgoers and others who recognize the Black Church
as an important cultural institution: “Like other black churches, Trinity’s
services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are
full of dancing and clapping and screaming and shouting.”25
Obama learned a mode of Black sermonizing. While not attempting to
duplicate it to the letter in the political sphere, he readily engaged in a
“stylistic sampling” of the Black Church’s Oral Tradition, as one respondent
put it. In his “More Perfect Union,” for example, Obama began his speech-
sermon by framing slavery as America’s “original sin.” Opening with this
religious frame primed the audience for the most important moment of the
speech, which to us, sounded like the climax of a sermon. From approxi-
mately the last eight minutes of his speech, Obama uses a number of
Black preacher−style rhetorical devices. He cites Scripture; offers the flock
(“Americans”) a choice between good and evil, right and wrong; and then,
through the effective use of timing, repetition, and narrativizing, offers
us a way to perfect our character (ourselves and the Union). The only way
to truly witness the man’s skillz is to examine the lengthy excerpt below,
which is notated to highlight his multilayered use of repetition26 and which
includes a truncated sample of his storytelling:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and noth-
ing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand—that
we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us
be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s
keeper. . . .

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics

that breeds division, and confl ict, and cynicism. We can tackle
 “Nah, We Straight” 17

race only as a spectacle . . . We can play Reverend Wright’s ser-

mons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now
until the election. . . . We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary
supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can
speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in
the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that. [He repeats “We can” and articulates the entire
phrase in a lower, breathy voice to give it the sound of genuine
feeling. Pausing to add rhetorical effect]
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be
talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And
then another one. And nothing will change.
Th at is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can
come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk
about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black
children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic chil-
dren and Native American children. This time we want to reject
the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn. . . . They are
our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century
economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency
Room are fi lled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not
have health care. . . .
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once pro-
vided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the
homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every reli-
gion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk
about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who
doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation
you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every
color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed
together under the same proud fl ag. We want to talk about how to
bring them home from a war that never should’ve been autho-
rized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about
how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their fam-
ilies, and giving them the benefits they have earned. . . .

There is one story in particular that I’d like to leave you with
today—a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking
18 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in

Atlanta.
There is a young, twenty-three year old woman, a white woman,
named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence,
South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly
African American community since the beginning of the cam-
paign. . . . Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps
somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s
problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work,
or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she
didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room
and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. . . . And
finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there
quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And
he does not bring up a specific issue. . . . He simply says to everyone
in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of
recognition between that young white girl and that old black man
is not enough. . . . But it is where we start . . .

In the eight-minute excerpt, Barack repeats “we can” seven times in succes-
sion (and emphasizes it once for rhetorical effect) before moving listeners
to “we want,” shifting the focus from our failures to our collective goals
for action. He then effectively uses a combination of the phrases “Not
this time,” “this time,” and “this time we want to talk about” to begin 10
different successive ideas.27 All the while, he presents us with the choice
between “division . . . conflict, and cynicism” and coming together to say,
“Not this time.” Finally, he humanizes that choice with the story of young
White Ashley and an older Black man and suggests that together we can
work to perfect the union.
In this “A More Perfect Union” speech, Barack was addressing a national
audience made up of folks across the racial and linguistic spectrum. In
majority Black contexts, however, where Black linguistic norms prevail,
Barack Obama’s been known to take his Black church stizzy to the next
level. Specifically, he can shift into a deep Black style of call and response, a
communicative strategy that breaks down conventional divisions between
“audience” and “speaker.” 28 Shot through with action and interaction, call
and response is concentric in quality, with the audience becoming both
observers and participants in the speech event. The audience’s verbal
and nonverbal responses co-sign the power of the speaker’s call. Barack
 “Nah, We Straight” 19

Obama’s speech in front of a predominantly Black crowd in South Carolina

provides a quintessential example. He fired folks up to the point where
they was damn near testifyin. Walkin across the stage, he looked out into
the crowd:

Barack’s call: They’re tryna bamboozle you. [Pause]

Crowd’s response: [Black woman seen waving her sign like a
fan, Black men shaking their heads in recognition; crowd
laughter] Yes!
Barack’s call: It’s the same old okey-doke. [Pause]
Crowd’s response: [Laughter, agreement] Th at’s right!
Barack’s call: [Looking out to audience with a half smile] Y’all
know about okey-doke, right? [Pause]
Crowd’s response: Yeahhh! Yes! [Laughter]
Barack’s call: It’s the same old stuff !
Crowd’s response: Yeahhh!
Barack’s call: Just like if anybody starts gettin one of these
emails sayin, “Obama is a Muzlim.” [Pause]
Crowd’s response: Yes! They do it!
Barack’s call: I’ve, I’ve been a member of the same church for
almost twenty years. [Pause]
Crowd’s response: C’mon now! Alright!
Barack’s call: Prayin to Jesus!
Crowd’s response: [Hits a climax with uproarious shouts and
applause]
Barack’s call: Wit mah—wit mah Bible [pronounced Bahble].
[Pause]
Crowd’s response: Amen! [Continued applause]
Barack’s call: Don’t LET people turn you around [continued
applause] because they’re just makin stuff up!
Crowd’s response: Yes, they are!
Barack’s call: Th at’s what they do!
Crowd’s response: Yes, they do!
Barack’s call: They try to bamboozle you!
Crowds response: [Laughter] Hoodwink you!
Barack’s call [now a response to “Hoodwink you!”]: Hoodwink
you! [Laughter]

Barack Obama’s masterful use of the call-and-response mode of Black

Communication transformed this venue in South Carolina into a Baptist
church lit with the spirit. Well, at least for the Black folks that were pres-
ent. Weellll . . . While Black folks were shoutin, hollerin “Amen!” and goin
20 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

back and forth with Barack in a culturally familiar verbal dance—until

the lines between caller and responder were blurred—most White folks on
the scene were either looking on blankly or smiling quietly. It’s quite pos-
sible that White folks knew that something else was going on but couldn’t
quite figure out what it was. Of course, Blacks in the audience and most
reading this now recognized that Barack was also recalling famous lines
associated with Malcolm X (ironically, a Muslim) about White people try-
ing to “bamboozle” and “hoodwink” Black folks. Like a coded verbal game
of catch, Barack threw it out, the Black audience caught it, and then threw
it back for him to catch. It wasn’t that White audience members didn’t
approve of what was being said; it was that they were simply unable to
play the game.29

Familiarly White, Familiarly Black, Familiarly

American, Familiarly Christian: The Syntax
and Style of Barack’s Language
All of Barack’s flexible linguistic abilities that we have described thus far
were critically important to his being elected. Th is was perhaps the single
most consistent finding in our survey: Barack Obama’s mastery of White
mainstream English ways of speaking, or “standard” English, particularly
in terms of syntax, combined with his mastery of Black Culture’s modes
of discourse, in terms of style, was an absolutely necessary combination
for him to be elected America’s first Black president. One respondent in
particular articulated this sentiment perfectly. When asked about Barack
Obama’s language and language use, she explained:

When Obama was on the campaign trail, his speeches mirrored

that of a Baptist preacher. The way certain words were stressed
and the rise and fall in his speech were very reminiscent of the
church. Sprinkled with imagery, metaphors and historical refer-
ences, coupled with an underlying theme and you had speeches
that captivated not only Americans, but the world. . . . I feel like
Obama has been able to balance his multi-racial identity and his
Black experiences. His speeches are a great example of that bal-
ance. Obama has the ability to use Standard English in a “Black”
context by using the “preacher” format to develop his speeches
and then delivering them in Standard English. By combining
these two experiences, Obama was able to appeal to a larger
 “Nah, We Straight” 21

audience of people. Whites did not feel alienated by his language,

and Blacks felt a sense of familiarity with his speech pattern.

Of course, mastery of so-called “standard English” is mandated in American

politics, but it was Barack’s ability to combine this variety with Black ways
of speaking that was ultimately crucial. His linguistic style mattered in at
least three ways. First, Barack Obama’s mastery of White mainstream ways
of speaking allowed White Americans to feel more comfortable with him. He
used a language variety that was familiarly White, which rightly or wrongly,
did not “alienate” Whites in the way that Black Language sometimes does.
Relatedly, his style of speaking was seen as “transcending” Blackness, with
many describing him as “exceptionally articulate,” making (unintentional)
racist links between “articulateness,” “Whiteness,” and “intelligence.”30
Though some Americans noted that White, male mainstream ways of speak-
ing English are problematically mapped onto “the language of politics” and
“the language of success,” Black Americans highly regarded Barack’s profi-
ciency in this style as well. Using positive terms, many respondents across
racial lines described Barack’s ability to use “standard English,” “typical
American English,” “normative English,” “standard American English,” “pol-
ished standard English”—and our personal favorite, “a language literally
born of the American educational system’s upper echelon.”
Second, not only did Whites feel that Barack spoke familiarly White, many
Black folks felt that he spoke familiarly Black. While some Black women
respondents noted that his “sounding Black” had to do with his “manly (deep)
voice” or his “baritone,” more often Blacks described Obama’s speech style
in terms of “a Baptist preacher” or in the “tradition of the Black Church.”
So, while responding positively to Barack’s command of “standard” English
syntax, the real clincher for Black folks was that Barack could kick it in a
style that was recognizable to the community as “something we do.” Rightly
or wrongly, to many Black folks, anything less than that mighta made the
brotha suspect. This is because, sociolinguistically speaking, the way we use
language often hints at our politics, indexing our (dis)alignment with par-
ticular groups or causes. We read into people’s words for clues, signs, any-
thing that might help us figure out where they stand. In the case of Barack
Obama, accurately or not, many Black folks read his use of Black modes of
discourse as indexing a political alignment with the Black community.
Thirdly, Barack’s ability to bring together “White syntax” with “Black
style” and to speak familiarly Black was not only important for the Black
community, it was also critically important for the White community for
at least two reasons. One, Whites have always dug Black preacher style, so
long as it didn’t come at them too hard in that caustic, biting, damn-you-
to-hell kinda way. (There is a reason why many Black folks refer to Martin
22 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Luther King Jr. as “White America’s favorite ‘Negro’ ” and why, after hear-
ing Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, for instance, White Americans
don’t know whether to shit or go blind!)
The second and most critical reason why speaking familiarly Black
was important for Whites is this: It made Barack both “American” and
“Christian.” Not only are White Americans more familiar with a Black
Christian identity, but due to the contentious history of the Nation of
Islam and contemporary tensions with immigrant Muslims in post-9/11
America, many Whites also fear “(Black) Muslims.” Speaking familiarly
Black made Barack familiarly American and familiarly Christian. To bor-
row from one Asian American respondent who wrote about forever feel-
ing like a “foreigner” in the United States, “Barack needed to not only
be American; he needed to be 110 percent American.” After all, who can
forget the lunacy of some White folks at the McCain-Palin rallies (“I, I,
I don’t trust him—he’s A-A-Arab!”)? And the never-ending and overwhelm-
ingly White Birther Movement, which even includes the likes of your boy
Donald Trump? Growing up in Hawai’i and Indonesia with a Kenyan father
and Muslim family roots was apparently too much for White folks to han-
dle. Now, let’s not kid ourselves here—it ain’t like White folks got a lock
on xenophobia and anti-Muslim bias. Sounding familiarly Black, and thus
familiarly American and familiarly Christian, also won over those in the
Black community who questioned Obama’s heritage (“He ain’t Black—he
from Kenya!” or “Ain’t he a Mooozlim?”) or weren’t down with what they
saw as his appropriation of the Black American struggle (“He’s probably
one of those Africans who doesn’t like us, but will use the label ‘African
American’ to take advantage of affirmative action programs”). 31
In sum, Barack’s styles of speaking clinched his victory because he put
most Americans at ease. Here was a Black candidate for president whom
Black folks could trust because “he sounds White, but not too White” and
White folks could trust because “he sounds Black, but not too Black.” Of
course, it would be too simple to leave it there. The reality is that Whites,
too, were happy with a Black man who “sounded White, but not too White.”
His familiarly Black style Americanized and Christianized him, helping
them get over their irrational fears of a “foreign Muslim” or a “socialist
African.” Blacks, too, were likely happy with a Black man who “sounds
Black, but not too Black.” Quiet as it’s kept, because of Black Language’s
marginalized status in broader American society, some Black folks suffer
a linguistic shame that hypercriticizes any speech that sounds “too Black.”
The stories of people “cringing” every time they hear Magic Johnson speak,
for example, are all too common. In a similar way that Barack Obama’s
familiarly Black style helped some White folks get over irrational fears of
a “foreign/Black Muslim” or a “socialist African,” his familiarly White style
 “Nah, We Straight” 23

helped some Black folks get beyond irrational insecurities that “the whole
race” would be deemed “ignorant” because of one Black person’s speech.
Caught between discriminatory discourses of language, citizenship, reli-
gion, and race, Barack Obama’s language use hit that ever-so-small “sweet
spot” that appealed to the majority of Americans. It didn’t matter how
many times he repeated that he wasn’t a Muslim or how many times he
presented his birth certificate; what mattered more to most Americans,
even if subconsciously, was not what he said but how he said it. More
than any other cultural symbol, Barack Obama’s multifaceted language
use allowed Americans to create linguistic links between him and famous
African American male historical figures. These links served to simultane-
ously “Whiten,” “Blacken,” “Americanize,” and “Christianize” Barack in the
eyes and ears of both Black and White Americans.

With No White Dialect, Unless He Wants to

Have One: Language, Race, Power
To be sure, hittin that small sweet spot ain’t easy. While styleshifting may
often appear simple, humorous, or lighthearted, it is also loaded with com-
plex issues of identity and power. From a critical linguistic perspective,
styleshifting, and language in general, is anything but a neutral practice.
Returning to our survey, some Americans recognized that not everyone can
shift like Barack Obama, in part, because not everyone has access to both
White and Black ways of speaking. What troubled a few Americans, in par-
ticular, was the fact that while no one would ever expect White candidates
to have to sound “Black,” “Latino”, or “Native American,” for example, to
be taken seriously, Barack Obama needed to “sound White.” As one White
American bluntly put it: “In order for Obama to sound ‘knowledgeable’ to
the majority he must speak like a white man, enunciate clearly, say r’s,
etc.” Another noted that “Obama has to speak that way,” further explain-
ing: “For an African American to become president of a country that is
governed dominantly by white men, he had to publicly lose all traces of
‘blackness.’ ” The White woman who noted that Obama’s language “is seen
as white across racial lines” also had this to say:

In many ways, he has to speak the way he does. We have never

had a ‘black’ president before. It’s an idea that many voters had
to get comfortable with, and one that others may never be com-
fortable with. He has to comfort all those that are skeptical by
modeling himself closer to the presidents [the 43 White men]
that have come before.
24 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

These responses demonstrate that language is loaded with power. Which

languages are preferred in which contexts? By whom? Which groups are
included—or excluded—by these decisions? Who benefits? Can we imagine
a context, for example, in which Harry Reid based a White man’s elect-
ability on the fact that he speaks with no White dialect unless he wants
to have one? Simply put, why must Black Americans shift toward styles
considered White in order to be “successful”? These questions show that
the way we talk can either grant or deny us access to social, political, and
economic opportunities (think jobs, schools, etc.). Barack certainly knew
this when he said that Black people who want to be “successful” have to be
able to “speak several different forms of the same language.”
All of these issues rushed to the front of Black minds when Senate
majority leader Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada) famously distinguished
Obama from previous Black candidates for president like Al Sharpton and
Jesse Jackson. He claimed that (White) Americans might actually vote for
Obama, in part, because he was “light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro
dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” The messed up color-coded comment
and outdated terminology aside, Reid’s assessment of Barack Obama’s style-
shifting was pretty much on point. It’s worth restating, though, that rather
than a peculiar exception to the rule, Barack Obama’s linguistic practices
mirror those of many Black Americans who negotiate Black and White social
worlds on the regular. As Barack Obama said, “Th at’s not unique to me.”
What is unique to Obama, though, is that he was not your average run-
of-the-mill-type brotha—he was a senator running for president of the
United States of America. Reid’s comments sadly implied what our White
respondents made explicit, that if a Black man wanted to be elected presi-
dent he’d better keep his language in check, less any “hints” or “traces”
of his “Negro-ness” leak out into the public eye/ear. Given that intense
amount of social scrutiny, we can assume that Barack’s linguistic flexibility
is not merely a function of his diverse life experiences. It is also a cre-
ative response to the awareness—one shared by many Black Americans—
that White America continues to have a love-hate relationship with Black
America and its language. Despite the fact that Black Language stays on
White people’s minds and in their mouths, White America continues to
interpret Black linguistic forms as signs of Black intellectual inferiority
and moral failings.
Reid’s comments make it clear that White America rewards Black
Americans who don’t sound “too Black,” particularly in contexts that
matter—from classrooms to courtrooms to corporate boardrooms. Syracuse
University professor of finance and political analyst Boyce Watkins got
right to the heart of the matter when he reflected on the broader social
implications of Reid’s linguistic description of President Obama:
 “Nah, We Straight” 25

What is saddest about [Harry] Reid’s commentary, however, is

that it reminds many African-Americans across the country that
if our speech patterns or appearance are “too black” (whatever
that means) or too different from what some consider accept-
able, we are going to be deemed inferior. It seems that looking,
sounding and behaving like a white man is the only way I might
be considered to be as good as a white man. Th at is White
Supremacy 101. 32

It is precisely this White cultural hegemony—captured concisely by the

Black folk idiom, “if it ain’t White, it ain’t right”—that we hope to disrupt
in this book in terms of language. Because, as Americans, whether we like
it or not, we not only see race but we hear it too.

NOTES
1. See: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/09/reid-apology-for-negro-dialect-com-
ment/. Last accessed: 09-01-2011.
2. One of Barack Obama’s most insightful interviewers was none other than “Sir
Charles”—NBA legend Charles Barkley, that is. His book, Who’s Afraid of a Large Black
Man? (New York: Penguin Press, 2006) features interviews on race in America with
Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Tiger Woods, Morgan Freeman, George
Lopez, and Ice Cube, among others. Obama’s quote is from page 25.
3. In Mary Bucholtz’s White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 5). Not only is language often overlooked
in popular discussions of race, but White people are often missing too. Bucholtz’s
book is the first to use the tools of linguistics to examine the construction of diverse
White identities in the United States.
4. US Attorney General Eric Holder made these comments at the Department of Jus-
tice African American History Month Program on February 18, 2009. According to
Holder, “One cannot truly understand America without understanding the historical
experience of black people in this nation. Simply put, to get to the heart of this
country one must examine its racial soul. Though this nation has proudly thought
of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue
to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” The full transcript can
be found at: http://www.justice.gov/ag/speeches/2009/ag-speech-090218.html. Last
accessed: 09-01-2011.
5. See Pierre Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1991).
6. See Cornel West’s Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), a groundbreaking classic
on race in America. According to West, “The fundamental litmus test for American
democracy—its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media,
and culture—remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and
deployed against black people” (vii). From this perspective, West continues to be the
most vocal Black critic of Barack Obama.
7. The sociolinguistic research on Black Language—also known as African American English,
African American Vernacular English, African American Language, Black English,
Ebonics and still, by Harry Reid anyway, “Negro dialect”—can be found in numerous
26 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

volumes in research institutions across the country. It’s the most oft-studied variety
in the United States. See the work of linguists Guy Bailey, John Baugh, Lisa Green,
William Labov, Sonja Lanehart, Marcyliena Morgan, John R. Rickford, Arthur Spears,
Donald Winford, and others.
8. While shifting between Black and White varieties may be par for the course for many
Black Americans in contact with Whites, Barack’s a global, multilingual brotha. He’s
been known to flex his Spanish skills from time to time. In his most recent visit to
Puerto Rico (2011), for example, he got quite a response for using the word Boricua
to describe Puerto Rican culture. In Dreams from My Father, Barack explains that
he learned enough Spanish in Harlem to “exchange pleasantries” with his Puerto
Rican neighbors. Barack’s linguistic flexibility is most likely due to the fact that as a
young child he had a remarkable range of linguistic experiences. He not only noted
his father’s British accent, he also learned some Hawai’i Creole from his grandfather
and others in Hawai’i (25), and it took him “less than six months to learn Indone-
sia’s language, its customs, and its legends” (36). Though he has probably lost some
of his knowledge of Indonesian, YouTube videos show him greeting Indonesians in
their language. Later in life, Barack wrote about greeting some of his Kenyan rela-
tives in Luo, demonstrating that he’s the kind of person to make every effort to
communicate with others (374). More recently on March 21, 2012, Fahima Haque
wrote in The Washington Post about Barack Obama’s interaction with a deaf com-
munity college student, demonstrating his impressive sign language skills (http://
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/president-obama-impresses-with-his-
sign-language/2012/03/21/gIQAXG37RS_blog.html. Last accessed: 04-19-12). So, in
addition to his socialization into Black Language and White mainstream ways of
speaking, Barack’s communicative flexibility spans a broad range of experiences and
is a testament to the idea that language socialization occurs across the life span. In
other words, we don’t speak only the language of our family or hometown. If we
are sufficiently motivated and have a broad range of experiences, we pick up ways
of speaking throughout our lifetime. Peep the new volume by Alessandro Duranti,
Elinor Ochs, and Bambi Schieffelin, eds., The Handbook of Language Socialization
(Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) for more on the language socialization process from
top linguistic anthropologists in the game.
9. Styleshifting is a technical linguistic term used to describe the way speakers shift
in and out of particular linguistic styles. It might be helpful to think of your voice
box as a gearbox. A steep incline calls for a low gear. However, when the road
flattens out again, you may wanna kick it into a higher gear, and so on. Most of
us adapt to the changing contexts of our communicative encounters in much the
same way drivers adapt to the changing conditions of the road. The difference is
that most speakers shift styles quite unconsciously as they move throughout their
day-to-day lives. As an incredibly successful politician, Barack Obama must be con-
scious of his speech in ways that the average American’s probably not required to
be. Just as driving skills increase with varied experiences, so does one’s ability to
styleshift. Barack Obama, then, if we carry our analogy a bit further, is more like a
NASCAR driver than your average run-of-the-mill motorist. Of course, this analogy
also points to issues of social inequality. We ain’t all pushin Maybach’s on nicely
paved streets, nahmean? For recent scholarly work on Black American styleshifting,
check out H. Samy Alim’s You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic
Study of Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2004). For White styleshifting, check out Mary Bucholtz’s White Kids:
Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2011). And for Puerto Rican styleshifting and codeswitching, check Ana
Celia Zentella’s now classic, Growing Up Bilingual (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997).
For an excellent edited volume with chapters by leading experts, check out Penny
Eckert and John Rickford’s (eds.) Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
 “Nah, We Straight” 27

10. Geneva Smitherman made this distinction in her pioneering book on Black Language,
Talkin & Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977;
republished, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986).
11. Fastest way to find it is to search for “Barack Obama Real Cool”: (http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=30-lYueJivk). Last accessed: 09-01-2011.
12. One Black respondent went beyond Barack’s ability to speak across different racial
groups (Blacks and Whites) and described his ability to speak across different seg-
ments within the same racial group (“very high intellectuals” and “street kids that
love hip-hop”): “One time, Obama was able to fit a rap song into his speech perfectly,
based on the way he spoke his previous statements. He mentioned how he had been
receiving criticism, and instructed himself, and anyone else who has ‘haters’ to brush
that dirt off of their shoulders (reference to Jay-Z song). This shows how Obama can
reach everyone in the audience when he speaks, from the very high intellectuals to
the street kids that love hip-hop.”
13. Barack Obama uses all of these lexical items in Dreams from My Father. In Geneva
Smitherman’s Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (Bos-
ton/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994, 2000), trifling “describes a person who fails
to do something that he/she is capable of doing; irresponsible; inadequate” (285).
Barack uses trifling in exactly this sense on page 226 in Dreams: “ ‘We’re trifling.
That’s what we are. Trifling. Here we are, with a chance to show the mayor that we’re
real players in the city, a group he needs to take seriously. So what do we do? We
act like a bunch of starstruck children, that’s what.’ ” Smitherman defines yella/high
yella as a term used to describe “a very light-complexioned African American; praised
in some quarters, damned in others. Community ambivalence stems from high yel-
las’ close physical approximation to European Americans.” (303). In Dreams, Barack
writes about becoming “familiar with the lexicon on color consciousness” (193) in the
Black community and uses the term high-yella on page 273 in Dreams: “the high-yella
congregations that sat stiff as cadets as they sang from their stern hymnals.” Tom/
Uncle Tom is described by Smitherman as “a negative label for a Black person, sug-
gesting that he/she is a sell-out, not down with the Black cause. Tom comes from the
character Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s nineteenth century novel, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, who put his master’s wishes and life before his own.” (284). Barack uses these
terms to describe his puerile attempt to belittle another Black classmate in college:
“Tim was not a conscious brother. Tim wore argyle sweaters and pressed jeans and
talked like Beaver Cleaver. . . . His white girlfriend was probably waiting for him up
in his room, listening to country music. . . . ‘Tim’s a trip, ain’t he,’ I said, shaking my
head. ‘Should change his name from Tim to Tom.’ ” (101–102). House nigger, Smither-
man explains, historically referred to “an enslaved African who worked in Ole Mas-
sa’s house,” rather than in the field (field nigga), and “was viewed as loyal to Massa.”
(130). Malcolm X updated this term in the 1960s to refer to the working-class Blacks
as field niggas and middle-class Blacks as house niggas. House niggas were “more likely
to deny the existence of racism or make excuses for it, to identify with whites and
the system, and thus unlikely to engage in protest or rebellion.” This is precisely how
Barack Obama used the term when he realized that his Muslim grandfather, whom
he always imagined to be “an independent man, a man of his people, opposed to
white rule” in Kenya, turned out to be anything but that. “What Granny had told us
scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words to flash across my mind. Unlce
Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.” (406).
14. Rickford, J. R., Ball, A., & Blake, R. (1991). “Rappin on the Copula Coffin: Theoretical
and Methodological Issues in the Analysis of Copula Variation in African American
Vernacular English.” Language Variation and Change, 3, 103–132. For Rickford’s most
extensive paper on the copula, check out “The Creole Origins of African American Ver-
nacular English: Evidence from Copula Absence,” available at www.johnrickford.com.
15. Yo, just had to share a few. The first one is a retweet from @djtaylor12: “#uknowuugly
when you look in the mirror with the lights off.” This next one is from @Doyinakalyrical:
28 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

“#uknowuugly when your twitpic is still the twitter default egg.” LOL! It ain’t all jokes,
though. Some folks provide more critical commentary, like this one: “#uknowuugly
when u preach about GOD all the time, yet u have the most stank, ugly, negative,
un-GODLY attitude there is! YEAH I SAID IT.” Chuuuch! Catch Alim on @hsamyalim.
16. The copula is just one example of BL’s complex verbal system and the Africanization
of American English. According to John R. Rickford, copula absence “provides one of
the strongest arguments for possible Creole and African influences on the grammar”
of Black Language. Many Caribbrean Creoles and West African languages do not have
the copula in some grammatical environments, and patterns of its absence in Black
Language mirror that of its absence in Creoles (See Alim’s You Know My Steez, 141–
160, for strong evidence of this from Black youth in the San Francisco Bay Area in
Cali). Rickford also notes that “the very presence of certain aspect categories in [Black
Language]—particularly the completive (marked by done) and the present durative,
or habitual (marked by be)—may be attributed to their prevalence in West African
languages, which is well documented in the work of William Welmer and others. Even
the existence of a category of remote past (marked by BEEN) may go back to dis-
tinctions in languages like LuGanda and KiKongo. Moreover, the tendency of [Black
Language] to encode its most important tense-aspect distinctions through a series of
preverbal markers (be, bin, done, BIN, fitna, had, and so on) rather than through ver-
bal affixes strikingly parallels the pattern in Caribbean Creoles.” (from John R. Rick-
ford and Russell Rickford’s Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 2000, 154).
17. Check it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDy9I9C1xUM&feature=related. Last
accessed: 09-01-2011.
18. Linguistic anthropologists will recognize these terms. They refer to an approach to
the scientific study of a culture and their communication patterns known as “the eth-
nography of communication.” A speech situation, the largest level of the three levels
of analysis, describes the social occasion in which speech may occur (in our exam-
ple, lunchtime at an informal restaurant). You will hear many speech events inside
of a speech situation (in our example, a service encounter between customer and
employee). A speech act refers to each action of speech inside of a speech event (in our
example, ordering food). Check John Gumperz and Dell Hymes’s edited volume for an
early classic, Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972).
19. Signifyin has been described as a means to encode messages or meanings in conver-
sation, usually involving an element of indirection. According to Claudia Mitchell-
Kernan: “The black concept of signifying incorporates essentially a folk notion that
dictionary entries for words are not always sufficient for interpreting meanings or
messages, or that meaning goes beyond such interpretations. Complimentary remarks
may be delivered in a left-handed fashion. A particular utterance may be an insult
in one context and not in another. What pretends to be informative may intend to
be persuasive. Superficially, self-abasing remarks are frequently self-praise.” Check
out her classic article, “Signifying and Marking: Two Afro-American Speech Acts” in
John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., Directions in Sociolinguistics (New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, 1972, 82).
20. This interview was taped for www.diddy.com. You can catch it at: http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=Ne_87Kw35pE. Last accessed: 09-01-2011.
21. From Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New
York: Crown Publishers, 1995, 79).
22. Ibid. 72.
23. In many ways, Dreams from My Father details Barack Obama’s search for “a Black iden-
tity.” He writes, “Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged
in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America,
and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly
what that meant.” (76). Barack Obama, to use Awad Ibrahim’s terms, was in the pro-
 “Nah, We Straight” 29

cess of becoming Black. Many Black Americans, particularly those on the margins of
what most Americans see as a normative Black identity (sons and daughters of Afri-
can immigrants, for example), know this process well. Awad Ibrahim, Sudanese pro-
fessor of education at the University of Ottawa, describes the process like this: “To
become Black is to become an ethnographer who translates and searches around in
an effort to understand what it means to be black in North America, for example.” It
is a process of “entering already pronounced regimes of Blackness.” (from “Whassup,
Homeboy? Joining the African Diaspora: Black English as a Symbolic Site of Identi-
fication and Language Learning” in Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in
Africa and the Americas, eds., Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha Ball, and
Arthur Spears (New York: Routledge, 2003, 181–183). Black feminist cultural critic
Joan Morgan, who is Jamaican, described the process of becoming Black in Amer-
ica in these terms: “As a matter of both acclimation and survival, we learn [Afri-
can American] history. We absorb the culture. Some of us even acquire the accent.”
(See her essay, “Black Like Barack” in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, ed., The Speech:
Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union,” New York: Bloomsbury, 2009, 63).
For both of these scholars two things are central to the cultural socialization process
of becoming Black in the United States: (1) being positioned as “Black” by others
in society and experiencing anti-Black racism, and (2) positioning yourself as “Black”
by acquiring “Black” ways of speaking. That dialectic of positionality is what Obama
navigates throughout Dreams from My Father.
24. From Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (73–
74). Years later, Obama would take these skills with him on the campaign trail as
an adult. As William Jelani Cobb writes in Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress
(New York: Walker, 2010): “[Obama] showed up in a Marion, South Carolina barber-
shop and immediately commenced trash-talking a patron’s alligator shoes. It was a
risky move, but his underlying point was to illustrate that he understood [Black] bar-
bershop protocal. The campaign printed up posters of him sitting in that barbershop
and distributed the DVD of his visit.” (72).
25. For a full transcript of the speech, see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, ed., The Speech:
Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union,” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009, 237–
251). It was delivered on March 18, 2008, in Philadelphia and is known as “The Race
Speech” or just “The Speech.” You can also catch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo. Last accessed: 09-01-2011.
26. This excerpt is notated to demonstrate the multilayered use of repetition. For exam-
ple, the phrase “we can” is marked in bold. Each instance of “this time” is underlined.
Each use of “we want to talk about” or “we want” is in italics. Overlapping repeated
phrases like “This time we want to talk about,” are marked with “This time” underlined
and in italics. Whole phrases such as “I am here because of Ashley” are marked in
bold and underlined.
27. Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson also notes Obama’s use of “ana-
phora,” which is repetition of the “same word or phrase at the beginning of successive
sentences.” What’s interesting here is that Obama layers his repetition of multiple
words and phrases, creating an advanced use of this strategy, one that is common
in the Black preacher tradition. See Dyson’s full comments and other examples of
Obama’s use of this rhetorical device at: http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/a-
presidentpreacher-from-anaphora-to-epistrophe/2009/01/18/1232213445525.html.
Last accessed: 09-02-11.
28. For great examples of Obama’s rendering of call and response in text, check Dreams
from My Father, pages 293–295. You can also hear this portion of Barack’s South
Carolina speech here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19538_Page2.html.
Last accessed: 09-01-11.
29. Writing about Black music, Imani Perry discusses another level of call and response.
“To make something good . . . means in part to effectively employ the call-response
trope on several levels, and, just as important, to know what is good requires a sophis-
30 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

ticated . . . understanding of the symbolic references and cultural history from which
the music derives.” (Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 36). Relating this to Barack’s speech in South Carolina, Barack
put out the encoded Malcolm X call, and his Black audience responded. While there is
some scholarly debate about whether or not Malcolm X used those exact words, the
important point is that Barack Obama tapped into the symbolism and cultural his-
tory of Malcolm. He was also employing another level of signifyin, one that is central
to the Black literary tradition. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifyin(g)
Monkey; A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York/London: Oxford
University Press, 1989), signification relies on one’s knowledge of previous texts and
the author’s (speaker’s) ability to reinterpret them in new ways. Certainly, signifyin
on a Muslim minister’s words to ensure that he was seen as anything but a Muslim
qualifies. Barack done did it again.
30. The phrase “exceptionally articulate” was actually used by one White American and
“articulate” was used overwhelmingly by White respondents more than any other
group. This led us to develop the idea of “articulate as an exceptionalizing discourse.”
But, yo, check the next chapter for more on this problematic “articulate” business.
31. Or as one 58-year-old African American barber put it: “When you think of a presi-
dent, you think of an American. . . . We’ve been taught that a president should come
from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring some-
body in from another nationality, now that doesn’t feel right to some people.”
Quoted in William Jelani Cobb’s Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (Walker,
2010, 69). White folks in particular continue to struggle with Obama’s nationality
and religion. Just recently, during the Republican primaries leading up to the 2012
presidential race, a poll showed that about half of Republican voters in Alabama and
Mississippi still believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. And even scarier is the fact
that about a quarter believe that his parents’ interracial marriage should have been
illegal (http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/12/news/la-pn-poll-obamas-a-muslim-to-
many-gop-voters-in-alabama-mississippi-20120312. Last accessed: 04-19-12). If that’s
not wild enough, how about recent comments in April 2012 from rock star and
Romney-endorser Ted Nugent? In addition to calling the president a “criminal” and
his administration “vile,” “evil,” and “America-hating”—not to mention using extremely
dangerous and violent language—he also claimed that the United States would turn
into a “suburb of Indonesia” under Obama’s second term (http://abcnews.go.com/Poli-
tics/OTUS/secret-service-ted-nugent-violent-anti-obama-message/story?id=16159549#.
T5IFxRzwHn0. Last accessed: 04-19-12).
32. Check the full article at: http://www.thegrio.com/opinion/reids-negro-dialect-remark-
politically-incorrect-but-totally-right.php. Last accessed: 09-01-2011.
2
A.W.B. (Articulate While Black)
Language and Racial Politics
in the United States
He’s the fi rst mainstream African American
who is articulate and bright and clean and
a nice-looking guy.1
—Joseph Biden

I didn’t take Sen. Biden’s comments personally,

but obviously they were historically inaccurate.
African-American presidential candidates like
Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley
Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many
important issues through their campaigns,
and no one would call them inarticulate. 2
—Barack Obama

Let’s paint the picture. We’re at the Takoma Theatre in Washington, DC.
Packed house. A predominantly Black crowd with a token White person or
two in the front rows (you KNOW they gon get called out!). Well-known Black
comedian Chris Rock struts across the stage wearin black pants, black belt,
black shirt, and a shiny black leather jacket. “Lotta stuff goin on this year.
Everything racial this year. What’s the big thing this year? Election.” Movin
his hand across the stage from right to left in that crazy-expressive Chris
Rock way, he imitates White Americans’ belief in a potential Black candidate
for president, “He should ruuun, he could wiiiin.” [Laughter from the crowd].
Rock responds to the suggestion, “He can’t wiiiin. [He] can’t win! [He] got
a better chance of winnin the bronze in female gymnastics [Big laugh from
the crowd] . . . than being the President of the United States. Get the fuck
out! White people ain’t votin for [him].” [Laughter]. “Say they are. They. Are.
NOT!” [Laughter and applause]. “Okay! Just gon soup his head up, make him
run, he’ll get kilt tryna run. Shhhit . . . ” Rock continues with his side-splittin
performance, suggesting that White people say they’re gonna vote for this

31
32 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Black candidate “cuz it seem like the right thing to say,” just like answering
“yes” to the social pressure of being asked to be an organ donor.
Rock continues, “[He] can’t be pres-i-DENT. Get the hell outta here.
You know how I could tell [he] can’t be President? Whenever [he] on the
news, White people always give him the same compliments, always the
same compliments.” Imitating White folks again, performing the wide-
eyed White supporter with even more exaggerated gestures, “He speaks so
well.” [Laughter]. “He’s so well-spoken. He speaks so well. I mean, he really
speaks well. He speaks so well!” [Laughter]. Then, in his inimitable style, he
begins to break it down, “Like that’s a compliment. ‘Speaks so well’ is not
a compliment, okay? ‘Speaks so well’ is some shit you say about retarded
people that can talk!” [Laughter]. “What do you mean he speaks well?
What’d he have a stroke the other day?! He’s a fuckin educated man! How
the fuck you expect him to sound, you dirty muthafuckas, what are you
talkin about?!” [Extended laughter and applause]. Leaving no doubt about
his point, he really brings down the house with this one, “What voice were
you lookin to come outta his mouth?! What the fuck did you expect him
to sound like?!” [Imitating an exaggerated style of self-deprecating slave
speech, with a big wide grin showing his teeth] “ ‘I’ma drop me a bomb
today. I be pres-o-dent.’ ” [Laughter and applause]. Rock struts back to the
other side of the stage, “Get the fuck outta here!”
Chris Rock’s hilarious skit was not about Barack Obama. In fact, it was
about Colin Powell and was first performed by Rock over 15 years ago. 3
Like much of Rock’s comedy, the skit is loaded with insightful folk social
and linguistic analyses of race in America, touching on issues that played
out again and again during the last two election cycles with Barack Obama.
As is the case with most perceptive folk analyses, Rock’s routine articu-
lated the heretofore unarticulated—putting words to a feeling that Black
folks have long felt but not expressed.
We present a metalinguistic analysis of Barack Obama’s language—that
is, we’re gonna talk about the talk about the way Barack Obama talks. We
consider the racially coded meanings of articulate and how they function to
reproduce racist ideologies and, importantly, racial inequalities. The “articu-
late” question is not just cultural and symbolic but also linked to real-life
consequences for those on the linguistic margins of American society.

Racism 2.0: Articulateness as a Function

of “Enlightened Exceptionalism”
In the run-up to the 2008 presidential campaign, most Americans were
taken by surprise by the young, charismatic Black candidate Barack Obama.
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 33

As a relative unknown, he seemed to have gripped the nation’s imagina-

tion in a way that few presidential candidates had before him. Many White
folks, in particular, given their extreme isolation from Black communities
and other communities of Color, didn’t know how to respond to Barack
Obama and searched for some kind of interpretive frame with which to
understand this incredibly successful Black politician-professor. We know
his academic credentials well: a graduate of two Ivy League institutions
(Columbia University and Harvard Law School), fi rst African American
editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a law professor at the University
of Chicago. This highly educated Black man also became the Senate’s sole
African American. This, along with his multiracial background, his global
family biography, and his meteoric rise to the top of American politics,
threw many Americans off. What do we call this guy? Is he “Black”? Is
he “too Black”? Is he a “Mooozlim”? Is he even “American”? The questions
about Obama’s race—arguably America’s greatest obsession—went on and
on and on.
Given our narrow definition of Black in the United States, Barack Obama
(the candidate with “the funny name”) seemed like an anomaly. This narrow
perspective, combined with the pervasive stereotypes about Black men in
American society—“stereotypes about black criminality, black intelligence,
or the black work ethic,”4 as noted by Obama himself—worked to induce
many White folks to make sense of Barack through a theory of exception-
alism. Because he’s not like “those other Blacks,” he must be the exception
to the rule that frames all Black people as lazy, dumb, and/or criminal.
Thus, according to this thinking, because of his difference, he should be
rewarded—even elected—for being “better” than most of his people. As
race theorist Tim Wise has written in Between Barack and a Hard Place:
Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, this is not your mom and
pop racism, the kind that has plagued the history of this country since its
inception, leading to genocide, slavery, incarceration, and so on. “Consider
this, for lack of a better term, Racism 2.0, or enlightened exceptionalism,”
Wise writes. It is a “form of racism that allows for and even celebrates the
achievements of individual persons of color, but only because those indi-
viduals generally are seen as different from a less appealing, even patho-
logical black or brown rule.”5 To Wise and others, the fact that candidates
such as Barack Obama are called upon to “transcend” their race not only
proves that America is far from being postracial, but it also “confirms the
salience of race and the machinations of white hegemony.”6 Whereas no
one would even think of describing a White candidate as having to tran-
scend race, in a hyperracial America, a Black man can’t win without doing
just that. (Many will recognize the parallel here to gender, where women,
in a field dominated by men, are often asked to transcend gender if they
34 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

are to “appeal” to male voters—just ask your girl, Hillary. And then tell us,
what is a Black woman to do?).
Wise may have overargued the case that this kind of “enlightened
exceptionalism” got Barack elected. For one thing, the majority of White
people did not vote for Barack Obama. Second, as Tulane University politi-
cal science professor Melissa Harris-Perry reminds us, while social science
research shows that White people unconsciously prefer White faces over
Black and even lighter-skinned Black faces over darker-skinned ones, these
effects are “negligible in determining election outcomes.” 7 According to
Harris-Perry, partisan identification, issue positions, and previous elected
office have far greater effects. Still, there is “a there there” when it comes
to a theory of exceptionalism. Wise’s theory of enlightened exceptionalism
captures a longstanding Black folk theory of articulateness, where, as Chris
Rock argued above, Black folks are praised and rewarded as being “excep-
tional” for something that they believe is hardly exceptional at all.

Five White Guys and a “Magic Negro”:

The Policing of Black Language
Using the case of Barack Obama as an example, we have noted a particu-
lar fascination, obsession if you will, with his language and communica-
tive behavior, which have been the subject of extreme scrutiny. The intense
scrutiny is a type of social monitoring that highlights the fact that his
language, and Black Language more generally, are constantly policed by
White and other Americans in the public sphere. Further, this type of lan-
guage policing also throws into relief the complex and inextricably linked
relationship between language and race in America. Take, for example, the
various media crisis moments that surrounded Barack Obama over the last
five years in regard to the word articulate. A review of the last five years
of the biography of the word shows how one person’s seemingly harmless
compliment can be another’s glaringly offensive insult.
While articulate has a long history, the story begins for now in early 2007
when then Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Joseph Biden described
Barack Obama as the “first mainstream African American who is articulate
and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”8 That same week, in an unre-
lated incident, former president George W. Bush got in on the action and
answered a reporter’s question about Barack Obama by saying, “He’s an
attractive guy. He’s articulate.”9 These two comments created an uproar in
the Black community, as the racialized and classed meanings of the word
articulate began to enter the already troubling racializing discourses of the
2008 presidential campaign. As many Blacks noted, these remarks by two
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 35

extremely high profi le White politicians merely echoed the numerous com-
ments from many average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill White folks. Why was
everybody and they mama callin Barack Obama “articulate”?
Of all the adjectives Biden used to describe Obama, articulate stood
out for being “so pervasive” and for being used so “differently by blacks
and whites” that Lynette Clemetson called for a “national chat, per-
haps a national therapy session.” Writing in The New York Times on “The
Racial Politics of Speaking Well”10 —or what some Black folks refer to
as “Articulate While Black”11—Clemetson argued that, in attempting to
explain his remarks, Joe Biden just dug his hole deeper and cast Barack
Obama as completely out of the ordinary, describing him as “incredible”
and “a phenomenon.” The core of the issue for Clemetson is this: “When
whites use the word in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of
amazement, even bewilderment. . . . Such a subtext is inherently offensive
because it suggests that the recipient of the ‘compliment’ is notably differ-
ent from other black people.” As Georgetown University professor Michael
Eric Dyson added, “Historically, it was meant to signal the exceptional
Negro. . . . The implication is that most black people do not have the capac-
ity to engage in articulate speech, when white people are automatically
assumed to be articulate.”12
In his characteristic way, Obama brushed Biden’s dirt off his shoulder
in interviews, but he released a written statement that pointed out the
racialized meanings contained within the subtext of the “compliment.” “I
didn’t take Senator Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were
historically inaccurate. African-American presidential candidates like Jesse
Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a
voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would
call them inarticulate.”13 Obama’s statement demonstrates his refusal to
be White America’s “exceptional Negro,” one willing to accept “praise” at
the expense of other Black politicians and Black people in general. His
comments also highlight the fact that “compliments” like “articulate” and
“speaks so well” are too often racially coded to mean “articulate . . . for a
black person.” As Brown University Africana Studies professor Tricia Rose
pointed out, “Al Sharpton is incredibly articulate, but because he speaks
with a cadence and style that is firmly rooted in black rhetorical tradition
you will rarely hear white people refer to him as articulate.”14 Speaking on
MSNBC in early 2007, Al Sharpton’s own comments showed even further
complexity behind the “compliment” with this concise but loaded one-liner:
“I take a bath everyday.”15 (More on this later.)
After Joe Biden and George W. Bush, a third White man entered the
“articulate” narrative but in a slightly different way. This time, it was major-
ity leader Harry Reid, the Democratic senator from Nevada. In one of the
36 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

most talked about political books of the year, Game Change by Time’s Mark
Halperin and New York Magazine’s John Heilemann, articulate was given new
life through a direct linkage between language and race. According to their
book, Reid thought that Americans [read: White Americans] might finally be
ready to elect a Black president. Then he commented privately that this was
especially true because Obama was, relative to other Black candidates like
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, “light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro
dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”16 While the media went into another
tizzy, Obama once again brushed that dirt off his shoulder, knowing that
these comments were not intended as Reid’s personal beliefs. Rather, accu-
rately or not, they were made within a context of what Reid believed to be
White America’s attitude toward Obama and Black candidates in general.
Beyond being out of touch with current nomenclature (you basically gotta
be older than dirt to use “Negro” as a racial term of reference), Reid’s com-
ments suggest several current realities about race in America. First, many
White leaders hold the belief that America’s dream of postraciality is far from
its racial reality. Second, some Americans might, in fact, be hyperracial if vot-
ing is based in part on color of skin and shades of color within that. Third, if
a Black man was ever going to be elected, it was gonna have to be an “excep-
tional” Black man. To spell it out even more clearly, that Black man would
have to be damn near White—as light as possible, with White biraciality
being a big plus, and speaking in a way modeled on middle-class White lin-
guistic norms and as far away from Black norms of speaking as possible. As
one sista joked, pretending to be a White customer in an imaginary political
coffee shop, “I’d like to order a ‘Black man’ please, with lots of cream, some
chocolate and plenty of milk, oh, and with as little detectable ‘Negro dialect’
as possible!” President Obama himself commented on America’s racializing
hegemony, the set of ideologies that make Whiteness invisibly “normal” while
highlighting all non-Whites as different, meaning less than. The closer one is
to a “White ideal,” the more palatable they will be to many Americans.17
The fourth and fifth White men to enter this tale of “articulate” come
later in the game but show how this “articulate” frenzy continues into the
2012 presidential election season. This time, we have Republican represen-
tative Joe Walsh from Illinois. (Th is White view of Black articulateness
appears to be one of the few bipartisan issues in Washington these days!)
Walsh adds a slightly different twist to the tale, suggesting that Barack
Obama’s election was linked to both race and language, as well as “white
guilt,” as if Obama were the presidential politics version of an “affirmative
action baby”:

Why was he elected? Again, it comes down to who he was. He was

black, he was historic. And there’s nothing racist about this. It is
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 37

what it is. If he had been a dynamic white state senator elected

to Congress he wouldn’t have gotten in the game this fast. . . . [The
media] was in love with him because he pushed that magical but-
ton: a black man who was articulate, liberal, the whole white
guilt thing, all of that.18

Aside from the now classic, almost satirical, White rhetorical script of “I’m
not racist, but” followed by racist commentary,19 Walsh’s “magical” dis-
course ties in neatly with the fi fth White man to enter the narrative, con-
servative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh, perhaps more directly than any of the other actors in
this storyline, makes it painfully obvious that many White Americans vig-
ilantly monitor and police Black Language to the point of obsession. He
also makes it clear that there must be no “traces” of Black Language in
your speech if you are a Black candidate for President. On his radio show,
Limbaugh played a snippet of Barack Obama’s speech over and over again,
urging his audience to listen really closely because they might miss some-
thing. Obama was addressing the National Governors Association when he
said, “As a condition of receiving access to Title I funds, we will ask all
states to put in place a plan to adopt and certify standards that are college
and career ready in reading and math.” Limbaugh stops the tape and asks,
“D-ahhhh, did you catch, did you catch that there? Did you catch that?
No? You missed it. . . . See, you’re listening to the substance here. You missed
this.” After replaying it, he gives Harry Reid’s comments new life:

Th is is what Harry Reid was talking about. Obama can turn on

that black dialect when he wants to and turn it off. The President
of the United States just said here, ‘As a condition of receiving’—
and I wonder if this was on the teleprompter—‘As a condition
of receiving access to Title I funds we will aks [pause] all states’
Who is he trying to reach out here to, the Reverend Jackson, the
Obama criticizer? Now, if I use the word aks for the rest of the
day, am I gonna get beat up and creamed for making fun of this
clean, crisp, calm, cool, new, articulate [pause] President? . . . I’ll
aks my advisors. And I might even aks Governor Cumo, as the
Reverend Jackson pronounced his name.20

Beyond the obvious race baiting and mockery, Limbaugh displays multiple
forms of ignorance here. First, listening to the tape as trained linguists, we
noted that Obama’s articulation of “ask” was actually “aksk”, which threw
his timing off, making it more likely that Obama made an error given that
the word “access” came shortly before “ask.” Anyone who has listened to
38 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Barack Obama speak knows that “ask” is not rendered “aks” in his speech.
Second, those like Limbaugh, who berate Blacks for saying “aks” instead of
“ask” (including some Black folks like Bill Cosby, Shelby Steele, and others
demonstrating linguistic shame) are completely unaware of the linguistic
history of the verb. Writing in English with an Accent: Language, Ideology,
and Discrimination in the United States, Rosina Lippi-Green breaks down
the phonological [pronunciation] variation in regard to ask in the United
States:

The Oxford English Dictionary establishes this variation between

[ask] and [aks] as very old, a result of the Old English metath-
esis asc-, acs-. From this followed the Middle English variation
with many possible forms: ox, ax, ex, ask, esk, ash, esh, ass, ess.
Finally, ax (aks) survived to almost 1600 as the regular literary
form, when ask became the literary preference. 21

Most Americans, including those who mock African Americans for using
the historically “preferred literary form” of ask, are woefully ignorant of
its history. Further, as Lippi-Green notes, this variation is also found in
the speech of White Americans in Appalachia, in some urban regions of
New York, and in some regional varieties of British English. This last point
is important, as many are not aware of that fact that often what makes
Black Language unique has less to do with the “ignorance” of its speakers
and more to do with the ways that African and British language varieties
merged in the process of Creolization.22
The Limbaugh story is important because it reveals the general ignorance
(not just Rush’s) about Black Language and exposes those who manipulate
existing White fear of anything or anyone deemed “too Black” (or “not
White enough”). It was Rush Limbaugh, not Republican representative
Walsh (even though he used the term more recently), who popularized the
use of magic to describe Barack Obama among Republicans. He broadcast
the song “Barack the Magic Negro” (based on “Puff the Magic Dragon”) on
his radio show, and it was later sent out to members of the Republican
National Committee.23 Barack Obama, depicted as the “Magic Negro” by
White Republicans is beyond offensive for a number of reasons, not the
least of which is the purposeful use of the word Negro to describe Obama.
With its usage here, we also see yet another way that Barack Obama has
been framed as the “exceptional Negro,” standing on call, ready to alleviate
White fears and enlighten them on issues of race.
The final point to mention here is something that too often fl ies under
the radar. When White people (whether it’s Rush Limbaugh, Joseph Biden,
or George W. Bush) give Black people the “compliment” of being “articulate,”
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 39

they often juxtapose it with other adjectives like “good,” “clean,” “bright,”
“nice-looking,” “handsome,” “calm,” and “crisp.” This aspect of the use of
articulate is what makes it really feel like a backhanded compliment. When
Reverend Al Sharpton responded, “I take a bath everyday,” he was point-
ing out the insidiousness (no matter how inadvertent) of these kinds of
juxtapositions. Black folks’ assumption is this: If one needs to consistently
point out that an individual Black person is “good,” “clean,” “bright,” “nice-
looking,” “handsome,” “calm,” and “crisp,” it suggests that White private
opinions about Blacks, in general, hold that they are usually the opposite—
“bad,” “dirty,” “dumb,” “mean-looking,” “ugly,” “angry,” and “rough.” So, it’s
not merely the use of articulate that’s problematic, nor the expression of
surprise or bewilderment that makes it suspect, it is also the fact that its
adjectival neighbors describe qualities that help create these exceptional-
izing discourses.24 These common linguistic patterns open articulate up to
challenges of subtextual racism, one that speakers may not even realize
that they hold and perpetuate.

Is This Really about Race, Though? The Media Refer

to White Men as Articulate All the Time
In a recent blog post, a Black woman in her late thirties wrote about the
White use of the word articulate. In her post, she epitomized the Black folk
theory about articulate’s social meaning:

To me, whenever someone describes another person as “articu-

late,” even if I just see this in written form, I automatically
assume that the person doing the describing is white, and the
person being described is black. Articulateness is never pointed
out between other groups of people. Therefore, I see “articulate”
as some sort of negative euphemism about black people in gen-
eral. I see it as saying this as a way to actually negate the black
person’s intelligence. Like they managed to sound articulate by
accident or something.

Recently I was watching the show Snapped, which chronicles true

crimes committed by women. The show interviews relevant par-
ties, including the law enforcement officials involved in the case.
One story was about a black woman who had a Ph.D. in chem-
istry and was an especially successful chemist. The interviewees
couldn’t shut up about how highly educated she was. One detec-
tive described with obvious admiration—an unusual attitude
40 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

when talking about a murderer—about how despite all the evi-

dence against her, “She made an excellent witness—she was so
articulate on the stand!”

Why was that something to point out? Th at a woman with a Ph.D.

was articulate? Very troubling word.25

This example presents a strong interpretation of the articulate-as-White-rac-

ism theory and raises some interesting questions. Is the person doing the
describing always White? More importantly, is the person being described
always Black?
A blogger who refers to himself as the “Undercover Black Man”26 (most
probably because he’s White), responds to this interpretation of articulate by
saying, “I must say, with all due respect: Buuullshit!” The White folk theory
on articulate usually uses a number of tactics to deny that there is any rac-
ism involved. Adherents of this folk social analysis claim White people are
angry at the insinuation that you never hear anyone referring to a White
person as articulate. It’s just not true, they say. They are quick to point out
that the media has referred to White politicians as “articulate,” and there-
fore, it cannot possibly be about race, Blackness, or Barack Obama. In its
denial of the racially significant meanings of articulate, the argument relies
on logic that ignores the social and structural patterning of these events
altogether. The argument uses the relatively infrequent examples of articu-
late being used to describe White politicians in order to “debunk” and deny
any possibility of racism. As Undercover Black Man writes, “We have the
handy example of another well-spoken Democratic candidate in this very
presidential race . . . John Edwards.”
After a half dozen examples of the media referring to John Edwards as
“articulate,” Undercover Black Man rests his case: “You know what? I don’t
think John Edwards or his sympathizers consider it a freakin’ insult that he
keeps being called ‘articulate.’ ” Of course, right there in his list of quota-
tions (his evidence to support a nonracist reading of articulate) is this one:
“Edwards is a young, smart, articulate, and a good Southerner with mod-
erate tendencies and a heart for traditional Democratic issues (December
28, 2006).” Undercover Black Man fails on two major points. One, he fails
to contexualize these readings of John Edwards, a southern candidate for
President, within the pervasive U.S. ideologies about “dumb,” “slow”, or “slov-
enly” southern speech. He doesn’t consider that John Edwards is also being
singled out as “articulate” because—as many speakers of southern varieties
of English can attest—northern folks often compliment them because they
expect them to speak like Gomer Pyle!
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 41

Just as with the racializing hegemony evident in Obama’s case, “region-

alizing hegemony” in the United States marginalizes southern speech vari-
eties in relation to the supposedly nonaccented midwestern varieties of
English one hears on the evening news. So both bloggers’ perspectives are
incomplete, partial readings. Black people are not the only ones to be “com-
plimented” as articulate in this backhanded way, nor does the use of the
“compliment” toward White people negate the racial and discriminatory
patterning. These kinds of exceptionalizing discourses are not only used
against Blacks and southerners, they often appear in conversations about
immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants. Just recently, in July
2011, National Public Radio (NPR) host Terry Gross was speaking about
undocumented Filipino immigrant and Pulitzer prize winning Washington
Post writer Jose Antonio Vargas. Many well-intentioned supporters excep-
tionalize Vargas by making a case for a pathway to citizenship because he is
“the kind” of immigrant that “we” should be helping become an American.
They often point to the “articulate,” “bright,” and “hardworking” undocu-
mented immigrants (especially the DREAMers), exceptionalizing them com-
pared to their presumed unintelligent and lazy counterparts who speak a
variety of English accented by their primary languages. In short, the use of
articulate plays well into exceptionalizing discourses of race and other mar-
ginalized social and linguistic identities. So, to answer the question, Is this
really about race, though? Well, it’s about race and about more than race.

Reading Articulate as an Exceptionalizing Discourse:

White, Black, and Multiracial Perspectives
In order to push on some of these theories of articulate a bit more, we asked
a group of approximately 50 racially and ethnically diverse American college
undergraduates one question: “If someone referred to you as ‘articulate,’ how
would you feel? Explain your answer.” They were also asked to submit infor-
mation about their age, race, ethnicity, gender, and biographical background.
Overall, the results reflect four major factors. They: (1) Confirm folk theo-
ries of articulate as racist discourse, (2) Complicate the conversation by look-
ing across racial and ethnic groups in the United States, (3) Demonstrate
the multiple problematic links between “articulateness” and “Whiteness”
and “articulateness” and “intelligence” across groups, and (4) Reveal that
language, in general, and exceptionalizing discourses, in particular, are any-
thing but neutral. Rather, language is often socially charged, loaded with
issues of race, class, citizenship, and other forms of social identification.
One general fi nding is that while there were Americans across all
racial and ethnic groups who viewed the adjective as an unproblematic
42 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

compliment, this group was predominantly White. Many White respon-

dents expressed “pride” and “happiness” at being considered articulate,
as exemplified by this student’s response: “In reference to someone
describing me as articulate, I believe that I would feel proud. I think
I’d feel this way because to me, articulate means being able to express
yourself clearly with knowledge of the connotation and meaning of every
word you’re saying. I like to be able to express myself in a way that is
clear to others.”
A second general finding is that the overwhelming majority of Black
Americans found articulate to be problematic, with some downright
offended and insulted. In general, Black respondents seemed to go beyond
dictionary definitions of the word to think more critically about the social
meanings of the word across contexts. The social meanings, the kinds of
social messages encoded in the word’s use, seemed far more salient for
Black Americans. For example, this respondent recalled an early childhood
experience:

I remember the fi rst time that someone did refer to me as articu-

late, I was about nine and had no idea what it meant. Upon fi nd-
ing out its defi nition I was fl attered. I feel that labeling a child
as articulate might be appropriate in many contexts because they
might display a level of speaking and conveying their ideas above
what you would have expected. However, to label an adult as
articulate can be very insulting. It implies that you didn’t expect
them to be able to express their feelings and ideas with such flu-
ency or clarity. I personally would be especially offended if some-
one non black called me articulate now because it implies that
they expected less of me.

This respondent hailed from Chicago and described himself as an “African

American (Descendant of slaves in America) . . . with a very close extended
family,” with much of them “from the South as well.”
Beyond these expected results, a third general finding of the survey sug-
gested that multiracial Americans seemed not to possess strong interpreta-
tions of either side of the articulate debate. Further, the data suggests that
those Black Americans who identified as Black but were also multiracial—
and were socialized in predominantly non-Black communities—also did not
view articulate as definitively problematic. While we don’t want to make
too much out of these few responses, they do muddy the clear waters a
bit. One example comes from a respondent who self-identifies as “Black”
and “African American,” yet he also described himself as having a “black
father” and a “white mother.” He was “usually one or one of a few black
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 43

students in class in school” where the “majority of the school were Mexican
and Asian.” His response shows no awareness of articulate as part of an
exceptionalizing discourse:

I would feel very uplifted and proud of myself if someone else con-
sidered me “articulate.” I believe that being described as articulate
means that I am good at framing what I want to say into a way
that sounds convincing, sometimes, even if my opinion is totally
off or wrong. Great use of diction and syntax come with being
described as articulate.

This respondent was the only self-identified Black respondent to not

consider the complex social meanings of articulate.
Another example comes from a respondent who self-identified as “Asian,
African American, Native American, Caucasian” and expressed an almost
equally uncritical view:

I take great pride in being called articulate and have been called
articulate. Both of my parents are extremely well educated peo-
ple who have had to give many a speech and were both lawyers
who had to speak effectively and persuasively to prove a point
in the courtroom. I am certainly guilty of mumbling around my
friends. . . . Yet when I got up to give an oral presentation for my
class, I enunciated every word, let my personality shine through
my speech, and received glowing reviews. My parents tell me
all the time, “We know you can articulate, so why not do it
all the time?” In the last couple of years I have become much
better at enunciating all the time, and from the day I arrived
[on campus] . . . others pinned me as an intelligent and articulate
person based on the content and delivery of my comments. . . . If
someone looked at me and were shocked that I was articulate,
I might be slightly offended, but so far, the situations in which
I’ve been called articulate have only succeeded in making me
proud.

While taking great pride in being labeled “articulate,” this young woman
might be only “slightly” offended by the “compliment” but, more often than
not, would accept the praise as well deserved.
The survey further revealed that American ideologies of articulateness
are even more complex and nuanced than they appear. First, it seems that
some Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and other Americans also view articulate
as problematic but for different reasons. To this group, articulateness is
44 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

sometimes principally about making them the exception to a (racist) rule,

and other times, it’s about casting them and their speech behavior as
White, an identity category they resist. While this was implicit in some
Black responses as well, and much of the educational literature focuses on
Black youth resisting “acting White” and “sounding White,” these responses
allow us to highlight the nuances of the problematic link between “articu-
lateness” and “Whiteness” in other groups. The first example comes from a
Mexican-American self-identified “Hispanic/Latina.” She writes that being
referred to as “articulate” would be a “compliment,” especially in academic
settings. Feeling marginalized in these contexts, she reports that it would
allow her “to claim an identity as a student who ‘belongs’ and ‘fits in’
with the world of academia.” Then she adds another perspective about her
home community in northern California: “Talking as I am writing for this
response is asking to be ridiculed where I grew up. . . . Most of my class-
mates would be quick to say that both the sound of my voice when I speak
English and the vocabulary I use make me sound like a white girl. In this
case, being articulate is an insult because it gets me the label of sounding
white.”
The second example is from someone who describes her race as “Asian”
and her ethnicity as “Native Hawaiian.” Like the Mexican American
respondent above, she is able to see both sides of the articulate problem;
she also resists being racialized as “White” (and classed as “middle”). She
writes:

I think being described as “articulate” is a great thing—to me it

means that I can clearly express my feelings and thoughts to oth-
ers in words. . . . However, I guess there’s a fl ip side where being
articulate means speaking clearly and crisply and very prim and
proper. Th is seems very white and middle class. I wouldn’t nec-
essarily take that as a compliment, especially if “someone” was
referring to my everyday way of speaking.

These last two responses show how, in the United States, power-
ful language ideologies link articulateness with “standard” English with
Whiteness. This occurs largely because race and class inequality overlap to
the point at which the language variety that folks think of as “standard”
English is straightforwardly (if not problematically) constructed as “White
English.” For many Americans, these ways of speaking become associ-
ated with White folks, especially those born with a “silver spoon” in their
mouths. As emblems of dominant White cultural privilege, then, sounding
“articulate” or sounding “White” is sometimes rejected by those who have
been racialized as Others their entire lives.
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 45

“Forcing Our Tongues to Fit into a Western System”:

Insights from Those on the Linguistic Margins
(Bi- and Multilinguals)
Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and other Americans complicated our survey
results in other unexpected ways. In terms of reading the social meanings
of articulate, some respondents expressed a “split view” that depended on
their linguistic background as much if not more than their race. In many
cases, respondents do not view articulate as problematic in English, but
their responses grow more critical when speaking about the language of
immigrants, their family members, or those with “accents.” Because these
Americans are located on the linguistic margins—either they or their par-
ents learned English as a second language—some felt honored to be referred
to as articulate, since it meant that they had fully mastered English. At the
same time, however, these Americans were also able to point out the chal-
lenges of belonging to communities where “accents” from languages other
than English are linguistically marginalized.
This example comes from a respondent who describes herself as “Filipino
by culture (little blood) and Lebanese by blood (no culture)” but as having
grown up “in a predominantly Mexican community” in Texas. She begins,
“If someone described me as ‘articulate,’ I would feel like I had received a
great compliment. . . . I believe that the term articulate can apply across lan-
guages and the situations they are used in to mean a clear presentation of
complex ideas. Therefore, I view articulate as a compliment.” Then, in what
she describes as “a complete side-note,” she provides further information
about her mother’s language:

I called my mother at her work today. As she works in an office

and several people could have potentially answered the phone, I
was not sure if it was her who picked up. To be quite honest,
when I heard the woman’s voice on the other end of the phone,
my immediate thought was, Nope, that’s not mom. I asked to
speak to Soraya, and she said, “Hi!” I said, “Mom! I didn’t recog-
nize you . . . “ Her response? “I know. Different when I talk right,
huh?” . . . I had never considered my mother’s way of speaking as
“not right.” Granted, she has a Filipino accent (so I’ve been told),
but her own assertion that her way of speaking is wrong made
me realize even more how powerful language really is.

In this next example, from a self-identified “biracial (Hispanic and

white)” respondent, we see how the split view of those between linguistic
46 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

worlds gives articulate different meanings. She does not see articulate as
problematic in English but makes some complex connections in relation to
“color” when speaking of Spanish:

I speak the English that my parents do, so I’ve never faced the
additional challenges of feeling like the only “articulate” person
in, for example, an immigrant family that doesn’t speak English
or a family without parents who are lawyers. . . . Also, I identify as
biracial (Hispanic and white) so I’ve never felt the need to speak
the same way as people who look like me. Interestingly, I have
felt pressure to speak Spanish because I ended up with the dark-
est skin of any of my siblings. I have not felt a similar pressure
to speak a certain type of English.

For this respondent, the link between language and race is not as salient
as the link between language and “color.” She does not experience pressure
to speak a particular variety of English, but because of her “darker” skin,
she has felt social pressure to speak Spanish, as if a higher melanin count
leads to higher degrees of Spanish fluency. This respondent’s description
is similar to existing ideologies of language and race/color expressed by
some within Spanish-speaking Latino communities, those that assume that
darker-skinned Latinos should or must speak Spanish while giving lighter-
skinned Latinos a “pass.”27
These next two examples provide heavy insights into the complex
nature of the articulate debate. They also help to show that the under-
lying cause of Black suspicion and offense when it comes to the word
is due to broader, ongoing social processes that relate as much to the
deprecation of Blackness as they do to linguistic marginalization in gen-
eral. The following insight comes from someone who self-identifies as “½
Korean, ½ mixed white” and represents a great case of the split view.
Due to her position on the racial and linguistic margins, she claims that
she is not “articulate” and often feels like “she can’t gather her thoughts
to be expressed in an articulate manner.” So, her fi rst response to being
referred to as articulate “would be surprise, but also pleased that I’d
come across that way.” She later complicates her own view by providing
an Asian American vantage point to the discussion: “I think, though, that
the word contains a bit of surprise in it, as if one is exceeding expec-
tations . . . if someone told me I was ‘articulate’ after asking where I was
from, or if I spoke English, or anything else pointing to my race/ethnic-
ity, then I’d be annoyed.” She then explains why this might be particu-
larly frustrating for Asian Americans, who are often having to battle the
“forever foreigner” stereotype.28
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 47

Asian-American speech doesn’t get stereotyped as inarticulate like

black and Latino speech does, but it does sometimes get stereotyped
as accented. Maybe the person was trying to give me a compliment,
but Asian immigration to the U.S. is not new, the U.S. as a multi-
racial society is not new, and multiracial people aren’t new. I would
feel Othered and out of place, even though this is my place.

The final response in this section is worth quoting in full as it reveals

further complexity and the often unacknowledged emotional pain of grow-
ing up on the linguistic margins of America. This respondent is an indig-
enous speaker of Hawai’i Creole English, a stigmatized variety of American
English:

Answering this question is difficult. I spent the majority of my

childhood trying to prove my intelligence. Growing up in an
alternative school was difficult. I didn’t learn to read or write in
English until the 6th grade and even though I was different from
my classmates in that most of the community didn’t expect us to
succeed in a mainstream school I knew from a young age that I
had the work ethic and even more important the support to be
successful outside of our community. At the same time I strug-
gled with . . . being judged for speaking primarily Pidgin. We were
taught that Pidgin would prevent us from being successful, and
prevent people from respecting us. So those of us who could, or
cared enough, tried to force our tongues to fit into a western sys-
tem that would only patronize us for our efforts. Because of this,
a part of me, the part that so wanted to be successful as a child
would feel honored almost at the thought of someone calling me
articulate. But the version of me that has learned about the moti-
vations for consolidating communities into a singular language
variety makes me feel offended to be placed under that hammer.
I know that code switching is a sign of intelligence, even if it’s
not recognized as one. I know that I have the ability, because
of my background to effectively communicate with people from a
broad range of backgrounds in a way that is meaningful to them.
I would call this skill articulate if it weren’t already tainted with
expectations of covering up any language variety that doesn’t
agree with what some people call ‘Educated English.’ So for now,
I can do without such compliments—I don’t need them.

While speaking from a particular vantage point of the linguistically colo-

nized in Hawai’i, this young woman expresses several shared sentiments
48 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

of those on the linguistic margins. First, we can see clearly that Americans
on the linguistic margins—whether they speak Arabic, Black Language,
Span(gl)ish, Tagalog, or Hawai’i Creole English—learn the dominant ide-
ology that links articulateness with intelligence and Whiteness. Second,
rather than continue to feel shame, she expresses an alternative ideology
that privileges bilingual and multilingual speakers’ abilities to switch in
and out of multiple languages. Lastly, she frames articulate as a political
term. Far from neutral, it is loaded with a cultural-linguistic hegemony
that imposes itself on people, and praises them for “covering up” their own
language varieties rather than rewarding them for speaking multiple lan-
guage varieties.

White Paternalism, Black Empathy:

Nuancing the Black Folk Theory
The Black folk theory of the social meanings of articulate is more layered
than previously described. In several responses, Black Americans noted
that age was a critical factor in their analysis. Most Black folks can get
with adult references to children as “articulate.” What they can’t get with
is when Whites refer to Black adults in the same way; it smacks of that
same paternalistic attitude that infantilizes Black intelligence, bringing
up images of articulate being uttered with an accompanying “pat on the
head.” As one young woman put it, “I would understand a tone of surprise
if I was five years old, but at my age (22) it should be an expectation. As
an African-American, I am even more sensitive and defensive about how
people perceive my linguistic abilities.” In other words, to make it plain,
there is no normal developmental issue here, where a child is being social-
ized through praise into adult ways of speaking. Rather, there is a peculiar
social issue, where Black people feel similarly rewarded for being socialized
into White ways of speaking. Like the previously cited narrative from the
Hawai’i Creole English speaker, the assumption is that Black folks should
want to leave their language behind and “move on up” to the White high-
rises like the Jeffersons. Not only can Black people call the lie on that (as
if upward mobility was just about language, not race and class), but there is
also the almost inexplicable realization that one is being praised for abid-
ing by White norms, or as one respondent put it, “as someone who talks
like an upper-class white boy.”
These issues of language and racial politics are heightened for African
Americans in comparison to many immigrant populations because African
Americans do not consider themselves learners of English as a second
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 49

language. These heightened racial politics also have a long history in the
United States and are incredibly enduring. It should not come as a sur-
prise to anyone that Blacks might react so negatively to White paternalistic
views of their language. These views formed the core of the early scholar-
ship on the language of Black Americans that theorized Black Language
as “baby-talk.”29 Blinded by a firm belief, a science even, of the biologi-
cal inferiority of Blacks, other linguists took the baby talk theory to new
lows. Writing about Black speech communities in the American southeast,
one linguist “explains” the differences in Black speech not as caused by the
learning of English and influences from African languages but as caused
by “[i]ntellectual indolence, or laziness, mental and physical, which shows
itself in the shortening of words, the elision of syllables, and modifica-
tion of every difficult enunciation. It is the indolence, mental and physi-
cal . . . that is its most characteristic feature.”30 Is there any wonder why
Black people look suspiciously and contemptuously on White “compliments”
of their “articulateness”?
Many in the Black community are aware of how their speech is per-
ceived by White and other Americans. As linguists have noted, there are
websites dedicated to the mockery of Black speech and every news report
on Ebonics is followed by a litany of disgustingly racist diatribes online.31
In terms of our articulate analysis, we can historicize this linguistic moni-
toring within the American institution of slavery where we find ample
evidence that the policing of Black Language goes hand in hand with the
policing of Black bodies. In their postings to capture runaway enslaved
Africans, Whites often distinguished between them by their abilities to
speak English. An ad in the New York Evening Post in 1774 read: “Ran
away . . . a new Negro Fellow named Prince, he can’t Scarce speak a Word of
English.” And take this ad from the North Carolina Gazette in 1760: “Ran
away from the Subscriber, living near Salisbury, North Carolina . . . a negro
fellow named JACK. . . . He is about 30 years of age, and about 5 feet high,
speaks bad English.” Contrast these two announcements with this one
from Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury in 1734: “Run away . . . A Negro
Man named Jo Cuff y, about 20 Years of age . . . he’s Pennsylvania born and
speaks good English.” Thus, we can see that the White practice of separat-
ing “good” and “bad” Black speakers of English is an enduring legacy of the
African slave trade. Whites made use of exceptionalizing discourses to refer
to their “runway slaves” as speaking “good” or “exceptional” English.32
Despite this long and horrid history, survey results showed that at least
one or two Black folks stand on principle and express a sense of empa-
thy toward Whites. Rather than automatically reading articulate as part
of a system of racist, White paternalism toward Blacks, this respondent
50 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

acknowledges the distinct possibility of a racist subtext and then expresses

his internal conflict at length:

The hard part about reacting to being called articulate is that I

don’t want my judgment of the speaker’s views to be based on a
double standard. I am in danger of making an assumption about
the speaker’s awareness, or lack thereof, of the issues that affect
many urban minority areas so that many kids that live there
don’t get complimented as articulate. . . . I try hard to approach
people, especially people I am just meeting, without bias. Th is
situation is even more difficult because being called articulate is
often something that happens to me when speaking to someone
I’m just meeting for the fi rst time. Although I am using things
like context clues and body language, my reaction in these cir-
cumstances is almost impossible to do without assumptions
about the person I am talking to that have not had time to be
confi rmed or denied. Therefore, this situation shows its complex-
ity because of its potential for unfair assumptions to be made on
both parts.

This respondent recognizes that White “compliments” about his “articulate-

ness” are probably “linked to [his] being black” yet does not want to fall
prey to making similar kinds of race-based assumptions about the White
person giving the “compliment.” He does not want to prejudge people that
he meets for the first time, even as “being called articulate is often some-
thing that happens to [him] when speaking to someone [he’s] just meeting
for the first time.”
Some readers might expect us to view this example of Black empathy as
admirable, as something to be emulated by other victims of racism in order
“to break the cycle of hate,” as popular White antiracist discourses go. But
there’s a different point to be made here. While this respondent’s heartfelt
narrative displays an empathetic, honest struggle with the articulate ques-
tion, it lacks a critical perspective on racism in at least four dimensions.
To begin with, the respondent is right in resisting making assumptions
about individual utterances. However, what many people are responding to
is how utterances are structured socially so that particular patterns appear
far more frequently than others. From our previous examples, for instance,
it’s important to remember that articulate is used by members of the domi-
nant culture to describe the speech of those on the social and linguistic
margins, such as children, southerners, immigrants, second language learn-
ers, and so on. So, there is a salient link between those characterized as
articulate and social marginality.
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 51

Second, as we previously stated, it ain’t really helpful to look at any one

particular utterance of articulate and attempt to guess the speaker’s inten-
tion. What is useful, though, is looking across utterances and noticing, for
example, patterns in other juxtaposed adjectives. These other neighboring
adjectives simultaneously frame the speaker and the group to which the
speaker belongs in opposition to each other. The exceptional “peaceful,
patriotic, moderate Muslim,” for example, versus her “violent, anti-American
extremist Muslim community” is one such opposition heard frequently in
post-9/11 American public discourses. So, in addition to the broader, inter-
actional patterns of who utters what to whom, we must also consider the
more microlinguistic patterns that we use to construct “articulate” excep-
tions to the racist rule.
Thirdly, within the empathetic frame, racism becomes the property of
individuals, something that lives inside one person’s head or heart. Racism
is constructed as something that can be denied or refuted depending on
a person’s real intentions. The problem with this, of course, is that racism
is perpetually deniable because no one can ever really know if someone
else harbors racist thoughts or feelings and, especially, if those thoughts
and feelings will lead to racist actions. As noted by Imani Perry in More
Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality
in the United States, intentionality is no longer a good measure of racism.
People can—and often do—“promulgate racist imagery and ideas without
having any interest in identifying oneself as racist.” 33 Further, as critical
race theorists have long argued, racism is more productively viewed not
as an individual, emotional problem but as an institutional, systemic one.
The question worth asking is not “Does that particular person harbor rac-
ist beliefs when they call me articulate?” but “How does the repeated, pat-
terned use of articulate draw on racist ideologies and (re)produce racial
inequalities?” Rather than trying to prove if one person’s utterance is evi-
dence of racism, we can more fruitfully examine the ways our everyday
discourse is racially structured. So, in a “postintent” era, whether racist
“compliments” are intentional or even conscious becomes far less interest-
ing than how these “compliments” are patterned over time and space and
how they perpetuate racist ideas.
The empathetic frame—or not wanting to make assumptions of racism
based on a single utterance—assumes that words can be lifted up outta
their context and still carry meaning, but context is crucial to how we
make meaning. The repeated use of particular words by particular people
in particular contexts and situations over time is how words come to take
on socially charged meanings in the first place. Black speakers, for exam-
ple, interpret Whites’ use of articulate within a body of sociohistorical dis-
courses about White ideologies of race and language as well as contemporary
52 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

experiences with White racism and linguistic discrimination. So, when it

comes to articulate, we have to attend to microlinguistic and broader inter-
actional patterns of use, yes, but we also have to consider how articulate
articulates (to use our beloved adjective as a verb) with other sociohistori-
cal discourses and ideologies. Further, we need to develop a more critical
perspective on racism as not individual or even necessarily intentional but
as institutional and most definitely consequential.

Articulate as a Gatekeeping Mechanism:

Racial Segregation, Cultural Assimilation
and Linguistic Policing
The articulate question is a complex, multilayered one. An in-depth analysis
brings with it a whole complicated set of issues that raises questions about
American society and the American experiment. As an example of the polic-
ing of language—specifically, the White policing of Black Language—our
analysis raises questions about the workings of multiple forms of linguistic
racism in the United States. The articulate question is linked to deeper con-
cerns with stubborn, enduring sociostructural and sociocultural aspects of
American society. Specifically, we wanna talk about how articulate brings to
the fore a set of related issues from racial segregation to cultural assimila-
tion and linguistic policing (from everyday social monitoring to patterned
language-based racial discrimination).
Earlier we quoted a survey respondent who noted that she would take
articulate as a compliment if she was 5 years old. But now that she’s 22, it
should be an expectation and is, therefore, read as an insult. She then went
on to add, “As an African-American, I am even more sensitive and defensive
about how people perceive my linguistic abilities.” The loaded phrase here
is “As an African-American,” which suggests that being “complimented” as
articulate evokes longstanding White discourses of Black Language (and
people) as “deficient.” Another respondent felt that he was being “praised”
for abiding by White linguistic norms, or as he put it more directly, for
talkin “like an upper-class white boy.” For this respondent, articulate links
up not only with discourses of Black deficiency but also with hypocritical
discourses of racial assimilation and integration. The combination of these
two discourses—Black deficiency and racial assimilation and integration—
suggests that in order for a Black person to make it in America, he or she
must be an exception to the racist rule of Black deficiency and must prove
it by not speaking like “those other Black people.” Further, the implica-
tion is that, unless you talk like an “upper-class white boy,” you will not
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 53

succeed in America. And this brings us to the real problem with articulate,
which is the real problem with Black Language.
White America has long insisted on White English (not Chicano English,
not Black English, not no other kind of English) as the price of admission
into its economic and social mainstream. Even many otherwise liberal and
progressive Whites remain rigid and inflexible when it comes to linguistic
diversity. While some may deny their complicity in this kind of linguistic
hegemony, others earnestly work toward convincing linguistic minorities
that the journey to upward mobility will be easier for them once they drop
their cultural-linguistic baggage and acquire what they uncritically refer to
as “standard” English. (Hey, it sound nicer than saying, “once you talk like
me,” right?). So, despite America’s expressed egalitarian values, linguistic
hegemony is framed as beneficial to linguistic minorities rather than harm-
ful, and linguistic homogenization is presented as preferable to linguistic
diversity. Black Americans, then, who have developed a language, a way of
speaking, that serves as a source of solidarity, cultural pride, creative liter-
ary production, artistic expression, and just everyday kickin it are hypo-
critically asked to abandon that language in order to “make it” in a “White
world.” So, when White people praise and reward “articulate” Black speak-
ers, they are also celebrating Black movement toward the White main-
stream and away from a threatening cultural separatism. As Lippi-Green
once put it:

The real trouble with Black English is not the verbal aspect sys-
tem which distinguishes it from other varieties of US English, or
the rhetorical strategies which draw such a vivid contrast, it is
simply this: [Black English] is tangible and irrefutable evidence
that there is a distinct, healthy, functioning African American
culture which is not white, and which does not want to be white.
Th is is a state of affairs that is unacceptable to many. 34

She goes on to pose this difficult, complex question: Given America’s

national discourses of “one nation, indivisible,” and the official “end” of racial
segregation in “schooling, housing, public places, and the workplace . . . what
does it mean then to say that there is an African American culture distinct
enough from other American cultures to have its own variety of English, a
variety that persists in the face of overt stigmatization?”35
On the other side of this coin are some really troubling facts about
racial integration. While most White people claim to want racial inte-
gration, it’s like they be talkin outta both sides of they mouth. Racial
integration in American society is still far from reality, in part, because
as Barack Obama observed in The Audacity of Hope, “Few minorities can
54 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

isolate themselves entirely from white society—certainly not in the way

that whites can successfully avoid contact with members of other races.” 36
In contemporary American society, even in the Obama Era, there is a
critical disjuncture between White attitudes and behaviors in regard to
racial integration and equity. As Stanford University sociologist Prudence
Carter points out in Stubborn Roots: The Threat of Cultural Inflexibility to
Equity in U.S. & South African Schools, while many middle-class Whites, in
particular, have absorbed the discourse of racial integration, their actions
militate against it. 37 Racial integration is apparently a nice theory, but in
practice, folks fi nd all kinds of ways to resist racial integration in school-
ing, housing, and so on. So, clearly, the irony—better put, hypocrisy—is
that even as Whites promise milk and honey to Blacks willing to accept
a particular form of linguistic colonization, they be steady workin to
deny access to the Promised Land like it was some kinda gentrified gated
community!
Since outright racial discrimination is legally banned (though still widely
practiced), language has become an even more important vehicle in the
denial of access to resources to Blacks, particularly housing. When artic-
ulate functions as an exceptionalizing discourse, it separates the speaker
from other Black people, who are largely working class, the kind of Black
people that White gatekeepers want to keep far away from their chil-
dren and their property values. They are also typically people who “sound
Black”—and due, in part, to racial segregation and in part to Black cul-
tural priorities—have not mastered “Ole Massa’s” linguistic norms. Over
the last several decades, since the outlawing of racist, discriminatory real
estate practices, housing discrimination has become more stealth. We have
seen the growth of a new form of racism in housing that relies on linguis-
tic cues as indices of someone’s race, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality,
region, and so on. For example, if a landlord receives a call from a pro-
spective tenant and denies that application solely because of the tenant’s
race, that’s straight-up illegal, Racism 1.0. This does not prevent a landlord,
however, from making sociological inferences based on the prospective ten-
ant’s speech (thinking to oneself, “That tenant sounds Black”) and then
conjuring up a false reason (“it’s been rented,” for example) to deny the
tenant’s application: Racism 2.0.
As scholars, our fi rst experience with this kind of linguistic rac-
ism occurred a little more than two decades ago. In 1989, Geneva
Smitherman was asked to be an expert witness in a housing discrimi-
nation case in the Detroit area suburbs. The chief plaintiff in the case,
Young v. Riverland Woods Apartments et al., was a Black woman who had
appeared at the apartment manager’s office in person and was told that
there were “no vacancies.” Th is was a sista whose speech was, according
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 55

to many, “White-sounding.” Smitherman’s role was to establish that peo-

ple could and did make accurate racial assessments based on the sound
of someone’s voice over the phone. To accomplish this, she played tapes
of White and Black speakers, most of them colleagues of the plaintiff, to
both White and Black listeners from the Detroit metropolitan area. Each
speaker was heard on tape saying the same script, a set of statements and
questions about renting an apartment. Consistently, listeners were able to
identify the “Black-sounding” voices as Black and the “White-sounding”
voices as White. Further, both the plaintiff and another Black woman
who “sounded White” were also consistently identified as White. However,
when the plaintiff had shown up at the apartment building, she was told
that there were no vacancies. Between that kind of linguistic evidence
and the Black and White testers who visited the apartment complex—
in pairs, an hour apart—the jury was soundly convinced that Riverland
Woods was guilty of racial discrimination in housing. Cost them a nice
piece of change too.
The case of articulate is directly relevant to this form of linguistic rac-
ism. While Smitherman showed that most speakers, most of the time, are
able to correctly identify a speaker’s race by the sound of her voice (and
volumes of linguistic research have supported this fi nding), her results
also showed the potential for racial misidentification. If Black women,
including the plaintiff, were identified as White, then it became possible
for landlords to deny their ability to detect race based on voice alone.
What is relevant here is that only the Black women who were preiden-
tified as “sounding White” would be likely to receive return calls and/
or to be told on the phone that there were available apartments. Whites
rewarded individual “White-sounding” speakers in much the same way
that “articulate” speakers are praised, while “Black-sounding” speakers
were punished.
Further, this case highlights the complexity of this form of linguis-
tic racism because it demonstrates how race intersects with class in the
minds of the listeners on the other end of the phone. More often than
not, Black speakers who receive White “compliments” for being “articu-
late” are highly educated and middle class. Of course, the glaring irony
here is that as Whites reward Blacks for being “articulate”—tying prom-
ises of upward mobility and desires of racial integration to one’s ability
to master White linguistic norms—White racist practices often reveal the
ambivalence (at best) and hypocrisy (at worst) of this “damned if you
do damned if you don’t” language politics. The somber reality for many
African Americans is that, still, no matter how “articulate” yo ass is,
upon visiting in person, can’t nuthin fool the landlord now, baby—you
Black, Jack!
56 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Ten years after Smitherman testified in Detroit, sociologists Douglas

Massey and Garvey Lundy at the University of Pennsylvania documented
this type of linguistic racism in the housing market in the Philly area.
Similar to Smitherman’s experiments, the research team designed a study
with male and female speakers of “White Middle-Class English, Black
Accented English, and Black English Vernacular.” 38 In an article published
in the Urban Affairs Review, the authors found that “rental agents now use
linguistic cues over the phone to assign prospective renters to racial cate-
gories and then vary their behavior systematically to discriminate on the
basis of inferred race.” Compared with Whites, Blacks were “less likely to
get through and speak to a rental agent, less likely to be told of a unit’s
availability, more likely to pay application fees, and more likely to have
credit worthiness mentioned as a potential problem for qualifying for a
lease.” These effects were “generally exacerbated by gender and class” with
“the most disadvantaged group” being “lower-class black females.” 39
Th is real and tangible example of language policing has recently been
given the name linguistic profiling40 by Washington University professor
John Baugh. H. Samy Alim, as a graduate student at Stanford University,
was privileged to be a part of the Linguistic Profi ling Research Team from
2001 to 2003, where he was first exposed to perceptual and phonetic
studies of linguistic racism. In these studies, linguists concluded that
“(a) dialect-based discrimination takes place, (b) ethnic group affi liation is
recoverable from speech, and (c) very little speech is needed to discrimi-
nate between dialects.”41 Other Linguistic Profi ling Research Team mem-
bers documented the widespread nature of this discriminatory linguistic
practice. Ashlyn Aiko Nelson, then graduate student in economics and
education, who is currently professor at Indiana University, studied “the
sound of equal opportunity” by examining how linguistic profi ling worked
in terms of credit and housing access for linguistic minorities.42 In this
work, she presents strong evidence “of unequal access to credit for lan-
guage minorities” and makes a clear link between race/ethnicity, language,
and one’s ability to build wealth in the United States. Dawn L. Smalls,
then a Stanford Law School student, who is currently Executive Secretary
to the US Department of Health and Human Services, investigated lin-
guistic profi ling in the law by examining “its use in employment discrimi-
nation, housing discrimination, and . . . the criminal law.”43 Since the early
2000s, studies of linguistic profi ling have grown in scope, demonstrating
the pervasiveness of this practice and its applicability across linguistically
marginalized populations, from bilingual speakers to deaf signers. Baugh
has edited two volumes of studies that explore this phenomenon in inter-
disciplinary and global perspective.44
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 57

Learning to Let Go
In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama writes that “[i]n general, members
of every minority group continue to be measured largely by the degree of
our assimilation—how closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform
to the dominant white culture—and the more that a minority strays from
these external markers, the more he or she is subject to negative assump-
tions.”45 Perhaps more important is Obama’s consideration of the overall
impact of dominant, racist ideologies on ethnoracial minorities in the United
States. “It’s unrealistic to believe that these stereotypes don’t have some
cumulative impact on the often snap decisions of who’s hired and who’s
promoted, on who’s arrested and who’s prosecuted, on how you feel about
the customer who just walked into your store or about the demographics of
your children’s school.”46 And we would add, too, how one feels about the
voice on the other end of the telephone, the family who just moved into
the neighborhood, or the prospective tenant who just walked into the apart-
ment office. More than about simply being acceptable or palatable to White
America, President Obama’s framing of race and language issues as having
tangible consequences for people of Color is of critical importance.
The fact that Racism 2.0 is subtle, rather than blatant, and institutional,
rather than individual, makes it all the more insidiously oppressive and
effective as a system that maintains unequal access to social and economic
resources. As we have shown, the policing of language is a fake-out, an
excuse for preventing marginalized groups from accessing power, property,
and influence. It ain’t ever really about “your verbs agreeing” or “enunciat-
ing the ends of your words.” Because of the strong links between language
and identity, linguistic discrimination is often nothing more than racial
and ethnic discrimination by proxy. In light of the reality of language-
based racism, we are sure that some of y’all are thinking, “In the face of all
of this evidence, why don’t Black people just let go of their cultural way of
speaking so that at least they can escape Racism 2.0 (linguistic profi ling),
even if they can’t escape Racism 1.0 (being visually identified and denied
based on race)?”
First, if we truly believe in the American “experiment,” the ideal of
American equality and democracy does not require cultural-linguistic
homogenization. Quite the opposite: The American value of diversity
within democracy is touted as one of our greatest strengths. While Barack
Obama’s common refrain that “[o]nly in America is my story possible”
might be an example of American exceptionalism—setting America apart
from and above other nations—it also expresses the value placed on diver-
sity in American society.
58 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Second, as most linguistically marginalized Americans are painfully

aware, while some individuals can styleshift and codeswitch to an extent
that they are racially unidentifiable, many others simply cannot. Even when
some folks speak “flawless standard English,” they can still be identified as
Black by their voice quality, frequency and pitch, patterns of intonation,
and so on. Barack Obama, for example, is sometimes identified as “sound-
ing Black” just by the “baritone of his voice.” (We in some deep ishhh if
our very own pres-o-dent can’t escape linguistic profi ling!). In the Massey
and Lundy study previously mentioned, their inclusion of “Black Accented
English” speakers allowed them to test results for middle-class Blacks
who could codeswitch into more “standard” varieties of English (in other
words, those most often on the receiving end of articulate). Those speakers,
though, were also identified as Black due to the pronunciation of certain
words (pronouncing advertised as advertahsed, for example).
Third, language and culture are not things that people can just “let go”
of. Speakers of marginalized language varieties—shoot, of any language
variety—learn language from the community of speakers within which
they are socialized. Linguistic styles and accents are not genetic; they’re
social. Not to state the obvious, but a Black child does not “sound Black”
because he or she is Black. Take that same child and raise him or her in
upper middle-class White suburbia or in an isolated rural village in the
Japanese countryside, and lo and behold, the child will come up speak-
ing the language varieties of the local speech community. The unfairness
of the demand to “just let go” of one’s language should be obvious then.
Asking people to unlearn or abandon their language is like asking them
to go back magically in time and select a different speech community to
be raised in. How does one accomplish that? And since this point is often
difficult to grasp, consider this: How many White speakers, for example,
would be able to pass the test of sounding “authentically” Black? Chances
are that most would sound like straight-up posers unless they grew up in
Black communities and/or have intimate Black friendship networks. There
is little, if any, chance that a White person can “let go” of the markers of
his or her Whiteness and even less chance of successfully getting a job or
housing or a small business loan, for example, if achieving any of these
depended on one’s mastery of Black linguistic norms.
Being socialized into a language, into a community of speakers, is also
being socialized into a culture. Many Black Americans grow up in a culture
that privileges alternative meanings of being “articulate,” including those
that focus on “speaking clearly” as well as those that emphasize the art in
articulate. The artful use of language, as we saw in the Chris Rock skit, for
example, is a source of pleasure, entertainment, reflection, and of course,
socialization. It’s not only where you learn to speak the language of those
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 59

you love; it’s where you learn to love and be loved. It’s where you have your
first formative experiences of being a member of a family, a community,
a culture. It’s where you develop your first notions of who you are and
who you might become. And if you’re an ethnoracial minority in the United
States, it may also be one of the few spaces where you feel both connected
and respected. All of that and more are communicated through language.
Why, then, should any American be forced to abandon his or her language
variety because of dominant culture’s discriminatory practices? If you ask
us, it ain’t the language and culture that we should be lettin go of; it’s
these messed-up racist practices.

NOTES
1. Joseph Biden made these remarks in the New York Observer in 2007 back when he was
running against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
For the full story and video, check out: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/
biden.obama. Last accessed: 09-01-11.
2. Barack Obama’s written statement is quoted in the same CNN article above.
3. This skit is part of Chris Rock’s HBO special “Bring the Pain,” which appeared in
1996. Rock took home two Emmys for his performance, one in Outstanding Variety,
Music, or Comedy Special, and the other in Outstanding Writing for a Variety of
Music Program. Throughout his career, Chris Rock has been known for his insightful,
sharp, witty commentary on race relations in the United States. On November 29,
2007, Chris Rock, along with leading Black race theorist and then-Princeton Univer-
sity professor Cornel West, introduced then presidential candidate Barack Obama at
the Apollo Theatre.
4. From Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2006, 235).
5. Wise is one of the most prominent White antiracist voices in the United States. His
ability to explain White privilege to White people has been noted since the publica-
tion of his first book, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Berke-
ley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2004). His discussion of “racism 2.0” can be found in the
preface of Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of
Obama (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009, 8–11).
6. Wise (2009), 9.
7. For Harris-Perry’s full comments, see: http://articles.cnn.com/2010–01-11/opinion/
harris.lacewell=PM:OPINION. Last accessed: 09-01-11. Also, Stanford University pro-
fessor of psychology Jennifer Eberhardt and her associates have shown how racist
stereotypes continue to haunt Americans. And for Black Americans, racism continues
to be a life-and-death matter. Check out these two articles by Eberhardt et al. as a
starting point: “Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants
Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes” in Psychological Science, 17, 383–386, 2006, and
“Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing” in Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 87, 876–893, 2004. And if that don’t blow your mind, see also, Goff et al.
“Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary
Consequences” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 292–306, 2008.
8. Check: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama. Last accessed:
09-01-11. In the article, Biden is also quoted as making other questionable com-
ments: “In a June 2006 appearance in New Hampshire, the senator commented on
60 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

the growth of the Indian-American population in Delaware by saying, ‘You cannot go

into a 7–11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. Oh, I’m not
joking.’ ”
9. For Bush’s comments, see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2007/01/31/AR2007013101304.html. Last accessed: 09-01-11.
10. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/weekinreview/04clemetson.html. Last accessed:
09-01-11.
11. See Philip Arthur Moore in Racialicious, http://www.racialicious.com/2007/01/25/
barack-obama-is-awb-articulate-while-black/. Last accessed: 09-01-11.
12. In: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/weekinreview/04clemetson.html. Last accessed:
09-01-11.
13. Check: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama. Last accessed: 09-01-11.
14. In: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/weekinreview/04clemetson.html. Last accessed:
09-01-11.
15. Check out: http://www.time.com/time/quotes/0,26174,1584608,00.html. Last accessed:
09-01-11.
16. See: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/09/reid-apology-for-negro-dialect-comment/.
Last accessed: 09-01-11.
17. Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope, 235.
18. In: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/gop-rep-walsh. Last accessed:
09-01-11.
19. This and other White discursive strategies to deny racism have been noted again
and again by social science research on language and race, from discourse analyst
Teun van Dijk’s Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987) to linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill’s The Every-
day Language of White Racism (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) to sociologist Edu-
ardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and Racial Inequality in
Contemporary America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littelfield, 3rd edition, 2010).
20. Check the video yourself at: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201002220031. Last
accessed: 09-01-11.
21. From Rosina Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimina-
tion in the United States (London/New York: Routledge, 1997, 179). This work con-
tinues to be one of the most influential books within and beyond the academy in
the area of language and discrimination. Lippi-Green’s model of language subordi-
nation shows how linguistic discrimination functions in diverse contexts from the
classrooms to the courts to corporate culture and cable television. The new edition,
released in late 2011, includes a brief section on the media’s monitoring of Obama’s
language.
22. Creolization is a technical linguistic term that refers to the linguistic restructur-
ing that occurs when two language varieties come into contact. The uniqueness of
Black Language in the United States is due, in part, to its roots as a contact lan-
guage that developed in the sociopolitical context of the African slave trade. For a
brilliant introduction to concepts such as Creole formation, language mixing, second
language learning, and so on, see Donald Winford’s An Introduction to Contact Linguis-
tics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
23. The term magical Negro was popularized by Black filmmaker Spike Lee, “super-duper
magical Negro” in 2001 (http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v29.n21/story3.html). Last
accessed: 09-01-11. It usually refers to a stock character who uses special insights or
powers to help, not himself, but the White protagonist and is more generally about
the misrepresentation of Black characters in film. For a more complete discussion, see
Krin Gabbard’s Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (New Bruns-
wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004) and Matthew Hughes’s “Cinethetic Racism:
White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films” in Social Problems,
56(3), 543–577, August 2009.
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 61

24. In her chapter, “Exceptionally Yours: Racial Escape Hatches in the Contemporary
United States” (from her book, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and
Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, NYU Press, 2011), Imani Perry
explains that “racial exceptionalism is the practice of creating meaning out of the
existence of people of color who don’t fit our stereotypic or racial-narrative-based
conceptions. . . . The phenomenon of exceptionalism ultimately serves to support a
general stereotyping of the larger populace . . . and justifies that stereotyping within
a social context in which racial egalitarianism is proclaimed. . . . When the normal
state of people of color is assumed deficient, then the departure from that state puts
one into a ‘state of exception’ ” (130–131). In relation to Barack Obama, Perry reads
Joseph Biden’s “inartful” comments as evidence of “a thematic in American culture in
which the idea of Blackness is dissonant to excellence and achievement and in which,
in those instances in which excellence and achievement are found in Black bodies,
those individuals are cast as necessarily extraordinary and distinguished” (127).
25. From www.dap.com. [No longer accessible].
26. See: http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com. Last accessed: 09-01-11.
27. These language ideologies insist that darker-skinned Latinos (especially those who
look “mas indio,” or more indigenous) who do not speak Spanish are only “pretend-
ing” not to do so, or that they must be speakers of a stigmatized indigenous “dia-
lecto.” Alim has heard this ideology expressed numerous times among Mexicans in
California, usually accompanied by a hand gesture touching the forehead, “¿¡Cómo
que no puede hablar español cuando trae el nopal en la frente?!” [Loosely, “How
come he/she can’t speak Spanish when he/she looks unmistakably/stereotypically
Mexican?!”]. Another example of this is found in linguistic anthropologist Jonathan
Rosa’s University of Chicago dissertation, Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a
Race: Making Latino Panethnicity and Managing National Anxieties (2010), in which he
discusses a relatively light-skinned student who joked that the number of people who
spoke to him in Spanish increased during the summer time when his skin was darker.
An already classic volume on how these language ideologies work across contexts is
Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity’s (eds.) Language Ideolo-
gies: Practice and Theory (New York/Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Alice Ashton Filmer describes this race/color/nationality/language association as
acoustic identity in her 2007 article, “Bilingual Belonging and the Whiteness of (Stan-
dard) English(es),” Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 747–765. Looking across racial and ethnic
groups and across various national contexts, she concludes by noting that “[i]n every
case, the speaker’s acoustic identity and sense of bilingual belonging are negotiated
and defined within a complex set of historical/sociopolitical/cultural relations and
expectations that ultimately conflate the use of (Standard) English(es) with White-
ness and Western imperialism. In light of this evidence, to insist that Standard Eng-
lishes are neutral forms of communication capable of unifying multiracial/ethnic/
cultural societies is to fail to recognize these prevalent, and generally unconscious
assumptions and expectations. This brand of linguistic ethnocentrism—a major legacy
of Euro-American colonialism—is unethical and must be challenged on the grounds
of human and civil rights.” (761–762).
28. The various stereotypes that circulate in the United States about Asian Americans
are discussed in linguistic anthropologist Angela Reyes’s book, The Other Asian: Lan-
guage, Identity, and Stereotype among Southeast Asian American Youth (Mahwah, NJ/
London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007). Drawing on the classic work of Edward
Said, Reyes explains that the “forever-foreigner” stereotype “draws on discourses of
Orientalism, ideologies which shape the image of Asian and Middle Eastern peoples
as Other and thus unassimilable due to innate East-West differences that cannot be
resolved.” (7–8).
29. See J. A. Harrison (1884). “Negro English.” Anglia, 7, 232–279.
30. See J. Bennett (1908), “Gullah: A Negro Patios.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 7, 332–347
and Bennett, J. (1909), “Gullah: A Negro Patios.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 8, 39–52.
62 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

For a full breakdown, see Geneva Smitherman’s “Discriminatory Discourse on African

American speech” in Smitherman’s Talkin That Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in
African America (New York/London: Routledge, 2000, 67–92).
31. See John R. Rickford and Russell Rickford’s Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
(New York: Wiley & Sons, 2000) and Rosina Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent, 2nd
edition (New York/London: Routledge, 2011), among several others. Rickford and
Rickford’s Spoken Soul is particularly informative for folks who wanna read up on
Black Language in the United States and remains a central text in the field.
32. For more on the development of Black Language in the United States and the racial
politics of speaking it, see Geneva Smitherman’s now classic text, Talkin and Testifyin:
The Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977; [republished in 1986,
Detroit: Wayne State University Press]). See pages 10–15 for more on these newspa-
per announcements describing the language of enslaved Africans.
33. Check Imani Perry’s More Beautiful and More Terrible (New York: NYU Press, 2011),
22.
34. See Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent, 1997, 178.
35. Ibid.
36. Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, 2006, 236.
37. See sociologist Prudence Carter’s Stubborn Roots: The Threat of Cultural Inflexibility to
Equity in U.S. & South African Schools (New York/London: Oxford University Press,
2012).
38. D. S. Massey and G. Lundy (2001). “Use of Black English and Racial Discrimina-
tion in Urban Housing Markets: New Methods and Findings,” Urban Affairs Review,
36(4), 452–469. The authors described “Black Accented English” and “Black English
Vernacular” as differing in their grammar. So, “Black Accented English” was their label
for (usually middle-class) Black folks who may have “sounded Black” on occasion but
spoke without any Black grammatical features. Those who may have “sounded Black”
and spoke with Black grammatical features were labeled as “Black English Vernacular”
speakers. Similarly, “White Middle-Class English” speakers were those who spoke with
no features of “Philadelphia’s distinctive working-class accent.” (456). The authors did
not have access to any working-class speakers so they were not able to see the effect
of class within White speakers.
39. D. S. Massey and G. Lundy (2001), 466–467.
40. See sociolinguist John Baugh’s “Linguistic Profiling” in Makoni, Smitherman, Ball, &
Spears, (eds.), Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas
(New York/London: Routledge, 2003, 155–168). Baugh’s work and media appearances
have raised the nation’s consciousness about this issue. His research has influenced
public service announcements by the National Fair Housing Association and garnered
him the second annual Pioneer of Fair Housing Award from the US Department of
Housing and Urban Development in 2004.
41. See T. Purnell, W. Isardi, and J. Baugh (1999). “Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments
on American English Dialect Identification.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology,
18, 10–30.
42. See her chapter, “The Sound of Equal Opportunity: Credit and Housing Access for
Language Minorities,” in John Baugh’s Linguistic Profiling in Interdisciplinary Perspec-
tive, Volume 2: Social Science and Legal Dimensions (Final Report: Prepared for the Ford
Foundation. African and African American Studies: Washington University in St. Louis,
2009). See also A. A. Nelson (2009). “Credit Scores, Race, and Residential Sorting.”
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 29(1), 39–68.
43. See D. L. Smalls (2004). “Linguistic Profiling and the Law.” Stanford Law and Policy
Review 15(2), 579–604. One of the most troubling findings in Smalls’s legal note is
that there is a “blatant lack of consistency” in the way courts treat linguistic profiling
testimony. As she writes, “Particularly problematic is the fact that linguistic profiling
testimony appears to be subject to a higher standard in the civil context than in the
criminal context; whereas courts express doubt about a person’s ability to distinguish
 A.W.B. (Articulate While Black) 63

a speaker’s race in the realm of housing discrimination, courts often categorically

accept this premise in the criminal law.” (603). In other words, our judicial system
avoids placing blame on landlords and rental agents (because they can’t infer some-
one’s race by voice 100 percent of the time) but will readily convict a person of color
because ear-witness testimony describes them as “sounding” like a particular race. The
denial of individual racism upholds institutional racism yet again.
44. See John Baugh’s Linguistic Profiling in Interdisciplinary Perspective, Volume 1: Linguistic
Foundations and Volume 2: Social Science and Legal Dimensions (Final Report: Prepared
for the Ford Foundation. African and African American Studies: Washington Univer-
sity in St. Louis, 2009).
45. Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, 2006, 235.
46. Ibid., 235–236.
3
Makin a Way Outta No Way
The “Race Speech” and
Obama’s Rhetorical Remix
When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds
of despair, and when our nights become darker than a
thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a
creative force in this universe, working to pull down
the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to
make a way outta no way and transform dark days into
bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral
universe is long but bends toward justice.1
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1967 [Italics ours]

Reverend Wright and other African Americans of

his generation . . . came of age in the late fi fties and
early sixties, a time when segregation was still the
law of the land and opportunity was systematically
constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many
failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how
many men and women overcame the odds, how
many were able to make a way out of no way for
those like me who would come after them. 2
—Barack Obama, 2008 [Italics ours]

At a crucial historical moment in the 2008 presidential campaign, then-senator

Barack Obama was forced to directly confront America’s most treacherous
social, cultural, and political minefield—race. While Obama had been rela-
tively silent on the issue of race, there came a point in the campaign when
he had no other choice but to address the nation. During the months of
heated primary debates with his then-opponent Hillary Clinton, a series
of controversial sermon sound bites from Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright
emerged and were looped 24−7 across all media outlets. Reverend Wright
had been Obama’s pastor for some 20 years, performed Obama’s marriage
ceremony to Michelle, baptized Obama’s two children, and was currently

64
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 65

serving as a member of the Obama campaign’s African American Religious

Leadership Committee. His pastor’s controversial sermonizing had taken
Obama’s silence around the racial dynamics of his campaign and shouted
these dynamics from the rooftops. To paraphrase T. Denean Sharpley-
Whiting in her introduction to The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More
Perfect Union,” many White Americans were lookin at Barack like, “Well,
before you start movin your furniture into the White House, homie, you
got some splainin to do.”
As White calls for an “explanation” grew and the daily media coverage
began turning into a public relations nightmare, many Hillary Clinton sup-
porters, joined by nearly all conservative pundits and talking heads, declared
this the end of the Obama campaign. Heading into March 2008, some
Black supporters of Obama lamented, “Might as well stick a fork in dude,
he’s done.” The numbers told a similar story. Obama watched his six-point
lead in the Gallup tracking polls turn into a seven-point deficit. Journalist
and cultural critic Joan Morgan summed up the situation like this:

By all accounts, the Wright debacle was a live grenade that threat-
ened to damage an essential tenet of the Obama campaign: the
sexy new multiracial, youth-driven, socioeconomically diverse,
bipartisan ‘CHANGE’ he was promising America. . . . The question
was never if race would morph from the pink elephant in the
room into the raging tiger that needed to be sedated and tamed.
It was always when and who, if anyone, would emerge intact once
the beast was unleashed. 3

The Black Elephant in the Room: Navigating

America’s Most Treacherous Minefield
Paradoxically, the Obama candidacy was a “postracial” moment. While it
represented a symbolic break from the “whiteout” on the US presidency,
it was also, obviously, the most racialized campaign in American history.
There were, of course, all the folks at the rallies for Obama’s opponents
who showed up with stuffed monkeys, or Curious George T-shirts, or with
racist images of watermelons and fried chicken, and folks who sang “Barack
the Magic Negro” along with Rush Limbaugh. But race had become an issue
even in the primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama noted:

Th is is not to say that race has not been an issue in this cam-
paign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators
have deemed me either ‘too black’ or ‘not black enough.’ We saw
66 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the
South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for
the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of
white and black, but black and brown as well.4

Obama’s South Carolina primary comment reminds us of former president

Bill Clinton’s racial-referencing of Obama’s candidacy. By Bill’s logic, the
fact that Barack defeated Hillary by receiving an overwhelming majority of
the Black vote in South Carolina made Barack “a Black candidate.” Astute
observers knew that Clinton was employing race to try to box Barack in
verbally so that he could not appeal to the broader American public. As
author and political commentator Keli Goff noted and certainly as the
Clintons knew, “Obama had spent his campaign trying to avoid being pigeon-
holed as ‘the black candidate,’ or worse, being viewed as the typical black
candidate—one whose candidacy is predicated primarily on running as
a black person there to advance black issues or to air black grievances.”5
Most Black Americans, while understanding Bill’s support for his wife,
read Bill’s move as a racially loaded betrayal, deserving of a revoking of his
honorary Black status. Further, Hillary Clinton used Obama’s Blackness to
demand that he “denounce”—and then further “reject” (big difference there,
right?)—everything “militantly Black” from Minister Louis Farrakhan to
Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Geraldine Ferraro cited Obama’s Blackness
as the reason that he had even made it this far.6 Clearly, for Obama to
navigate America’s treacherous minefield of race was more than complex, it
seemed downright impossible.
The enormity of the challenge lay in not just navigating the treacherous
terrain of race in the United States, in general, but also Reverend Wright’s
Black Liberation Theology and Black community politics, in particular. Yet,
after doing a string of talk shows and media appearances attempting to
extinguish Reverend Wright’s racial fi restorm, Obama told his senior advi-
sor, David Axelrod, “I want to do this speech on race. I want to put this
thing in its proper perspective. . . . I think this is an important moment, and
people may accept what I have to say or not, but it’s an important moment
in terms of dealing with the elephant in the room.”7
President Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, which has come to
be known as the “Race Speech,” was delivered at the National Constitution
Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 2008, nearly eight
months before the November election. When the motion of history pre-
sented Obama, and America, with this gut-wrenching political moment,
Obama did not retreat from the difficult, problematic, ultrasensitive topic
of race. Rather, he faced the matter of race and US racism head on, making
a strategic decision to talk openly, boldly, honestly—and personally—about
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 67

race. In doing so, he offered us a new twenty-first-century model for politi-

cal discussions about race in the United States.

“Unashamedly Black”: Black Preaching and the

Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright Controversy
Soundbites from Reverend Wright’s sermons began wide circulation in the
media in March of 2008, broadcast 24−7 in, as Obama called it, “an endless
loop,” accompanied by negative commentary. Not only were these excerpts
decontextualized, they were offered to the American public without explan-
atory cultural background about Traditional Black Church preaching, in
general, and the social gospel, in particular. Further, rarely was there ever
any discussion of Reverend Wright’s family background, educational and
theological training, life experiences (including military service), or con-
tributions to the Chicago and national Black community. If media depic-
tions served as one’s only source of information about Wright, “one would
expect him to be a militantly black supremacist hater of America and all
she stands for,” as professor of Biblical interpretation Obery M. Hendricks
Jr. put it in “A More Perfect (High-Tech) Lynching: Obama, the Press, and
Jeremiah Wright.”8
Hendricks notes that Reverend Wright’s parents were highly respected
members of the Philadelphia community where he was born, his father, a
long-serving Baptist minister and his mother, an educator who broke racial
barriers as the first Black teacher at Germantown High School and later
first Black vice principal at Girls High School. The Philadelphia high school
from which Wright graduated, Central High, at that time overwhelmingly
White, accorded him great respect. Unlike others of his generation, he did
not exercise his college deferment but volunteered for the military, serv-
ing six years, both in the Marines and the Navy, where he was trained
as a cardiopulmonary technician. He was part of the medical team during
Lyndon Johnson’s surgery while Johnson was president and received a letter
of thanks on behalf of President Johnson. A highly educated man, Wright
has been awarded eight honorary degrees and is the holder of four earned
degrees. He attended Virginia Union University, Howard University, and
the University of Chicago Divinity School, from which he earned a master’s
degree, and United Theological Seminary, where he studied under the illus-
trious theological scholar Samuel DeWitt Proctor (mentor to Martin Luther
King Jr.) and from which he earned a Doctor of Ministry.
Additionally, Wright is A.B.D. (all but dissertation) in the Ph.D. pro-
gram in History of Religions at the University of Chicago. He stopped work
on his dissertation to devote all his energies and time to building a new
68 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

church for Trinity United Church of Christ on Chi-Town’s South Side where
he was called to pastor in 1972 and where he built the congregation from
87 members to more than 8,000 by the time of his retirement in 2008.9
Over the years, Wright had spoken not only at Black churches around the
country but also at numerous universities and academic conferences.
Media pundits attacked Wright as a racist, hatemonger, and leader of a
church that denounces White people. Yet, as Hendricks notes, the United
Church of Christ, of which Wright’s Trinity is a part, is a predominantly
White denomination, and Trinity does have White members. Trinity’s
motto is “unashamedly Black,” and its symbols and much of its literature
are African-Centered. Similar to the history of African American Studies
in the academy and African-Centered Education in K−l2 schools, it is dif-
ficult for non-Blacks to wrap their minds around the fact that pro-Black
is not anti-White. As University of Chicago (White) Professor Emeritus
Martin Marty explained: “For Trinity, being ‘unashamedly black’ does not
mean being ‘anti-white,’ but rather is a discursive tactic to address the
abiding sense of shame in many African Americans that is a legacy of
slavery and Jim Crow segregation.”10 Further, the United Church of Christ
ministers and leadership (many of them White) rose to Wright’s defense.
Reverend John Thomas, the General Minister and President of the United
Church of Christ, declared at a press conference held at Trinity in early
March 2008:

It has saddened me to see news stories reporting such a cari-

cature of a congregation that has been such a blessing. . . . Those
who sifted through hours of sermons searching for a few lurid
phrases and those who have aired them repeatedly have only one
intention. It is to wound a presidential candidate. In the pro-
cess a congregation that does exceptional ministry and a pastor
who has given his life to shape those ministries is caricatured
and demonized. You don’t have to be an Obama supporter to be
alarmed at this.11

So what was the message in those sermons and sound bites that so inflamed
and infuriated White folk? More so than the message, it was the rhetorical
style and linguistic discourse in which the message was conveyed. Points
in Wright’s sermons that had to do with US culpability and wrongdoing at
home and abroad had been made by others, and—check it out—can even
be found in Obama’s “Race Speech.” However, whereas Obama tempered
and significantly departed from the Black jeremiadic style in his sermons,
Wright was rhetorically relentless in maintaining both the caustic Black
and the damning Biblical jeremiadic style.
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 69

The Wright sermons that were the source of the soundbites were his “The
Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” preached September 16, 2001, and “Confusing God
and Government,” preached on April l3, 2003. In the September 16, 2001
sermon, among the words Wright preached were:

I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. . . . He was on

Fox News. Th is is a White man, and he was upsetting the Fox
News commentators to no end. He pointed out . . . a White man,
he pointed out . . . that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced
by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true—America’s chickens are
coming home to roost. . . . We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed
Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New
York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye . . . and now
we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now
brought back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are
coming home to roost. . . . Violence begets violence. Hatred begets
hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A White ambassador said
that y’all, not a Black militant. Not a Reverend who preaches
about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who
is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dan-
gerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador
said the people that we have wounded don’t have the military
capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing
to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to
grips with that.12

In the April 13, 2003 sermon, among the words Wright preached were:

Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments

change, God does not change . . . The government lied about their
belief that all men are created equal. The truth is they believed
that all White men are created equal. The truth is they did not
even believe that White women were created equal, in creation
or civilization. The government had to pass an amendment to the
Constitution to get White women the vote. Then the government
had to pass an equal rights amendment to get equal protection
under the law for women . . . [The] government, when it came to
treating the citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put
them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of
Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment
prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African
descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains . . . in
70 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

slave quarters . . . on auction blocks, in cotton fields . . . in inferior

schools . . . substandard housing . . . in scientific experiments . . . in
the lowest paying jobs . . . outside the equal protection of the
law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education
and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helpless-
ness . . . gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a
three-strike law and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.”
No, no, no! Not God Bless America. God damn America—that’s
in the Bible—for killing innocent people. God damn America for
treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America as
long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme.13

As several theologians pointed out, Reverend Wright is preaching out

of the Biblical jeremiadic tradition. In that tradition, it is the preacher’s
obligation to warn his flock when they are going astray and in danger
of incurring the wrath of God. According to Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of
Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York City, Reverend Wright’s ser-
mons were “deeply traditional, carefully composed and structured talks in
the Biblical tradition of such venerated sources as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
Deuteronomy . . . solidly in the tradition of the ancient prophets, who would
catalogue the sins of the people and invoke the Divine litany of curses
upon people who [had] wandered from the righteous path prescribed in
Scripture.”14 White Minister Paul Davis put it this way:

As a minister, I do not fi nd the Pastor’s sermons disturbing in

the least. After all a good sermon should affl ict the comfortable
and comfort the affl icted . . . I agree wholeheartedly with every-
thing Pastor Wright said here. If American history turns Rush
Limbaugh’s stomach, perhaps he should get a little more intesti-
nal fortitude… Don’t side with pro-war conservatives, an oxymo-
ron in itself considering the trillion dollar expenditure of killing
in foreign theaters of war, and then hide from the consequences
of your foreign policy.15

As Hendricks points out, the function of Wright’s Biblical jeremiad “is to

remind Americans, lest we become self-righteous in our righteous indigna-
tion, that we too have engaged in mass destruction of innocents.”16
In the sacred world of the temple, the Judeo-Christian leader/pas-
tor/priest/rabbi is supported by thousands of years of Biblical tradition,
prophesy, prophetic teaching, and beliefs subscribed to by all. By contrast,
Obama’s “Race Speech” was delivered in the secular world where the swirl-
ing, changing state of sociopolitical realities, varying beliefs, and multiple
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 71

demographics make the rhetorical pathway not so clear. How does one speak
the truth to a people who are diverse and speak many tongues? How does
one speak the truth about race in America—and in a single speech—when
having an honest discussion is like navigating a minefield? And how does
a man who is racialized as Black—the bottom rung on America’s (and the
world’s) racial hierarchy—address these real and difficult tensions when both
Black and White racial resentment is heightened by the divisive discourse
incited by the very act of his presidential bid? This was the challenging, for-
midable charge to Barack Obama, with commentators on both sides looking
for any signs of either too much sympathizing with Black people (a “Black
Messiah”) or too much shuckin and jivin to the White power structure (an
“Uncle Tom”). The rhetorical situation called for someone who could be, as
commentator Keli Goff put it, “somber yet transcendent, painfully honest
yet awesomely inspiring . . . but most of all he would have to find some way
to unify and uplift and connect, not alienate.”17 This is what Goff was hop-
ing for, yet she considered it “virtually impossible,” that is, until she heard
the “Race Speech.” Barack Obama not only met the rhetorical demands of
the “Race Speech,” he did the impossible—he made a way outta no way.

“Black and More Than Black”: The Rhetorical

Demands of the “Race Speech”
Obama was confronted with a rhetorical situation in which Black and
White perceptions and past and present experiences of race are often at
odds. In great measure this is attributable to a long, brutal history of
enslavement, followed by an additional century of neoenslavement and
today’s continuing racial separation—for example, in housing, schooling,
and other institutions.18 In and of itself, the fact that Obama would seek
to deliver a speech about race was nothing new. African descendants in the
United States have been engaging in public discourse about racial oppres-
sion at least since David Walker, born to a slave father and a free mother
in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1785, issued David Walker’s Appeal, in
Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World,
but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America
(1829).19 What was new was a race speech delivered in our time, in what
many Americans believe is a “postracial” (or “colorblind”) society, one in
which problems of race and racism are widely believed to no longer exist.
(People can see color in everything from roses to rainbows but somehow
can’t see it in race.)
The argument is that these issues were addressed and dealt with in
the last century and owing in great measure to the “success” of the Civil
72 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Rights Movement, African Americans have made major advancements on

all fronts—educational, economic, social, political. Those who hold this
position contend that there is no longer a need for a “Black Movement”
and speeches of protest against White oppression. Whether or not one
agrees with this interpretation of current Black social reality, it is a fact
that, except for an occasional public talk by Reverend Jesse Jackson on
corporate responsibility to Blacks or the Reverend Al Sharpton on the
shooting of yet another hapless young brotha by police, the longstand-
ing genre of Black protest oratory is all but dead in the twenty-fi rst cen-
tury. So many Americans were sitting at the edge of their seats precisely
because, as noted by Derrick Z. Jackson, this speech presented to us the
very rare occasion to hear a Black man talk about race on the national
stage.20
To be sure, today’s sociopolitical context is decidedly different from that
of nineteenth-century Black leaders such as former slave turned abolition-
ist, Frederick Douglass, or twentieth-century Civil Rights and Black Power
activists, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture.21
The blatant symbols of racial oppression—for instance, White-only access
to hotels, theaters, and public facilities, police dogs and water hoses spray-
ing nonviolent protestors—are no longer with us. There is now a sizable,
highly educated Black middle and upper class. The NBA, the NFL, Hip Hop,
and other forms of Black popular culture have contributed to the develop-
ment of the image of a bling-bling, livin large Black elite, with Benjamins
to burn. Moreover, late twentieth-century periods of “benign neglect” and
the end of the “Second Reconstruction” virtually succeeded in the erasure,
from America’s social agenda, of Black concerns about social justice, pov-
erty, and educational inequities.22 In short, this was a 2008 White audience
for a speech about race, not a 1968 one, a situation that called for a new
kind of Black oratory, a reinvention of the Tradition.
While the Black audience for such a speech was also a twenty-first-
century one, these people who are “darker than blue” (as the late Curtis
Mayfield often sang) have long, painful memories of betrayal by both
Black and White politicians and leaders. Moreover, even those who seek
to invoke historical amnesia in order to keep on keepin on in their over-
worked, paperchasin struggle to survive are forced to bear witness to the
historical impact and presentness of the past—the resegregation of schools,
the seemingly intractable poverty in urban wastelands, and the skyrocket-
ing incarceration rates of Black men.23 For many Blacks, the reality of their
condition could not be swept under the rug, it cried out for acknowledg-
ment and recognition. Blacks—and Obama himself—had painfully under-
stood the good Reverend’s fiery, Biblically grounded sermonic exhortations
about America’s misdeeds and failings. But still, for some Blacks there was
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 73

that nagging question about Obama’s Blackness. Is he Black enough? Is he

culturally Black? Is he attuned to The Tradition?
Given the demands of these two different—and on some levels, diamet-
rically opposed audiences—the historical moment called for a race speech
that could be explicatory, but it could not be condemnatory as was the case
with much of the racial rhetoric of the previous century. While the rhetori-
cal task required a speech crafted by an African American, it had to be an
“American”, not just an “African American” speech.24 Or in the words of
Obama, it had to be “black and more than black.”25 Given his background
and upbringing, his “improbable” journey in America, Obama seemed espe-
cially suited—dare we say called?—for this task. He was, after all, an
American who is neither “White” nor “Black” (in the narrow stereotypical
American sense). At the same time, paradoxically, he was an American who
is and has lived both “Black” and “White,” who thus is uniquely positioned
to see and feel both dimensions of the Black-White binary.
One of the authors of this book, Smitherman, is the daughter of a
baptized-in-the-fire Baptist preachaman, who has, on many occasions,
shouted and clapped to the stirring power and visionary message in a
Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright sermon. Smitherman is also a sociolinguist
who teaches courses in African American Language and Culture and has
used Wright’s oratorical brilliance—as in his “Demons and Detractors”
sermon, which is also excerpted in her Word from the Mother: Language
and African Americans (2006)—to teach the rhetoric of what late linguist
Grace Sims Holt referred to as “stylin’ outta the Black pulpit.”26 Stanford
University sociolinguist John R. Rickford uses Wright’s “When You Fail
in Your Trying” sermon for a similar pedagogical purpose (see Rickford
and Rickford’s award-winning book, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English,
2000). As a member of the generation that came of age in the twentieth-
century Black Freedom Struggle,27 Smitherman has also shouted and
clapped to the flamboyant speechifying and insightful calls to action in a
M. L. King, Kwame Ture, or H. Rap Brown speech.28 Curiously, she found
herself awed by Obama’s speech, despite the fact that it didn’t appear to
reflect the Black protest oratory she intellectually and emotionally knew
so well. This wasn’t your traditional Black speech. Millions of others were
also awed—audiences all over the country, Black, White, Asian, and Latino,
male and female, of different generations and classes—because it was not
your typical political speech either. How could it be that his speech satis-
fied the complex psychosocial demands of Whites, Blacks, and other folks
while at the same time it candidly spoke the truth to the people?
We believe the answer lies in the strategic rhetorical choices made by
Barack Obama. Verbal persuasion is both an art and a science. The rhetor
must have the ability to discern the most effective means of persuasion at
74 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

his or her disposal. Accurate audience assessment and analysis are criti-
cal, as is skill in appropriating available persuasive strategies. For example,
the historical annals of Black oratory record that in the Nation of Islam
(NOI), Malcolm X reached heights of dazzling speechmaking while Elijah
Muhammad was considered ho-hum. In the Civil Rights Movement, Martin
Luther King Jr. scaled the rhetorical mountain while Ralph Abernathy
never got off the ground. In all of these cases, the success of the orator
was never based solely on the content of the speech (for the message was
fairly consistent); rather, it was always also judged by the linguistic and
rhetorical style of the speaker.

Makin a Way Outta No Way: Obama’s

Symbolic Use of Black Language
While most commentators before and after the “Race Speech” focused
on what Obama needed to say, actually said, or should have said, few, if
any, paid attention to how he said what he said. Given that commenta-
tors had deemed the speech’s success an impossibility or suggested that
nothing short of a miracle was needed, Obama’s “Race Speech” symbolized
his own ability “to make a way outta no way.” A longstanding idiom in
African American Language, makin a way outta no way is grounded in The
Tradition. It reflects the Black struggle to survive, as the late, great Tupac
Shakur once said, “against all odds.” It is the paradox of the indomitable
drive to find a solution when there is no way out. As a Black folk expres-
sion, makin a way outta no way is summoned up to characterize even such
everyday experiences as Blacks creating culinary delicacies from Ol Massa’s
scraps and leftovers (e.g., chitlins). Against the panoramic span of Black
people’s continuously evolving history, makin a way outta no way announces
that, even when given very little to work with or when all the cards seem
stacked against us, we will find a way to survive—and thrive. Makin a way
outta no way refers to a hope, a deep, abiding faith, that, as Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. put it, even when our “days become dreary with
low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a
thousand midnights,” the bright day of justice will soon come.
In “Makin a Way Outta No Way: The Proverb Tradition in the Black
Experience,” Smitherman, Daniel, and Jeremiah (1987) interviewed Blacks
in the United States and in the Caribbean to demonstrate that proverb
use is a crucial source of strategies for makin a way outta no way.29 As in
other communities worldwide, Black American proverbs serve an important
socializing function, quoted by parents to their children, or to friends and
siblings, as a way to teach rapidly and in no uncertain terms about life and
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 75

living. Often used proverbs—not necessarily African derived—and the pro-

verbial wisdom and life experiences they embody contain guides and Black
belief sets for survival and development. As described by Smitherman et
al., “[Proverbs] represent the wisdom [of the people] . . . these sayings are
like honeycomb; sweet to the soul, and health to the bones . . . Black beliefs
that reflect fundamental perceptions of reality . . . essential value orienta-
tions and most basic rules for living. . . . Proverbs are significant . . . as a leg-
acy that has enabled African people to ‘make a way outta no way.’ ”30
For Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—as well as Reverend Dr.
Jeremiah Wright and millions of African Americans—makin a way outta
no way is embodied in the “faith of the Fathers,” a belief in a God-centered
universe and the social justice of Christianity. Through the centuries, the
Black Church has been influential in sustaining this cultural ethos and
value system among Blacks—notwithstanding the fact that not all Blacks
are ardent or, for that matter, even regular, churchgoers. However, this
accounts for the historical legacy and continuing significance of the Black
Church, a past and present refuge for Blacks. Explaining how he came to
understand and embrace faith, in The Audacity of Hope, Obama draws on
the Black proverb tradition and writes:

Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole

person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury
of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had
to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic,
and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate
way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked
and challenge powers and principalities. In the history of these
struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to
the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, pal-
pable agent in the world. In the day-to-day work of the men and
women I met in church each day, in their ability to “make a way
out of no way” and maintain hope and dignity in the direst of
circumstances, I could see the Word made manifest.31

We consider makin a way outta no way a metaphor for Obama’s overall

strategic success in the “Race Speech.” Employing this familiar, culturally
rooted Black Vernacular trope, he thus symbolically indexes his Black iden-
tity, represents his Black cultural affinity, and advances a political stance
that frames the Black condition in terms of success, not failure (“What’s
remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather
how many men and women overcame the odds, how many were able to
make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them”).
76 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

While this rhetorical strategy probably flew right over the heads of most
White and other non-Black listeners, to Black folks, it signaled a cultural-
linguistic connection and a political worldview that validates the perspec-
tive of Black survival under extraordinarily adverse circumstances.
Simultaneously, however, Obama articulated this vernacular idiom in the
formal voice of the LWC (Language of Wider Communication, or as some
would have it, the Language of Whiter Communication). 32 Linguistically
speaking, while most Black speakers using this idiom pronounce it with
a particular Black prosody and rhythm and render “out of” as “outta,” for
example, Obama utters this phrase in a highly formal register, enunciat-
ing every syllable. Drawing on a culturally salient and politically impor-
tant proverbial Black Idiom in The Tradition but formally pronouncing it,
Obama articulates Blackness anew. He found a way to articulate Blackness
on a national stage—quietly communicating an important ideological mes-
sage to the Black electorate—but doing so in a form that was digestible to
non-Black America.33

The Old: The (White) American

and African American Jeremiad
But if ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself, saith the
Lord, that this house shall become a desolation. . . . And many
nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say . . . [w]herefore
hath the Lord done thus unto this great city? Then they shall
answer, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord
their God. (Jeremiah 22: 5−9)

The term jeremiad is derived from Jeremiah, an Old Testament prophet

who accounted for Israel’s trials and tribulations as punishment for depart-
ing from their covenant with God. However, even as he critiques Israel for
its wayward, ungodly behavior, he reminds the people of their status as
God’s chosen people and foreshadows their return to greatness following
repentance. The American jeremiad is a speech, sermon, or other form of
public discourse in which the speaker critiques the society for its misdeeds
and wrongdoings while holding out hope that this fall from Grace can be
reversed if the country corrects its behavior and lives up to its divine man-
date. It has its roots in the European jeremiad, which, in turn, has its roots
in the Biblical jeremiad and began as a political sermon in the Puritan era.
Like the Old Testament Israelites, seventeenth-century Puritans believed
that they, too, were God’s chosen people. They had been delivered out of
Europe and called by God to establish a new order, to create in this new
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 77

world a nation that would be a symbol of liberty, freedom, and hope for
peoples around the globe. (Notwithstanding this grand vision for the new
order, no thought was given to the fate of the Indigenous peoples of the
land—American Indians.34)
Puritan leaders used the rhetorical framework of the American jeremiad
to remind the colonists of God’s divine plan for America and their role
in the fulfi llment of the new nation’s destiny. Cultural historians, such as
Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad (1978), track the continuing
belief in and discourse of American exceptionalism to its beginnings in the
American jeremiad of the Puritan era. Bercovitch contends that the jere-
miad has persisted for centuries and has “played a significant role in the
development of . . . modern middle-class American culture.” He notes that
the “prophetic history” and “mission” of America as a special, unique coun-
try is writ large, not only in sermons and speeches but also in literature,
culture, and core values, such as the “devaluation of aristocracy, opening
up of political, educational, and commercial opportunities to a relatively
broad spectrum of the population.” 35 (Notwithstanding Bercovitch’s astute,
scholarly account of the “process of Americanization,” at points he is sur-
prisingly honest in his assessment of what he calls the “patent fiction” that
is the “American mission.”36)
Jeremiadic speeches and sermons had a set tripartite formula: (1) The
speaker intones America’s promise as a beacon of liberty, equality, and
social justice; (2) He (or she, but it was almost always a he) details and
castigates America’s misdeeds, its grave departure or “retrogression” from
the promise; (3) The speaker reaffirms the prophesy that America will com-
plete its mission and redeem the promise.37 This rhetorical structure helped
the speaker to simultaneously chastise and uplift his audience. “The jer-
emiad . . . was fi lled with underlying optimism about America’s fate and mis-
sion. . . . [Its] dark portrayal of current society never questioned America’s
promise and destiny. . . . The unfaltering view is that God will mysteriously
use the unhappy present to spur the people to reformation and speedily
onward to fulfi ll their divine destiny.”38
As an archetype of the American jeremiad, Bercovitch analyzes “Brief
Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness,” a speech by
Samuel Danforth delivered in 1670. He notes that Danforth’s speech “con-
demns the colonists’ shortcomings and justifies their affl ictions.” The charge
is that “[w]e have . . . in a great measure forgotten our errand.” Danforth
“underscores this meaning by comparing New England’s ‘howling wilder-
ness’ with that of Moses and John the Baptist.” He goes on to “assure
the colonists of success not because of their efforts, but God’s: ‘the great
Physician of Israel hath undertaken the cure . . . he will provide . . . we have
the promise.’ ”39
78 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Just as there was a Black nation within the White nation, there was
a concomitant Black jeremiad within the White jeremiad. Beginning in
the Antislavery Movement, Black leaders adapted the White jeremiad for
the purpose of protest against enslavement and later discrimination and
racism. In the Black version, the rhetoric envisioned US descendants of
enslaved Africans as also being God’s chosen people. God’s mandate became
a charge to the White nation to live up to its divinely inspired calling and
provide equality and social justice for the Black nation. Historian Wilson
Jeremiah Moses, who is believed to have coined the term Black jeremiad,
argues in his Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations
of a Religious Myth: “If the bondage of the Colonies to England was simi-
lar to the enslavement of Israel in Egypt, was not the bondage of blacks
in America an even more perfect analogy? If Americans, by virtue of the
ideals of their revolution, were in fact a covenanted people and entrusted
with the mission to safeguard the divine and natural laws of human rights,
was there not a danger to the covenant in perpetuating slavery?”40
Following the tripartite structure of the American jeremiad, the Black
speaker lauds America for its founding principles and promise (“life, liberty,
pursuit of happiness,” “all men are created equal”), details and denounces
the society for its failure to live up to that promise (e.g., enslavement, denial
of equal opportunity, Jim Crow), and calls on the country to recommit to
its historical mandate and divine promise by alleviating Black oppression. A
classic example of the Black jeremiad is Frederick Douglass’s oration deliv-
ered in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, which has come to be known
as his “Fourth of July” speech. Th is former slave, who became a powerful
force in the Abolitionist Movement and a revered leader of African slave
descendants in his time, acknowledges and celebrates the significance of
July 4, but he is ultimately dismissive of the holiday since it is meaningless
to those still in bondage.
Douglass employs Biblical metaphors, as in the White jeremiad, to recall
America’s prophetic mission and promise. “Th is, to you, is what the Passover
was to the emancipated people of God.” As he continues, he contrasts the
lofty ideals and liberatory promise of America with the capture of Africans,
the horrors and brutalities of bondage, and his own personal tribulations
during enslavement. Although he frames his argument with overtones of
the Biblical narrative, his language is caustic and accusatory, his metaphors
bitter and brutal.

Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural jus-

tice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to
us? . . . “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. . . . We wept
when we remembered Zion. . . . They that carried us away captive,
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 79

required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us

mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing
the Lord’s song in a strange land?” . . . What, to the American slave,
is your 4th of July? . . . Your celebration is a sham; your boasted
liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling van-
ity . . . your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence;
your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers
and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your reli-
gious parade and solemnity, are to him . . . a thin veil to cover up
crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a
nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody
than are the people of the United States. . . . Th is Fourth of July is
yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.41

Calling the question of America’s promise, as embodied in its founding

documents, Douglass foreshadows the end of enslavement and expresses
his belief that Whites will rise to the greatness in that promise. His tone
reflects what Obama, borrowing from Reverend Dr. Wright, who, in turn,
borrowed from late Reverend Frederick Sampson of Detroit, might have
called the “audacity of hope.”42

Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I

defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the
other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes,
entirely hostile to the existence of slavery . . . Notwithstanding
the dark picture I have this day presented . . . [I] draw . . . encour-
agement from “the Declaration of Independence,” the great prin-
ciples it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.

Perhaps the quintessential Black Jeremiad is Dr. Martin Luther King

Jr.’s oft-quoted “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered August 28, 1963, in the
Nation’s capitol. Following the well-worn Jeremiadic script, King invokes
the prophetic vision of America: “When the architects of our Republic
wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration
of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every
American was to fall heir . . . a promise that all men—yes, black men as
well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” However, the society has failed to
fulfi ll its “sacred obligation . . . The Negro is still badly crippled by the man-
acles of segregation and the chains of discrimination . . . The Negro lives
on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material
prosperity.” Like Jeremiahs before him, King foreshadows doom so long
80 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

as America fails to address the racism and oppression of Blacks and thus
remains unrepentant:

We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the

fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the high-
ways and the hotels of the cities . . . We can never be satisfied as
long as our children are stripped of their adulthood and robbed
of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only” . . . We can-
not be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote
and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to
vote . . . There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until
the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of
revolt will continue to shake the foundation of our nation until
the bright day of justice emerges.

Later, and with the “fierce urgency of now” (another Martin Luther King
phrase often cited by Obama), King calls for re-commitment to the prom-
ise, exhorting America to “rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .’
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with
new meaning: ‘My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every moun-
tain side, let freedom ring.’ ”43
While Obama’s “Race Speech” relied on fundamental rhetorical princi-
ples that Aristotle taught centuries ago, principally ethos (persuasion based
on a speaker’s personal character) and logos (persuasive appeal based on
reason), more importantly he selected a familiar rhetorical paradigm, the
jeremiad, and skillfully adapted this centuries-old framework to accommo-
date a postmodern, post−Civil Rights, twenty-first-century Black and White
audience.

This. Is. The Remix: Barack Hussein

Obama’s Jeremiad
As a powerful and eloquent public discourse on race, Obama’s speech is
clearly situated in the jeremiadic tradition, but he puts his own innova-
tive imprint on the game, remixing the classic traditions to create a hybrid
form to suit the needs of a new era. The structure of his speech follows
the tripartite formula of classical jeremiads. He opens with an allusion to
the promise of America as articulated in its founding documents: “We the
people, in order to form a more perfect union. . . . Our Constitution . . . had
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 81

at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution
that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and
should be perfected over time.” He notes that, even at the outset, there
was a retreat from the promise, making his point about slavery with the
use of familiar, shared Biblical language: “original sin.” He expands on the
retreat from the promise, detailing a litany of past racial injustices, the
impact of which continues to be felt in Black communities today. He uses
deductive reasoning (logos), anchoring his major claim in the long his-
tory of institutionalized racism and deeply entrenched structures of racial
oppression in the United States. Given the constraints of time—this was a
campaign speech, not, for instance, a lecture in a university hall—he skill-
fully paints a portrait of that history with broad strokes. The strength of
this major premise is his logical, systematic accounting of historical facts.
He establishes his minor claim by laying out the destructive effects of this
past on the African American community today. He concludes by deduc-
ing the impact of this history on the pulpit oratory and public rhetoric
of Reverend Wright—and on the consciousness and discourse of Blacks of
Wright’s generation.
On education: “Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still
haven’t fi xed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the
inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the perva-
sive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.”
On economic discrimination: “Blacks were prevented, often through vio-
lence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African American
business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages,
or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fi re depart-
ments.” The result: “Black families could not amass any meaningful wealth
to bequeath to future generations. Th at history helps explain the wealth
and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of
poverty that persist in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.”
On the abandonment of Black neighborhoods: “The lack of basic services
in so many urban black neighborhoods—parks for kids to play in, police
walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement—
all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continues to
haunt us.”
On the American Dream deferred: “For all those who scratched and
clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many
who didn’t make it—those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or
another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future
generations—those young men and increasingly young women who we see
standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or
prospects for the future.”
82 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

On the impact on the Black psyche: “Even for those blacks who did make
it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fun-
damental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation,
the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor
has the anger and bitterness of those years . . . [The anger] find[s] voice in
the barbershop or around the kitchen table. . . . And occasionally it finds
voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.”
In characteristic jeremiadic fashion, Obama reaffirms his audience’s
belief in the promise of America, calling on both Blacks and Whites—all
Americans—to rededicate themselves to the realization of America’s destiny
and the perfection of the union. “What we know—what we have seen—is
that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we
have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we
can and must achieve tomorrow.” Further, in keeping with the religious
trappings of both the Black and the White American jeremiad, he links his
call to action to global religious ideology: “What is called for is nothing
more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand—
that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”
While the “Race Speech” taps into the basic structure of the Black jer-
emiad, in several significant ways it departs from that tradition. To begin
with, Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t convey a sense of impending doom and
destruction. Yes, failure to “come together” to talk about the common prob-
lems of education, employment, and health care that plague all citizens will
impede the social change that most Americans are desperately clamoring
for. But this line of reasoning conveys a very different emotional feeling
than the fear engendered by predictions of imminent destruction and dan-
ger. This was the hallmark of the jeremiad in the Antislavery Movement
as well as the racialized oratory of the twentieth century in which the jer-
emiad was often delivered to Black audiences, such as Malcolm X’s “The
Ballot or the Bullet” speech. And even King hinted at gloom and doom in
his “I Have a Dream” speech, warning that there will be “neither rest nor
tranquility” and “whirlwinds of revolt.”
Obama’s speech not only departs from the fiery zeal, the emotive lan-
guage, and the biting, hard candor characteristic of the Black jeremiadic
tradition, we also do not hear much of the rhythmic cadence of Tonal
Semantics emblematic of the Black rhetorical style, nor more than a few
vernacular tropes and phonological characteristics of African American
Language.44 None of this should be taken as a critique of this earlier style
of Black protest oratory (or of Obama, for that matter). As a Curtis Mayfield
twentieth-century people “movin on up” to self-realization after centuries
of societally imposed inferiority; as a Black nation within the White nation
in quest of a newfound sense of pride and self-determination; in a society
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 83

that was blind to Black suffering and lacking in the courage and political
will to address that suffering—given these concrete, historical conditions,
a bold, caustic, agitational, Black Vernacular driven rhetoric was called for,
as brilliantly argued in a pioneering work by Arthur Lee Smith (now Molefi
Kete Asante) in Rhetoric of Black Revolution (1969).45
In the archetypal Black jeremiad, Whites are told what they need to
do to redress Black grievances and thus revive America’s promise. These
instructions are often boldly stated, with the force of commanding, guilt-
induced directives. Obama chooses not to go there, abandoning the rhetori-
cal pathos of earlier Black jeremiads. Rather than using sweeping bombast
and pulling rhetorical heartstrings, he proceeds with calm, deliberate rea-
soning, seeking to elicit rational, thoughtful understanding and action that
will ultimately benefit the entire nation:

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means

acknowledging that what ails the African American community
does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy
of discrimination—and current incidents of discrimination, while
less overt than in the past—are real and must be addressed. Not
just with words, but with deeds—by investing in our schools and
our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring
fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this genera-
tion with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previ-
ous generations.

It is not only Whites but also Blacks who have some work to do if America
is to realize the promise and perfect the Union. Here is yet another example
of Obama making a fundamental departure from the classic Black jeremiad
where the message is usually directed solely at Whites and where there is
no critique or exhortation for Black people to take a certain amount of
personal responsibility for their condition. Or, rather, more accurately, the
critique and exhortation are not voiced in the public sphere but reserved
for intimate interactions in Black homes, mosques, churches, schools, com-
munity centers, and barber and beauty shops. In this racial uplift discourse,
delivered “at home,” the speaker may chastise Blacks for everything from
lack of Black pride, disrespect of Black women, adoption of White cultural
patterns and values, to eating “swine” and other foods believed to defi le
the Black body. In Obama’s case, airing the race’s dingy laundry was a
decided rhetorical risk that an earlier generation of Black orators, speaking
to a White or racially mixed audience, would not have taken. However, he
correctly gauged that this national 2008 Black audience would be receptive.
After all, many are living daily in communities rife with Black-on-Black
84 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

crime, baby daddies and baby mommas, and an educational achievement

gap spiraling out of control.

For the African American community, that path [to the more
perfect Union] means embracing the burdens of our past with-
out becoming victims of our past. . . . And it means taking full
responsibility for our own lives—by demanding more from our
fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading
to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges
and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb
to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can
write their own destiny.

Then he goes one step further, to a place that would never have been
heard in the classic Black jeremiad. He calls for Blacks to link our struggle
against current economic and social injustices with that of Whites. “It also
means binding our particular grievances—for better health care, and bet-
ter schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the
white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s
been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.” Those who listened
closely heard that Barack Obama is asking Black people to link their strug-
gle not only to that of struggling Whites but also to that of struggling
immigrants. In the context of the shifting and sometimes tense relations
involving Asian and Latino immigrants in historically Black communities,
Obama presents yet another bridge we need to cross. While this may appear
jarring to some Old Heads, it is logical to others who have always seen the
political potential in building coalitions of folks, those who, knowing the
particularly precarious position of Blacks, see allies everywhere.
Drawing on his personal character and credibility (ethos), Obama con-
nects America’s prophetic promise to his life’s journey and his family his-
tory, establishing his identity and authenticity—again, an element not in
the typical Black jeremiad, where the speaker generally eschews any pre-
sentation of his personal biography. Here the rhetorical strategy succeeds
in not simply reintroducing him to the American public but more crucially,
it displays the diverse, complex unfolding of the American promise—like
Langston Hughes, he “too, sing[s] America”:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman

from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather
who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during
World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber
assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 85

gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of

the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American
who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners. . . . I
have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of
every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and
for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country
on Earth is my story even possible.

He continues with his personal disclosure, characterizing his relationship

with Reverend Dr. Wright. Here Obama uses inductive reasoning (logos),
citing several specific instances to establish his general argument about
the logic of his close association with Reverend Wright. He catalogues a
wide range of noble actions and services. Wright “helped introduce me
to my Christian faith . . . [he] spoke to me about our obligations to love
one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor.” He lauds Wright’s
accomplishments in the Chicago urban community in his role as Pastor
of Trinity United Church of Christ as well as his leadership role in the
national Black community. Further, he knows Wright as a man who “not
once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any eth-
nic group in derogatory terms, or treat Whites with whom he interacted
with anything but courtesy and respect.” Obama’s powerful description
of a regular church service at Trinity, combined with a list of Wright’s
good works, induces the audience to Obama’s desired conclusion: Wright
is doing “God’s work here on Earth,” he uplifts the downtrodden, he has
an unfailing commitment to empowering the disempowered. At the same
time, Obama’s personal ethos demands that he honestly acknowledge
Wright’s “contradictions—the good and the bad,” his “profoundly distorted
view of this country,” and the “divisiveness” of his comments in the tele-
vised sermon excerpts.
This forthright characterization of Wright is juxtaposed with the candid
portrayal of Obama’s White grandmother, “a woman who helped raise me,
a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as
much as she loves anything in this world.” Yet she displays the same racial
prejudices and contradictions assigned to Wright: “a woman who once con-
fessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on
more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made
me cringe.” The disclosure enhances his credibility as the audience is made
to understand both Wright and Toot (Obama’s nickname for his grand-
mother; from Native Hawaiian kupuna wahine, or kuku/tutu wahine).46 Both
figures provide a human face to the snapshot of the “racial stalemate” that
prevents society from moving forward. They vividly and sadly exemplify
the thought patterns of Blacks and Whites from another moment in time,
86 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

a time that Obama, though fully understanding it, makes every effort to
distance himself from.
Symbolizing the unity that’s needed in the country, the end of the speech
rhetorically returns to its beginning, reiterating the charge to perfect the
Union: “This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation
has shown that it can always be perfected. . . . As so many generations have
come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty-one years
since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is
where the perfection begins.”
While the overall arc of the “Race Speech” is that of the Black jeremiad,
Obama made significant departures from this tradition. Speaking from
both a Black and a White (as well as a globally diverse) perspective on
race, he displayed a depth of understanding of multiple racial perspectives
and the past in which those perspectives are still mired—appropriately
and symbolically quoting William Faulkner, that son of the South, whose
Yoknapatawpha tales revealed to us that “the past isn’t dead and bur-
ied. In fact, it isn’t even past.” This was the metaphorical backdrop that
allowed him to portray and his audience to understand the persona of both
Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who had been a surrogate father to him for
two decades, and his beloved maternal grandmother, Toot, who had played
a major part in bringing this Black boy to manhood. It is significant and
a testimony to his power of understanding human nature that he did not
disown either of them, nor did he throw them under the bus. Those who
accused him of having done so were listening but didn’t hear. Drawing
on the courage and power of his love for and profound understanding of
these elders of his and imbued with the “faith of the fathers,” he allowed
a national audience to view Wright and Toot through his eyes, presenting
them in their symbolic glory and human limitations.

Conclusion: Searching for a

New Discourse on Race
Ultimately, then, the genius of the “Race Speech” lies in the fact that Obama
insightfully analyzed his Black and White audiences and selected a familiar
cultural touchstone, the jeremiad, and core, shared values embodied in the
American Dream and the prophetic tradition of Christianity. He framed it all
in careful arguments that were both personal (ethos) and logical (logos). He
remixed classical traditions in order to stamp his unique rhetorical imprint
on American public speaking conventions, reinscribing old materials to chart
a new and different trajectory for discussions of race in the twenty-first cen-
tury. In many ways, though heavily influenced by the transformational figure
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 87

of Malcolm X, he remixed the rhetoric of Malcolm and Martin in an effort

to create a new discourse on race. As Robert Hinton of H-AFRO-AM com-
mented, “He took Malcolm X’s jeremiad and turned it inside out” and thus
presented America “with an opportunity to act on its best principles.”47
While there were critiques of the “Race Speech” from Blacks, Whites,
and others across the racial (and political) spectrum, taken as a whole, the
responses were generally laudatory. Notwithstanding some critical points of
disagreement with aspects of Obama’s analysis, what he received particular
praise for was having publicly taken on the subject of race.48 His open, bold,
frank talk about race was, to some, the greatest legacy of the “Race Speech”
because it “finally allowed our nation to begin to move forward in a way
that we had been unable to before.”49 In just under 40 minutes, Obama
laid out the complexities and contradictions of race in the United States.
What we heard in this speech was not anywhere near the typical polarizing
positions of the past—or present. It was an honest, reflective, thoughtful
searching for a new discourse on race that provided us with a road map
to begin the process of racial healing.50 In much the same vein that Barack
Obama remixes the White and Black jeremiadic traditions in order to speak
to new people in a new time, he urges us to remix our race discourse in
such a way that we are no longer locked into blindly reproducing the racial
scripts of the past.51 This way, our approach will articulate with an emerging
postmodern, more ideologically flexible generation of Americans who never
doubted the possibility of a Black president.

NOTES
1. From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “Where Do We Go from Here?” delivered
at the 11th Annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia,
in August 1967. The full text of this speech, as well as a wealth of resources on Dr.
King, can be found at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute
at Stanford University, directed by Professor Clayborne Carson. Get familiar: http://
mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/. Last accessed: 09-02-11.
2. From Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, a.k.a. the “Race Speech,” deliv-
ered on March 18, 2008, in Philadelphia, PA. For a full transcript of the speech, see
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, ed., The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect
Union” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009, 237−251). You can also catch it on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo. Last accessed: 09-02-11.
3. Check out Joan Morgan’s insightful essay and analysis, “Black Like Barack,” in
Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009), pages 55−68. In complicating Barack’s “Blackness,” Mor-
gan provides an excellent example of the social construction of race and “Blackness”
in particular.
4. From Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, a.k.a. the “Race Speech.”
5. From Keli Goff ’s “Living the Dream” in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009), page 48.
6. Adam Mansbach runs down these events with incredible nuance in “The Audacity of
Post-Racism” in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009), pages 69–84.
88 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

7. Quoted in Derrick Z. Jackson, in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009, 233). Jackson’s “tri-

fecta” serves as an excellent ground-level analysis of these events.
8. Hendricks Jr.’s chapter can be found in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009), pages 155–183.
This quote is from page 162.
9. Ibid., 163.
10. Ibid., 166.
11. Ibid., 164.
12. You can check out this sermon online at: http://binside.typepad.com/binside_
tv/2008/03/reverend-jeremi.html. Last accessed: 09-02-11. It’s followed by CNN con-
tributor Roland Martin’s analysis of the sermon versus the media’s representation
of it. The controversial sections of the sermon are reprinted in Wikipedia, “Jeremiah
Wright Controversy,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Wright_controversy. Last
accessed: 02-01-11.
13. Controversial sections of this sermon are reprinted in Wikipedia, “Jeremiah Wright
Controversy,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah Wright controversy. Last accessed:
02-01-11. Check out Bill Moyer’s interview (April 25, 2008) with Reverend Wright
and his analysis of this sermon at: http://binside.typepad.com/binside_tv/reverend_
jeremiah_wright/. Last accessed: 09-02-11.
14. In Hendricks, Jr. in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009), page 169. Along similar lines, Ran-
dall Kennedy writes in The Persistence of the Color Line (New York: Pantheon, 2011)
that Wright’s statements contained “a useful message that was especially important
to articulate after the 9/11 attack. Reverend Wright’s message was that the United
States, too, is tainted by worldly sin—its imperialism (the Mexican-American War,
the conquest of the Philippines, the occupation of Haiti and Cuba); its dispossession
of the Indians; its subordination of blacks; its use of atomic weapons; its misadven-
tures in Vietnam, Chile, and Nicaragua; and still other misdeeds about which all too
many Americans are ignorant or indifferent.” (188).
15. Check Minister Paul Davis’s full comments at: http://ezinearticles.com/?Obamas-Pastor-
Jeremiah-Wright-Controversy-About-America—Rev-Wright-and-Obama-on-Race-and-
Politics&id=1056014. Last accessed: 09-02-11.
16. Hendricks, Jr. in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009), page 171.
17. In Keli Goff ’s “Living the Dream” in Sharpley-Whiting (2009), page 40.
18. Neoenslavement is a term used by a number of Black activists and intellectuals to
indicate that nineteenth-century emancipation did not free America’s enslaved African
population. Rather, it simply reintroduced slavery in a different form—segregation
laws and policies, employment discrimination, and so on. This period lasted from the
end of Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century,
with the passage of Civil Rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions such as the
1954 Brown v. Board decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional. However,
there remain activists today who still use the term neoenslavement to indicate that
African slave descendants are still not free, owing to the continuing existence of rac-
ism and discrimination in employment and other areas.
19. David Walker, who was legally free since African descendant children assumed the
status of their mothers, is considered to have written the first uncompromising pro-
test against enslavement. It was a bold and ultimately dangerous thing to do. A price
was placed on his head by slaveholders, and he was found dead in his shop on June
28, 1830.
20. See Jackson’s “Nuanced Genius” in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009), page 118.
21. Born Stokely Carmichael in Trinidad in 1941, he grew up in New York City, attended
New York’s well-known Bronx High School of Science, and graduated from Howard
University where he became active in the Civil Rights Movement. He was head of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and for a brief period held an
honorary position in the Black Panther Party. Credited for thrusting the slogan “Black
Power” into popular discourse, which he shouted out during a Civil Rights march in
the South in 1966, he subsequently wrote a best-selling book by that title, coauthored
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 89

with Charles Hamilton. Though often vilified in the mainstream White media, Carmi-
chael was immensely popular with Blacks, who saw him as a gifted, heroic orator,
skilled in articulating their problems—and their promise. Internationally honored for
his activism and commitment to social justice and freedom for African people, he was
also widely celebrated for what was dubbed a “revolutionary union,” his marriage to
the late South African (then in exile) singer-activist Miriam Makeba. Founder of the
All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, Carmichael left America, became a citizen of
Guinea, and in 1978 changed his name to Kwame Ture in recognition of the intel-
lectual and political influence of his heroes and mentors, Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou
Toure. Kwame Ture died in Guinea in 1998. His compelling autobiography, Ready for
Revolution (with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell), was published posthumously in 2003.
22. Benign neglect of America’s racial problem was a policy formulated by Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, chief domestic adviser to Richard Nixon. In a secret memorandum to
Nixon, Moynihan recommended nonenforcement of legislation on voting laws, laws
prohibiting discrimination against Blacks and minorities in employment, laws outlaw-
ing school segregation and various other antidiscrimination laws that the federal gov-
ernment had clear legal powers to enforce. Although Black intellectuals and leaders
denounced “benign neglect” as “criminal negligence,” nonetheless, it prevailed.
The “first” Reconstruction ended in 1877, with the federal government’s abandon-
ment of former slaves to southern governments, which promptly rolled back the freed-
men’s political gains, ushered in US-style apartheid and began an era of lynching and
brutal assaults against Blacks which would not be redressed until the Black Freedom
Struggle of the 1960s. Despite some economic, political, and educational gains in the
l960s and l970s, the mission was incomplete. There followed a treacherous push back
as the country shifted to a conservative climate of stagnation and dreams deferred—
a move, according to the late Ronald Walters and other political theorists, that was
solidified in 1980 by the election of Ronald Reagan and the subsequent Reagan-Bush
years (l980−1992) in the White House. The year 1980 effectively marked the end of
the “second” Reconstruction. See Ronald Walter’s Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora:
The African American Linkage (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).
23. A must-read on all of these issues is longtime Civil Rights advocate and legal scholar
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(New York: The New Press, 2010). Alexander shows convincingly that, while explicit
racial discrimination is now illegal, it continues through employment discrimination,
denial of voting rights and public benefits, educational inequality, and so on, particu-
larly for those labeled “felons.”
24. While some Blacks may have questioned Obama’s Blackness, Whites more often ques-
tioned his Americanness. Although Blacks are citizens of America, there is a lingering
association, albeit implicit, that American = White. In an intriguing study conducted
during the presidential campaign, psychologists Devos, Ma, and Gaffud (2008) posed
the question, “Is Barack Obama American enough to be the next President?” Using
San Diego State University students as their research population, which was “slightly
polarized toward Democrats or liberals,” the researchers asked the students to com-
pare Barack Obama and Tony Blair in terms of the extent to which they perceived
each as being American. When they focused on their racial identity, Blair was con-
sidered more American than Obama. However, when they focused on Obama’s and
Blair’s personal identity, this association was reduced or in some cases altogether
eradicated. The researchers concluded that while the “concept American was more
strongly linked to the White target than to the Black target,” when candidates are
“construed as embodying the American identity, they are more likely to be actively
supported.”
25. In the “Race Speech,” Barack Obama read a passage from page 294 of his book,
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Crown Publishers,
1995, 2004). In the passage, Barack universalizes the Black struggle (and also helps
others to perceive Black people’s humanity). Describing his first service at Trinity,
90 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

he wrote: “And in that single note—hope!—I heard something else; at the foot of
that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories
of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and
Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories—
of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story; the blood that had
spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day,
seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and
into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal,
black and more than black.”
26. See Grace Sims Holt’s chapter, “Stylin’ outta the Black Pulpit” in Thomas Kochman, ed.,
Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in urban Black America (Urbana, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 1972, 189–204).
27. This term is used to characterize the organized mass movement for Black empower-
ment that began with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, spearheaded by Rosa
Parks’s historic refusal to surrender her seat to a White man in 1955. The Black
Freedom Struggle encompasses the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power
Movement. The decline of the Struggle by 1980 is generally attributed to attacks,
assassinations, imprisonment, and the exile of Black leaders and activists, local as
well as the more nationally known—King, Malcolm, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton,
Mark Clark, Angela Davis, Reverend Benjamin Chavis, Assata Shakur, and Eldridge
Cleaver.
28. Born Hubert Brown in 1943 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he got his nickname Rap
because of his oratorical ability, which, according to his political autobiography, Die
Nigger Die! (1969), served him well growing up in the streets. He entered Southern
University at the age of 15. Active in the Black Freedom Struggle, he chaired the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC.). Although many activists of
that era were under surveillance and attack by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, Rap became a
particular target because of his powerful, acerbic style of oratory, shot through with
vernacular language and signifying discourse—perceived by government authorities as
incendiary and capable of inciting violence. In summer 1967, he spoke from the roof-
top of Detroit’s old Dexter Theater to hundreds of Blacks assembled on the streets,
in the aftermath of the worst of what the Kerner Report (1968) would come to call
“civil disorders.” Rap said, “Look what yall done did. Instead of calling this DEE-troit,
uhma hafta call this DEE-stroyed.” He converted to Islam and for more than 30 years
has been Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. However, in 2002, he was convicted of the
murder of a deputy sheriff and is currently serving life without parole—a conviction
his supporters believe is unjustified, politically motivated retribution for his activism
in another lifetime.
29 See Smitherman, Daniel, and Jeremiah’s “ ‘Makin a Way outta No Way’: The Prov-
erb Tradition in the Black Experience” in Journal of Black Studies 17(4), June 1987,
482−508.
30. Ibid., 505.
31. In Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on reclaiming the American dream
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2006, 245).
32. Multilingual societies characteristically employ a language that makes communication
possible with those who live outside one’s own hood. It’s a language that allows a
speaker to talk to a wider audience. In the United States, the LWC may be loosely
equated with a variety of American English problematically referred to as Standard
English. The troubling links between “standard” English, Whiteness, and articulate-
ness are described throughout this book.
33. The theme of Black Language’s “controversial” status runs throughout this book.
Whether we’re discussing specific linguistic features, nonverbal communication, or
language education, Black Language continues to be monitored and maligned by
dominant culture. Despite this, President Obama regularly articulates “Blackness”
through the use of cultural tropes and symbols—it’s part of his communicative M.O.
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 91

Time and again we see him giving subtle nods to his Black electorate, be it through
cultural-linguistic symbols or rhetorical references to Black intellectual and philosoph-
ical traditions. Not only did his “making a way out of no way” reference the Black
proverb tradition, he also recast one of Martin Luther King’s famous observations
that the great American paradox is that, as a nation of faith, we remain deeply seg-
regated in our houses of worship. Obama explained that White America’s surprise
at Reverend Wright’s anger was simply a reminder “of the old truism that the most
segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.” This “old truism” could
be attributed to Martin Luther King’s 1958 observations in Stride toward Freedom: The
Montgomery Story (quoted in James M. Washington’s edited collection, A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., New York: Harp-
erCollins, 1991, 479): “Unfortunately, most of the major denominations still practice
segregation in local churches, hospitals, schools, and other church institutions. It is
appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on
Sunday morning, the same hour when many are standing to sing: ‘In Christ There Is
No East Nor West.’ ” Although segregation is no longer legal, Obama and other Black
Americans often recast King’s observation to highlight the contradiction of “Chris-
tian” America’s ongoing struggle with residential and social segregation.
34. This grand vision was rooted both in the Puritans’ religious faith and in their
enhanced sense of English nationalism. Whenever Native Americans died off—due to
European diseases and warfare—the Puritans believed that it was God’s will, paving
the way for their establishment of the “city upon a hill.” See, for example, Robert F.
Berkhofer, Jr.’s The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to
the Present (New York: Vintage Press, 1979) and Francis J. Bremer’s, John Winthrop:
America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
35. See Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad (Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1978, 11−12, 18).
36. Bercovitch (1978) writes: “What first attracted me to the study of the jeremiad was
my astonishment, as a Canadian immigrant, at learning about the prophetic history
of America. Not of North America, for the prophecies stopped short at the Canadian
and Mexican borders, but of a country, that despite its arbitrary territorial limits,
could read its destiny in its landscape, and a population that, despite its bewildering
mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called an American mission,
and could invest that patent fiction with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual
appeal of a religious quest.” (11).
37. See Bercovitch (1978) and David Howard-Pitney’s The African American Jeremiad:
Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).
38. Howard-Pitney (2005), pages 6−7.
39. Bercovitch (1978), pages 15−16, 84.
40. See William Jeremiah Moses’s Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University,
1982, 31).
41. You can read the full text of Frederick Douglass’s “The Meaning of July Fourth to the
Negro” at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927t.html. Last accessed: 09-02-11.
You might also wanna check out Philip S. Foner’s five-volume set The Life and Writ-
ings of Frederick Douglass (New York: International Publishers, 1975).
42. According to Georgetown University professor and public intellectual Michael Eric
Dyson in “A President-Preacher From Anaphora to Epistrophe,” Obama’s “audacity
of hope” was first uttered by Dyson’s late, beloved pastor Frederick Sampson and
repeated by Jeremiah Wright in a sermon Obama heard (January 19, 2009). Dys-
on’s article is available online at: http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/a-presidentp-
reacher-from-anaphora-to-epistrophe/2009/01/18/1232213445525.html?page=2. Last
accessed: 09-02-11.
43. The full text of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech can be found at the
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University,
92 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

directed by Professor Clayborne Carson. Don’t sleep on this: http://mlk-kpp01.stan-

ford.edu/. Last accessed: 09–02-11.
44. Smitherman coined the term Tonal Semantics in Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of
Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977) to refer to the use of speech rhythm,
intonation, melodious repetition—that is, voice sound—to convey meaning in Black
oratorical style. In the hands of a skillful rhetor, the sound becomes as important as
and helps to convey the sense of the message.
Of course, as we wrote in the opening chapter, when addressing primarily Black
audiences, Obama draws heavily on the Black Oral Tradition, including the Oral Tra-
dition of the Black Church, in particular. Even in the “Race Speech,” while not deeply
engaging in the Tradition’s wide range of devices, Obama draws on what Michael
Eric Dyson (2009) refers to as “anaphora,” or “repeating the same word or phrase at
the beginning of successive sentences.” Dyson writes: “The complex signifying, ver-
bal devices, oratorical talents and rhetorical mastery taken for granted in the black
church, for instance, are largely unknown outside it. Yet a linguistic trace in Obama’s
speech leads straight to the black pulpit.” (http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/a-
presidentpreacher-from-anaphora-to-epistrophe/2009/01/18/1232213445525.html.
Last accessed: 04-21-12).
45. Arthur L. Smith (Molefi Kete Asante). Rhetoric of Black Revolution (Boston: Allyn and
Bacon, 1969).
46. According to Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986), kuku can refer to grandmother, grandfather,
grandaunt, or any relative or close friend of a grandparent’s generation. It is pro-
nounced with the English t sound, kuku >tutu. They indicate that it is “apparently a
new word as it has not been noted in legends and chants.” (177).
47. H-AFRO-AM is a discussion network for scholars of African American Studies. Robert
Hinton’s comment was made on March 24, 2008.
48. Adam Mansbach captures the essence of the critique in his thought-provoking essay,
“The Audacity of Post-Racism” in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009) when he writes, from a
White perspective: “I was with Obama until he let white people off the hook. Though
I grasped the political necessity of the move, my expectations of this man were suffi-
ciently high that it was disheartening to hear him fudge the difference between insti-
tutional racism and white bitterness.” (69). Mansbach’s main issue with the speech is
the false equation: “Racism cuts in both directions. Anyone can be its victim, just as any-
one can refuse to perpetrate it. . . . Obama’s insights about white anger were salient, but
to characterize ire at affirmative action and at the thought that others might think them
prejudiced as ‘similar’ to the frustration felt by the victims of entrenched structural
racism was disingenuous, and even irresponsible.” (74−75). Mansbach concludes with
thoughts on how Whites might interpret Obama’s speech as “post-race”: “ ‘Post-race’
suggests, not without an air of self-congratulation, that we are moving toward an
acceptance of the multifaceted nature of identity—learning to assimilate, for instance,
the idea that a human being can be both Kenyan and Kansan. This may be true. The
problem is that ‘post-race’ inevitably implies post-racism. To conflate the two ignores
the very nature of oppression.” (76).
Randall Kennedy does not aim to deride the speech but was unimpressed and
referred to much of the praise (quite derisively) as “Obamamania.” Writing in The
Persistence of the Color Line (New York: Pantheon, 2011), he states that while many
have “lauded the speech for its intellectual ambitiousness,” he doesn’t see “what so
impresses them.” (119). He continues: “In neither its rhetoric nor its analysis nor its
prescriptions did the speech offer much beyond a carefully calibrated effort to defuse
a public-relations crisis. . . . Much of what Obama had to say is, frankly, banal. To speak
out loud now the sentences quoted above, removed from the fears and yearnings of
March 2008, is to encounter rhetoric that should be seen as notably thin.” (121).
But that’s precisely it—to lift the speech, any speech, out of its immediate politi-
cal context would be a misreading of the speech. Kennedy’s comments are striking,
 Makin a Way Outta No Way 93

especially since in almost ever other case of his thought-provoking and well-argued
book, he takes great pain to discuss particular events within the context of the
racialized opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency.
Though Kennedy takes Cornel West to task, perhaps he might agree with West
on one point. As West commented, “As a speech given to a racially immature soci-
ety, it was brilliant” (quoted in William Jelani Cobb’s Barack Obama and The Paradox
of Progress (Walker, 2010, 32). Like Mansbach, Kennedy and Cobb both point out
moments of “false equivalence” in the speech, but as Cobb notes: “Those didn’t mat-
ter much. . . . The speech was too slickly phrased and deftly argued for its flaws to
register to many listeners.” (30). In our view, Barack Obama sized up his audience
masterfully by taking into account most Americans’ intellectual “immaturity” in race
matters and delivered a speech that could speak to Black and White audiences, both
emotionally and rhetorically.
49. In Keli Goff ’s “Living the Dream” in Sharpley-Whiting, ed. (2009), page 53.
50. In terms of racial healing, note the perspective of Stanford University professor and
former secretary of state Condoleeza Rice: “I think it was important that [Obama]
gave [the Race Speech] for a whole host of reasons. . . . There is a paradox for this
country and a contradiction of this country and we still haven’t resolved it. . . . But
what I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and
had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them”
(Reuters.com, March 29, 2008).
51. As we approach the 2012 elections, many wonder if Barack Obama can “show and
prove” on race matters in the United States. As Michael Eric Dyson famously com-
mented, Obama “runs from race like a Black man running from the police.” However,
as Randall Kennedy argues in The Persistence of the Color Line (New York: Pantheon,
2011), it is questionable, politically speaking, if Barack Obama should be more vocal
on issues of race: “Given the antiblack racism that is so ingrained in American cul-
ture, Obama’s reticence is probably the most realistic course of action under the cir-
cumstances. . . . On no topic is his caution more evident than race relations. Because
that topic remains volatile and because his blackness makes him particularly vulner-
able to demagoguery, Obama avoids confronting the American race question, thus
underscoring its central but repressed and paradoxical presence in the political culture
of the United States.” (238–239).
4
“The Fist Bump Heard
‘Round the World”
How Black Communication
Becomes Controversial
I have to be greeted properly. Fist bump, please.1
—Michelle Obama

We wondered, were white folks really so ignorant,

our worlds so segregated, that they couldn’t tell
what a good old-fashioned dap looked like?2
—Patrice Evans (www.theroot.com)

Certain types of African American speech are currently

being criticized, and to some extent, censured. . . . Much of
the language being criticized is not understood by many
of those doing the criticizing. . . . Controversial features
of African American verbal culture must be theorized
by those with the linguistic expertise to do so in order
to counteract the many misbegotten discussions and
analyses that are already in circulation. 3
—Arthur Spears

On Tuesday night June 3, 2008, at a campaign rally in St. Paul, Minnesota,

Senator Barack Hussein Obama sealed the Democratic nomination for presi-
dent of the United States. In celebration of this historic victory, he and his
wife, Michelle, hugged. Then Michelle extended her fist to give him a pound.
Like any fluent Black Language speaker, Barack responded with a pound,
extending his fist to meet hers. Used for decades all over African America,
on the regular, the Obamas’ pound sent shockwaves throughout mainstream
White America. Unsure what to call this “exotic” Black gesture, White folks,
both media playaz and everyday people, came up with all kinda labels—from

94
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 95

Figure 4.1 Barry Blitt, “The Politics of Fear,” cover of the New Yorker, July 21, 2008.

“fist bump” (also “fist-bump”), “fist pump,” “fist thump,” “fist jab,” “terrorist fist
jab,” “fist dap,” “fist pound,” “fist-to-fist thumbs up,” and “closed-fist high five”
to “knuckle bump,” “knuckle buckle,” “knuckle knot,” “knocked knuckles”—
and more. A Washington Post article referred to “the first couple” as “the fist
couple” and announced that “it was the fist bump heard ‘round the world.”4
96 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

“Like a Bunch of Anthropologists Stumbling upon

Some Aliens on Mars”: The Cultural-Linguistic Gap
between White and Black America
But first, y’all, before we go anotha fuhtha, let’s git the nomenclature right.
The correct term is pound, not fist bump. Chiding the media for using this
term, the online journal The Trickle-Down posted:

Please mainstream media workers and journalists and newscast-

ers of America, it’s not called a “fist bump,” it’s called giving dap
or a pound. . . . Where have you all been culturally for the last . . . 40
years or so that you have never heard those terms? As presumably
professionally trained journalists and media workers, who are sup-
posedly covering nationwide cultural trends and events, has this
really escaped your radar so long? “Fist bump”? That sounds ter-
rible, in league with the terms “baby bump” and “bumping uglies.”
The term sounds like a bunch of anthropologists stumbling upon
some aliens on Mars . . . “and they engaged in a ‘fist bump.’ ”5

In Black Communication, The Pound is a gesture of solidarity and comrade-

ship. It is also used in a celebratory sense and sometimes as a nuanced
greeting among intimates and/or those with a shared social history. As
previously noted, you might also refer to it as dap or givin dap. However,
Black Vernacular purists only use dap to refer to fists touching in a verti-
cal, not a horizontal position, and if you comin correct, you give dap twice
in succession, the first time with one person’s fist on top followed by a
second time with the other person’s fist on top.
Mainstream White America’s unfamiliarity with The Pound—as well as
many other aspects of Black communication—persists in this supposedly
“postracial” twenty-first century. Scholarly work has shown that, both in its
nonverbal and verbal forms, Black Language continues to be misunderstood
by the White mainstream. In a study on the “dynamics of a Black audi-
ence,” scholar Annette Powell Williams concluded: “Cultural ‘understanding’
can only come about after a long period of involvement with a group. The
subtle ways in which black people communicate with each other, unper-
ceived by the outsider—or, if perceived, likely to be misinterpreted—are
nevertheless the cues that make for effective communication.”6 Although
Powell Williams’s study was conducted four decades ago, her conclusion is
dead on hit today. Unfortunately, White folks’ confusion about and misin-
terpretation of the Obamas’ pound underscores the old adage, “the more
things change, the more they remain the same.” That is, despite the fact
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 97

that we’re living in a hi-tech media age, the cultural-linguistic gap between
White and Black America remains because it is the consequence of the lack
of a “long period of involvement” between the two groups.
There is a real structural barrier to cultural interpretation, no matter
how many hours you sit in front of the “boob tube” swimming in Black
Culture. We live in a country where residential segregation remains the
order of the day, and more than half a century after Brown vs. Board found
school segregation unconstitutional, all too few K-l2 schools are racially
integrated or racially balanced. As a minority in a White majority country,
for survival sake, Blacks are forced to learn to be bicultural/bilingual. (Of
course, not all succeed in mastering these two cultural-linguistic worlds.)
Furthermore, other ethnic groups (Latinos, Asians, etc.) in the United
States are also forced to learn to be bicultural/bilingual. The same societal
pressure does not exist for many Whites, who unless they choose to go
outta they way, may live and die and know little or nothing about the com-
municative culture of Blacks and other groups.
To be sure, racism yet plagues the republic as it moves into the second
decade of the twenty-first century. While a good deal of racial bias can be
attributable to just plain ignorance of the Other, racist perspectives are usu-
ally evident not in folks’ inability to decode Black cultural signs but, rather,
in the kinds of interpretations one makes when faced with the blank page
of their own ignorance. With an infinite realm of possible explanations, the
analyst is obligated to ask the question: Why that particular interpretation?
White America’s ambivalence toward Black modes of communication—be it
a simple pound, an average nigga, or a bad muthafucka (all discussed in this
chapter)—is ultimately best understood within a framework that considers
language as a primary site of cultural struggle and as a proxy for multiple
forms of discrimination. After all, as much linguistic and anthropological
research has shown, how we feel about a given language, more often than
not, reflects how we feel about its speakers. (Read that again.)

The “Hezbollah Fist-Jab” and Other Wild-Ass

Verbal Assaults: (Mis)Understanding
“Black Folks 2.0”
White ignorance was revealed not only in the misnaming of this Black cultural
communicative gesture but also and, ultimately more importantly, in misunder-
standing the meaning of the gesture. On the Internet, in the news media, and
in everyday people’s conversations, The Pound was characterized as symboliz-
ing militancy, violence, and a terrorist Muslim ritual. On Fox News’s America’s
98 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Pulse, television host E. D. Hill referred to the Obamas’ gesture as a “terrorist

fist jab.”7 Obama’s mythical Muslim connection was symbolized by The Pound
being dubbed a “Hezbollah fist-jab.” The original source of this wild-ass ver-
bal assault appears to have been a posting on HumanEvents.com whose home
page bills it as “leading conservative media since 1944.” In this posting, the
reader commented that “Michelle is not as ‘refined’ as Obama at hiding her
TRUE feelings about America—etc. Her Hezbollah style fist-jabbing.”8
White folks was already mystified and confused by this presidential can-
didate with the “funny name” whose mother was White and whose father
was a citizen of Kenya; who had grown up in an “exotic” place—Hawai’i
(never mind that it is one of the “United” States and has been since 1959,
albeit contentiously so)9; who had spent some of his childhood years in
another “exotic” place—Indonesia; whose religion was believed to be Islam
(never mind that he had, on numerous occasions, proclaimed his Christian
faith and had spent some two decades as a member of Trinity United
Church of Christ under the Pastorship of Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright).
Now here the Black guy come comin up in the campaign with this weird
“fist bump”—initiated, no less, by his slave descendant wife from the South
Side Chi-Town ghetto, who might be a militant Black Nationalist holdover
from the Black Power Movement. (White folks, we feel you; in retrospect,
all of it may have been a bit much for y’all to process.) Thus the media and
everyday conversations were rife with speculations about the Obamas’ use
of The Pound, at worst, as a symbol of solidarity with Islamic terrorists,
or at best, as an expression of a Black American “hate Whitey” sentiment
(echoing another White folks’ myth that a tape existed of Michelle casti-
gating “Whitey”; however, to date, nobody has ever produced the tape).
In contrast to the negative reactions in some White quarters, African
Americans overwhelmingly applauded the Obamas’ pound (at least initially).
Sistas in beauty shops and hair-braiding salons everywhere high-fived and
exchanged their own pounds of tribute to Michelle, “our brilliant, bad Sista,”
for taking the lead in initiating this gesture with her man. Many Blacks had
been skeptical about what they referred to as Obama’s “Blackness” (after all, he
is “half-White,” as many Black folk put it, and not the descendant of enslaved
Africans and the neoenslavement experience like millions of other African
Americans). For these sistas and brothas, The Pound indicated that at last the
“boy is showing his Black-hand side” (as one Baptist church deacon put it).
Black author and public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates said that “it thrilled a
lot of black folks,” noting that previous generations of Blacks suppressed this
kind of Black communication for fear of “looking too black” in mainstream
settings. Coates concluded that “it’s liberating to be able to run for president
as a black man. . . . Barack is like Black Folks 2.0.”10 Even boojie Blacks raved
about the Obamas’ pound. On JackAndJillPolitics.com, whose home page bills
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 99

it as “a black bourgeoisie perspective on U.S. politics,” one reader commented:

“When I saw them give each other dap, I was like ‘Hell yeah!’ ”11
Notwithstanding the negativity and disturbing reactions in some White
quarters, there were others who celebrated the event. As one writer
commented:

The Obama pound, exchanged between Michelle and Barack on

Tuesday night, marked a historic moment. Yeah, there’s that whole
first black nominee for president thing. But more significant is
the fact that the greeting which has been described by confused
white journalists as a “fist bump,” “a frat-tastic fist bump,” and a
“Hezbollah style fist-jabbing” is finally being introduced to main-
stream culture. The introduction of “The Pound” into our national
vocabulary will have ripple effects. . . . People previously unfamiliar
with “The Pound” are seeing the world in a whole new way.12

David Givens, Director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane,

Washington, found the Obamas’ pound “very touching. It was an elegant lit-
tle non-verbal moment and it gave us a view into their relationship.”13 Karen
Bradley, researcher and at the time visiting professor at the University of
Maryland, told the Washington Post that the “fist bump” seemed more “spon-
taneous and authentic than the hug” and went on to note: “He’s looking
right at her, she’s looking right at him—it’s a partnership, it’s ‘We did it.’ ”14
Rachel Sklar (Huffington Post) indicated that she and viewers were “happy
to see that kind of genuine, affectionate moment between the nation’s
fastest-rising power couple.”15 Borrowing the phrase “fist bump of hope”
from an Internet posting, the NY Daily News penned the article, “Barack and
Michelle Obama’s ‘Fist Bump of Hope’ Shows Them Silly in Love.” The article
quotes psychologist Drew Western, author of The Political Brain: The Role of
Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation: “People saw their willingness to
display their affection in the way they really do—at home, or in private
moments.” The article also quotes psychologist Judy Kuriansky, who stated
that “America wants to see what’s going on in the relationship. . . . [It] was
very hip, very cool, an ‘I’m-with-it’ move. It’s almost cocky.”16

National and World Fist Bump Day: The

“Fist Bump” Goes Global (and Viral)
The news media and White mainstream folks might not have been in the
know on June 3, 2008, but they got busy wit a quickness. Articles, pictures
on the Internet, and commentaries about The Pound started sprouting up
100 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

everywhere, showing Whites in a variety of situations and activities using

the gesture—playing golf, kayaking. Several schools in Hawai’i, concerned
about the H1N1 virus, changed the traditional graduation handshake to
The Pound.17 Writing in the New York Times on June 11, 2008, journalist
Jim Rutenberg noted:

Um, people. Th is is a common gesture, and its use is not lim-

ited to Democrats with unusual names. In 2001 it was used by
Carleton S. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive—
now advising Senator John McCain—and Michael D. Capellas,
then the Compaq chief executive, to salute the completion of
their merger. And in 2006, former President George Bush shared
a fi st bump with Anna Kournikova at a celebrity tennis event—
and he was 82 at the time.18

According to Frank Rich of the New York Times (July 27, 2008), USA Today
noted that fist bumps had become the rage among “young (nonterrorist)
American businessmen.”19 A YouTube video demonstrated instructions for
The Pound in four moves, the first of which is to bend your elbow at an
82-degree angle!20 On Reliable Sources the Sunday after the Obamas’ cel-
ebrated pound, the program host brought up the subject of what he
referred to as the “knuckle bump.” He then ended the show by giving a
pound to one of the guests (a White male), who accompanied his pound
with “Word.”21 And at least one foreign head of state got in on The Pound
frenzy. A New York Times photo captured what wound up being an awkward
moment when then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy attempted to execute
The Pound with an unsuspecting Obama, who had anticipated a handshake
and extended his palm instead.22
And, of course, with our hyperracial lenses on, Obama was taken to
task on Internet blogs and cable news networks for “refusing” to give a
pound to an elementary school White boy who had requested it—or so it
was thought. A closer viewing of the classroom setting where the alleged
slight of this young White boy occurred revealed that the kid had asked
Obama to “sign my hand” and raised his fist for Obama to sign it. Obama
then said that his mother might not like that—“She’ll be like, ‘What is the
dirt on your hand ?” He then autographed pictures the children had been
drawing.23 Despite the initial drama of misunderstanding and misinter-
pretation that prevailed in White mainstream culture about the so-called
“fist bump”, in the final analysis it seem like everybody and they momma
wanted to be down.
All the hoopla about the Obamas’ pound led to a call to establish National
Fist Bump Day on June 3 each year and to a more global movement to
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 101

establish World Fist Bump Day each July 7. On the former, organizers
posted the following on NationalFistBumpDay.com in 2009:

On June 3rd, 2008, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle took part
in what immediately became known as “the fist bump heard ‘round
the world.” Though it was an intensely personal and affectionate
gesture of love and respect at a pivotal moment in Obama’s presi-
dential campaign, it firmly placed the fist bump on the national
stage. In the following days and weeks, the fist bump took the
country by storm. Though the “knuckle bump” had been used for
years, it had never been used so publicly, or by such an impor-
tant figure. . . . Nearly a year later, a group of like-minded people
got together to commemorate Obama’s grand gesture, but also to
take the fist bump to a higher level, one above partisan politics
and social divides. For one day we call for Americans, and perhaps
even global citizens, to put aside their differences—be they class,
race, religion or values—and show their respect with a little bump.
Sometimes all the world needs is a little human touch, a little flesh
to flesh action, and a little understanding.

SO THIS JUNE 3RD, SHOW THE WORLD SOME LOVE

AND BUMP IT!

And while you’re at it, check out our store for some
great National Fist Bump Day TM gear. 24

The founder of the movement for World Fist Bump Day is Thomas
Sandberg, who says he is “a Norwegian living in USA . . . an artist and an
author” and that he had “tried to raise the issue [of the Fist Bump] 3 years
ago” but to no avail. However, he is now “giving it a second try” since
“even the president seems to buy into this, plus many celebrities and oth-
ers.” Unlike National Fist Bump Day organizers, the bottom line rationale
in Sandberg’s call for an alternative to the handshake is not so much rep-
pin for peace and brotherhood (and tryna make an extra dollar!) as for
hygiene and health:

More and more people are bumping fists as a form of greeting. I

think time has come to make the Fist Bump an acceptable alter-
native to the handshake. The main reason I started this move-
ment is not related to politics or any deeper meaning of the Fist
102 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Bump or its origin. I’m concerned with the health aspect of a

handshake. It’s been proven beyond doubt that germs swapped
in a handshake is one of the main ways people contract a wide
range of viruses . . . [A] Fist Bump . . . is a fi ne gesture between two
people. You’re still acknowledging and focusing on giving sole
attention to the other person and by timing it right with the
proper touch it can still be a special moment.25

If a National Fist Bump Day and a World Fist Bump Day wasn’t enough,
there’s even something for folks who spend their days and nights out there
in the blogosphere. We now have a World #tweetbump Day! (Tellin you,
can’t make this shit up). Founded by public relations and media consultant
Sarah Evans, World #tweetbump Day “is inspired by President Obama’s pub-
lic fist bump” and is a day “dedicated to putting aside differences, embrac-
ing one another as human beings and spreading some good cheer.” Evans
explains: “While National Fist Bump Day is great for face-to-face interac-
tions, it leaves those of us in the virtual world a bit ‘bumpless.’ Therefore
I’m unofficially partnering with National Fist Bump Day and declaring June
3, 2009 World #tweetbump Day on Twitter.”26
It’s unclear how the movement for National, World, or Twitterverse Fist
Bump Day is doing at this stage (the national group posted a “Happy Fist
Bump Day” for June 3, 2010). But mos def, the Obamas’ pound was the
“fist bump heard ‘round the world.”

Michelle Obama: Pound for Pound

Barack’s Biggest Fan
For their part, the Obamas seemed to take the “mass hysteria” about their
Black communicative gesture in stride. Then-candidate Barack, ever Mr.
Cool, appeared unfazed and oblivious to all the drama about their use of
a gesture that can be witnessed countless times every day in Black com-
munities across the nation. Crediting Michelle with the impetus for their
special historic moment, he said that “it captures what I love about my
wife. There’s an irreverence about her and sense that for all the hoopla, I’m
her husband and sometimes we’ll do silly things.” 27
In Michelle’s case, her response to the mania over The Pound contributed
greatly to the redemption of her image at the time, muting conservative
attempts to paint her as an anti-American militant. The criticism stemmed
from a convoluted misinterpretation of a comment she had made early on
in the campaign, in which she noted that for the first time she was proud
of her country—that is, for assessing Barack the man, not Barack the Black
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 103

man. It was actually intended as a compliment acknowledging the develop-

ing sophistication of some American voters for realizing King’s vision of
looking beyond color to the “content of [a person’s] character.”
Ever comfortable with who and why she is, Michelle launched her
redemption-by-pound on June 18, 2008, when she cohosted the popular
daytime show The View. From Jump, she told her female cohosts: “I have
to be greeted properly. Fist bump, please.” As they exchanged pounds all
around, she noted that this is now “my signature bump. But let me tell
you, I’m not that hip. I got that from the young staff. That’s the new high-
five.” Entertainer and actress Whoopi Goldberg, one of the regular cohosts
on The View, in her own inimitable comedic way, lambasted the foolish hys-
teria over the Obamas’ pound. After all the women had greeted Michelle
“properly,” Whoopi mocked the negativity: “I’m sorry, what did that mean?
Should I be worried about doing that with you?” By immediately calling
lighthearted and positive attention to The Bump and describing herself as
unhip (read: harmless), Michelle, with the help of Whoopi, took the air out
of any further negative criticism that could have possibly been directed
at her. With this move, Michelle scored points on both the political and
personal levels. On a personal level, as Maureen Dowd concluded, Michelle
“scored a pre-emptive hit both with her chic style . . . and with her playful
fist pump [sic]. . . . The dap or pound, as it’s also called, was a natural and
beguiling moment that showed the country that, even though she started
out as her husband’s boss and has a resume that matches his, she likes
him and is rooting for him.”28

Crossin over Like Allen Iverson: Black

Communication in the Public Sphere
The Pound was first introduced into mainstream Black Culture in the late
1970s/early1980s as Hip Hop Culture spread out from its New York home
to Blacks all across the country. Like Hip Hop, The Pound was also adopted
by many multiracial urban youths. The dap preceded The Pound, having
been introduced into Black Culture in the 1960s by African American sol-
diers fighting in The Nam.
In these days when The Pound and the high-five have gone global, it’s
well to remember that Black nonverbal (and verbal) communication has
always had an ambivalent status in White mainstream culture. What
White mainstream media once referred to as “palm slapping” among
Blacks has evolved into the high-five and spread out from its Black Culture
roots. It was once perceived of as the province of “street” Blacks hangin
out on the corners of Harlem, South Side Chicago, Black Bottom Detroit,
104 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

and other urban centers peopled by the Great Migration of Blacks from
the rural South in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the gesture
of what Blacks called “givin skin” and “givin five” was not the sole prov-
ince of street people in those urban centers, nor did it originate there.
Rather, givin skin/givin five was widely used by all groups throughout
Black speech communities (although it was sometimes frowned on if used
by females when males were around). Further, the gesture reflects the car-
ryover of African communication styles used among such West African
ethnic groups as the Mandingo.29
The Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated
the adoption (“crossover”) of Black Popular Culture, like the high-five. By
August 1991, Ebony magazine was referring to this cultural adoption as the
“high-five revolution.” With a photo of President George Bush (the elder)
giving an Air Force Academy cadet a high-five instead of the customary
salute, Ebony declared: “The high-five congratulatory hand slap has moved
from the urban basketball court to the sports arena and corporate set-
tings. Even President George Bush has given a high-five in a moment of
elation.”30
Among the originators of the high-five, though, the high-five wasn’t
always high. In the decades before 1990, givin skin/five was done by
extending the palms from waist level, and there were several different
variations to convey diverse meanings. Using field research conducted in
1968 and 1969, African American scholar Benjamin Cooke developed a
schema for classifying the complex system of givin and gettin skin. In
addition to givin and gettin skin as “gestures of greeting or parting,” he
noted that there was “agreement skin,” “complimentary skin,” “emphatic
skin,” and “five on the sly.” Cooke concluded that there were more than 28
combinations of givin/gettin skin possible in social situations in the Black
community. He thus cautioned against misinterpretation: “One look at this
variety of meanings associated with the kinemes of giving and getting skin
is enough to indicate that the only way to interpret the act in any one
situation would be to analyze the entire communicative event.”31
In today’s world, both nonverbal and verbal Black communication can
be observed in the White public sphere. While the “crossover” label is new,
the process is as old as the African Holocaust.32 Late linguist J. L. Dillard’s
history of African American Language traced young White Americans’ bor-
rowings from the speech of Africans during and after the enslavement
period.33 In the Harlem Renaissance era of the 1920s—a period in which
the Negro was “in vogue”—Whites flocked uptown to Harlem clubs and
cabarets to immerse themselves in the language, music, and culture of the
“New Negro.” In 1957, White American writer Norman Mailer noted in his
historic essay “The White Negro” that:
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 105

In certain cities . . . New York . . . New Orleans . . . Chicago . . . San

Francisco, and Los Angeles . . . this particular part of a generation
[of Whites] was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. . . . And
in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro
who brought the cultural dowry. . . . So there was a new breed of
adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking
for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts. The hipster
had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for
practical purposes could be considered a white Negro. 34

Mailer’s piece created widespread controversy, but he had simply set out
in the public sphere what many African American writers, intellectuals,
and cultural theorists had been saying privately for decades. As Langston
Hughes bemoaned in the aftermath of the Harlem Renaissance, “they done
taken my blues and gone.”
Cornel West has called this crossover the “AfroAmericanization of
youth,” but it’s broader than that. Adults of varying ages and class groups
throughout the global village have also become AfroAmericanized. Crossing
over is writ large in fashion, music, attitude, dance, and even in what used
to be Black children’s games. White women have now picked up Double
Dutch, the jump rope game young sistas done been playin for years on
the streets of the Bronx, Motown, South Central, Chi-Town, the ATL, the
Illadelph, and other urban hoods. Journalist Elizabeth Ahlin, writing about
the group Double Dutchess, noted: “White and in their 20s, the women of
Double Dutchess are bringing a new look to a pastime long considered the
province of young African American girls.”35
On the linguistic front, we are witnessing the “Africanization of American
English.”36 While much more pervasive today, this phenomenon was also
documented by Mailer back in 1957: “The child [in the cultural marriage of
White and Black] was the language of Hip, for its argot gave expression to
abstract states of feeling which all could share. . . . The language of Hip is a
language of energy. . . . The nuance of the voice uses the nuance of the situ-
ation to convey the subtle contextual difference.” He lists “perhaps a dozen
words . . . most in use and most likely to last with the minimum of varia-
tion: man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, fl ip,
creep, hip, square.”37 More than five decades later, Mailer’s word list has
undergone some modification, but his conceptual point still holds. Black
linguistic innovations have continued unabated in our postmodern, high-
tech, cyberspace, media-driven world as the Africanization of American
English moves fast and furious throughout the globe. Nonetheless, as the
Obamas’ “fist bump” has demonstrated, even with a Black man in the White
House, there are dimensions of Black Language and Culture that remain
106 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

unknown and/or misunderstood by the White mainstream. Th is cultural-

linguistic gap is even more striking in the case of verbal communication,
which makes it imperative for speakers to know the answer to what late
linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes referred to as the fundamental ques-
tion of all communication in any language, wherever it occurs: Who can
say what to whom under what conditions?38

Understanding the Rules of Engagement:

Different Linguistic Strokes for
Different Folks
The answer to the Hymesian question is not the same for Black folks as it
is for White folks. Of course, there are many areas of shared communica-
tion between the two groups. However, there are also many areas where
the rules of linguistic engagement differ and become glaring as Black
insider talk moves out into the White public sphere—in the media, on the
Internet, in Hip Hop, sports, and entertainment. While this difference is
most often noted with the so-called “N-word” (more on that in a few), it
also pops up in the case of seemingly less controversial verbal and nonver-
bal forms of Black communication.
The phrase “Just throw yo hands in the air, and wave ‘em like you just
don’t care!” is a common invocation used by Hip Hop artists and DJs in
da club to get the party started. Th is same hand waving in the air is a
common gesture in the Black Church. It is used to convey approval as a
response to what the preacher or someone in the congregation has said. Or
the waving hand can be used to express a spirit-fi lled moment, in which
case the gesture substitutes for talk. As church folks chant, “If I couldn’t
say nothin, I’d just wave my hand.” Cultural outsiders are mystified by the
use of the same nonverbal gesture in two different contexts, one sacred, the
other secular. However, in Black Culture there is really no sharp division, no
dichotomy between sacred and secular. Rather, in keeping with the African
World View, there is a continuum of the sacred and profane. This sacred-
secular continuum accounts for Black musical artists with ties to and per-
formances in both the Black Church and pop worlds, such as Hip Hop/R&B
artist Faith Evans and Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin. It also accounts for
the much-applauded performance style of the late James Brown, Godfather
of Soul, who would go offstage and return wearing a black cape symboliz-
ing the preacher’s robe. He would continue to sing and shout (as in church)
until he got the Spirit and had to be pulled away from the stage. Similarly
some church folk “git happy” (also referred to as “catch the Holy Ghost”)
and have to be attended to by the church’s nurses.
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 107

In the verbal realm, consider the label nappy, a term that simply refers
to the tightly curled natural state of African American hair. Ha, not so
fast. Yes, it’s true that we have had a celebration of natural/nappy Black
hair since the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Yes, we
now have the upbeat oft-used slogan, “Happy to be nappy” (also found on
T-shirts). And the children’s book Nappy Hair by African American writer-
professor Carolivia Herron celebrates the symbolic value of Black women’s
natural hair. Yet nappy, a term that can have either a positive or negative
meaning, can only be used by Blacks with Blacks in Black social contexts.
In this linguistic case, that’s the answer to the Hymesian question.
Some years ago the nation witnessed the violation of this communica-
tion rule when a White teacher in Brooklyn, New York, used Herron’s book
with her African American students. All hell broke loose: Black parents
protested, accused the teacher of racism and/or poor pedagogical judgment,
and the teacher requested a transfer to another school. Economist and
former President of the HBCU Bennett College for Women, Dr. Julianne
Malveaux, a self-described nappy-headed sista, called this a “nappy misun-
derstanding . . . [that] turned a classroom misunderstanding into a national
incident.”39
More recently in 2007, nationally syndicated White radio host Don Imus
caught hell over his decision to call the women of the Rutgers University
basketball team “some nappy-headed hos.” The response to Imus’s suspen-
sion showed how deeply divided the country was and is along racial lines.
While many Whites (from conservative Republican Pat Buchanan to liberal
comedians Bill Maher and Rosie O’Donnell) claimed Imus was protected by
freedom of speech or that his apology should be enough, most Blacks viewed
the comment as both racist and sexist coming from a White male in a soci-
ety that routinely denigrates Black women. To make matters worse, many
Whites then turned around and accused Black folks such as Al Sharpton and
Jesse Jackson, who were most vocal throughout the controversy, of seeking to
profit by creating racial division. These responses showed, again, that rather
than “postracial,” America was and is a hyperracial society. The national reac-
tion also underscored the fact that, even though Blacks and Whites appear
to be speaking the same language, the meanings and rules of engagement
for using that language differ significantly. This is glaringly obvious in the
case of ritualized language traditions, such as snappin, and in the semantic
inversion of common English words, such as muthafucka and nigga.
The tradition of snappin, a.k.a. signifyin and playin the Dozens in
Old School lingo, is a style of verbal communication that incorporates
double meaning and humor to comment on an individual, event, or sit-
uation. Snappin can be in the form of playful commentary or serious
social critique couched as verbal play. It involves rhetorical hyperbole,
108 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

irony, indirection, metaphor, and deployment of the semantically or logi-

cally unexpected. Most importantly, the signifyin must be funny. There
are double—and sometimes multiple—layers of meaning. Although signi-
fyin and playin the Dozens (“yo momma” verbal taunts) is tantamount to
a dis, it’s acceptable in Black communication because those in the social
context recognize it as a longstanding form of Black Culture, with socially
defined rules and linguistic norms shared by those born under the lash.
Until the global explosion of Hip Hop Culture, this verbal tradition was
rarely heard outside the confi nes of the Black community. Still today,
the language forms used in this style of Black verbal communication are
associated with and believed to be used only by Black males, particu-
larly brothas who are young Hip Hop headz. Not so. Snappin and the raw
language involved in this communicative style is used by males and females,
young and old, lower and upper classes and this cultural form was in use
long before most Hip Hop heads were even born. This erroneous associa-
tion reflects the generational and class divide in Black America that has
arisen over the past two decades.
Smitherman’s study, “If I’m Lyin, I’m Flyin: The Game of Insult in Black
Language,” describes several conversations in which sistas engage in snappin,
including incorporating raw language. For example, this exchange between
two 30-something sistas:

Linda: Girl, what up with that head? [referring to her friend’s

hairstyle]
Betty: Ask yo momma.
Linda: Oh, so you going there, huh? Well, I did ask my momma
and she said, “Can’t you see that Betty look like her momma
spit her out!”

And this from some older, middle-aged sistas:

Arlene: No, un-unh, I don’t think I know any of that stuff

[responding to Smitherman’s query, asking if they knew how
to play the Dozens].
Renee: I remember something like, uh, I don’t play the Dozens
cause the dozens is bad.
Barbara: But, Arlene, I can tell you how many dicks yo momma
had.
Arlene: Well, I hate to talk about yo momma, Barbara, cause
she’s a good old soul.
Renee: Aw, nah, heifer, thought you didn’t know any of that
stuff.
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 109

Arlene: [Finishing the rhyme she started above] . . . she got a

two-ton pussy and a rubber ass hole.40

In all-female contexts, the sistas can come real and raw, and their snappin
can rival even the most highly criticized Black male Hip Hop artist whose
lyrics have been deemed vulgar or offensive. In Spike Lee’s 1991 fi lm, Jungle
Fever, there is a scene in which the women gather to commiserate with
Drew over her husband’s unfaithfulness. Described as the “War Council,”
this scene in the fi lm was not scripted. The sistas, all professional, college-
educated women, freestyled, reflecting the authentic verbally rich skills of
Black women steeped in the rules, norms and rituals of snappin and other
forms of Black Language:

Inez: Deal with the Black man for a minute. There’s a lot of self-
hate goin on when he can’t deal with a sista.
Drew: Yeah, Inez, how would you know? You won’t deal with a
Black man.
Inez: Oh yes, I do date Black men, but I also date Chinese, Latino,
Jewish, the full spectrum. . . . I know you think I should date
Black men, but I’m going to date who I like. Give me a man,
regardless of the color of his skin, who is nice to me, who is
sweet to me, and who I strongly believe loves me.
Drew: Inez, I am not the rainbow-fucking kind.
Inez: Drew, if it will make you happy, honey, I will make a
pilgrimage to Africa . . . and fi nd myself a true tribesman.
Vera: A true Asiatic Black man.
Inez: With a dick down to his knees to keep me happy for days.
Nilda: Oooh, Zulu dick.
Inez: Th at’s right, girl. Ima get me some serious Zulu dick in the
bush. . . .
Nilda: Most of the Brothas who have made it got White women
on their arms. Their responsibility level isn’t the same as
ours.
Vera: It isn’t a question of responsibility. It’s just a fundamental
disrespect . . . for women.
Nilda: I don’t care, the best man, it’s hard for him to say no,
some pussy staring him in the face. . . . I don’t know the man
that’s been born, that’s gon say no. . . . He gon look around, ain
nobody looking, he gon fuck the pussy. If you are in a committed
relationship, you are supposed to be able to say “No.” . . . You gon
get turned on . . . you gon see somebody you want to fuck. But
your mind supposed to tell you, “I have a committed relationship
110 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

here. I have a wife, whatever,” and tell the dick to shut the fuck
up. Tell the dick to get down, strap that muthafucka down.

More recently, as we’ve seen with the young sistas from the San Francisco
Bay Area in Alim’s work, the tradition of signifyin is goin strong, even
reinvented within verbal duels where these youth try to put each other
on hush mode (using their wit to leave opponents speechless, without a
response).41

The Logic of Niggaz and Muthafuckaz:

The Uncensored Mode in Black Communication
It’s been said that the two most popular words in African American
Language are muthafucka and nigga. Both exemplify the semantic inversion
characteristic of Black communication that extends the meaning of words
on multiple levels. These forms have enjoyed longstanding use throughout
the Black community and by Blacks from all walks of life for generations.
Though not used by everyone, these terms have endured for many reasons,
not the least of which is the pleasure Black folks get outta playin wit the
semantic ambiguity, inventing new meanings, spellings, and contexts of
use. Their use today is by no means a new phenomenon. What is new is
the widespread use of these terms outside Black community contexts—in
Hip Hop, at Black comedy shows, on the Internet, and in other arenas of
the public sphere.
African American linguist Arthur Spears has coined two useful concepts
for analyzing these widely spoken language forms: uncensored mode and
normalization. Rather than refer to such terms as nigga and muthafucka as
taboo language or obscenities, he proposes that we use the phrase “uncen-
sored mode”:

The term uncensored mode has been coined in recognition that

individuals operate effectively within different evaluative lan-
guage norm contexts—which is true of language users world-
wide. . . . In this mode, expressions that in censored contexts are
considered obscene or evaluatively negative are used in an almost
or completely evaluatively neutral way. Among censored contexts,
I include church services and other contexts in which persons of
high, mainstream-supported respect are present, e.g., ministers,
elderly relatives, etc. Thus we could say that in locker rooms,
almost invariably uncensored mode (hereafter UM) speech is
used, whereas in church, we would expect censored speech.42
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 111

As a consequence of UM language use, terms that were once considered

taboo have become “normalized.” Spears explains:

What is new . . . is . . . normalization, the use of uncensored expres-

sions by some types of people in most social settings in an
evaluatively neutral way, i.e., the expressions are not inherently
negative or positive . . . they are neutralized: they are negative,
positive, or neutral in force depending on how they are used.
Many people who function exclusively or primarily in mainstream
settings are not aware of this.43

Rather than referring to “obscenity” or “taboo words,” the advantage of the

concepts UM and normalization is that they call for linguistic analysis to
confirm what’s being communicated before we pass judgment on speakers
and their language. To consult Spears again:

[Rather than obscene language], I prefer to use the term uncen-

sored speech in order not to prejudge the actions of the users of
such speech. My wish not to prejudge is not the result of unre-
flexive liberal humanism; rather, it reflects one of the major con-
clusions presented . . . namely, in many cases, rigorous analysis of
form, meaning, and communicative behavior is required before
one can pass judgment on the speech of members of communi-
ties other than one’s own, where the term community membership
is determined by age, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, gender, and
other variables.44

If we heed Spears’s call for “rigorous analysis,” we can see that nigga and
muthafucka each allow for a multiplicity of meanings and a range of evalua-
tions. Smitherman first documented this phenomenon more than three
decades ago in her Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. She
explained that “we are talking about terms rooted in the Black cultural
experience” and that the “semantics . . . depend not only on the immediate
linguistic context but on the sociohistorical context as well.” She also
added:

When White English words are given a Black Semantic interpre-

tation, their range of referents increases . . . on one level a word’s
referent is the same for Blacks and Whites. But since Blacks
also share a linguistic subculture outside the White mainstream,
on . . . the Black Semantic level the same word has multiple meanings
and associations. . . . One dude said to another, noticing how he
112 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

was dressed. “You sho got on some bad shit,” which means he got
on good shit, which means he’s attractively dressed.45

Yet, following Spears, some terms are censored in the presence of

elderly relatives, ministers, teachers, and others. Thus Black speakers
shift styles based on unwritten rules of engagement, varying their use
from context to context, moment to moment. This linguistic styleshift-
ing applies in the case of Black Language’s most (in)famous widely used
term: nigga.
In Talkin and Testifyin, Smitherman called attention to what in those
years she was representing as nigguh: “Whereas to Whites it is simply a way
of callin a Black person outta they name, to Blacks it has at least four dif-
ferent meanings as well as a different pronunciation: nigguh”46 (reflecting
the general pattern of postvocalic r-lessness [no “r” after a vowel] in
some varieties of African American Language). Despite the range of
meanings in the term, there have been a number of efforts, both indi-
vidual and organized, to discourage the use of nigga, if not to ban it
from the Black speech community altogether. At the 2007 annual con-
vention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), the group gave nigga a formal funeral and burial,
complete with a casket and other funeral trappings, at Hart Plaza on
Detroit’s riverfront. (Yeah, y’all, this actually happened.) Nonetheless,
despite its rocky journey, today in 2012 nigga is alive and well—and has
even been used by some of those same leaders who object to it. (More
on this in a few.)
Not only is nigga still omnipresent, since 1977 it has taken on expanded
uses and meanings. In both editions of Smitherman’s Black Talk dictionaries,
she notes these semantic expansions, and by the publication of her Word from
the Mother in 2006, nigga had acquired at least eight different meanings, and
it had taken on the twenty-first-century Hip Hop spelling, “nigga”:

1. Close friend, someone who got yo back, yo “main nigga.”

2. Rooted in Blackness and the Black experience. From a middle-aged
social worker: “Th at Brotha ain like dem ol e-lights, he real, he a
shonuff nigga.”
3. Generic, neutral reference to African Americans. From a
30-something college-educated Sista: “The party was live, it was
wall-to-wall niggaz there.”
4. A sista’s man/lover/partner. From the beauty shop: “Guess
we ain gon be seein too much of girlfriend no mo since she got
herself a new nigga.” From Hip Hop artist Foxy Brown, “Ain no
nigga like the one I got.”
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 113

5. Rebellious, fearless, unconventional, in-yo-face Black man.

From former NBA superstar Charles Barkley, “Nineties nig-
gas . . . The DailyNews, The Inquirer has been on my back. . . . They
want their Black athletes to be Uncle Toms. I told you white boys
you’ve never heard of a 90s nigga. We do what we want to do”
(quoted in The Source, December 1992).
6. Vulgar, disrespectful Black person, antisocial, conforming to
negative stereotype of African Americans. From former Hip Hop
group Arrested Development, in their best-selling song, “People
Everyday” (1992): “A Black man actin like a nigga . . . got stomped
by an African.”
7. A cool, down person, rooted in Hip Hop and Black Culture,
regardless of race, used today by non-Blacks to refer to other
non-Blacks.
8. Anyone engaged in inappropriate, negative behavior; in this
sense, Blacks may even apply the term to White folk. According
to African American scholar Clarence Major’s From Juba to Jive,
Queen Latifah was quoted in Newsweek as criticizing the US
government with these words: “Those niggers don’t know what
the fuck they doing” (1994:320).47

Although we are here focused on nigga, we should note that there are actu-
ally three so-called “N-words”: nigger, nigga, and Negro. All three have the
same origin. They came into English by way of Latin (niger/nigra/nigrum,
“black or dark colored”), Spanish and Portuguese (negro, “black”). While
nigger is the racial slur and is used only in a negative sense, nigga is the
Black pronunciation and can be used negatively, positively, or neutrally.
Negro was for decades a perfectly acceptable label for the race. Even the
fiery radical W.E.B. Du Bois not only used the term but also campaigned
to have it capitalized in the 1920s. Th is racial label fell out of favor in
the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and was used for
Blacks who weren’t down with the Black Struggle and/or had low racial
self-esteem.
In the twenty-fi rst century, Negro has been reclaimed as a euphemism
for nigga in the neutral sense and is used in contexts where the speaker
feels nigga would be inappropriate. Check out this example where a sista
was extolling the culinary talents of Black cooks at an outdoor, multi-
racial festival: “Girl, those Negroes know they was throwin down!” Or
P. Diddy’s 2004 Vibe magazine interview conducted when he was play-
ing Walter Lee Younger in the late Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play Raisin
in the Sun. Referring to the photo of O. J. Simpson on the wall of his
dressing room, Diddy said: “I’ve been right at that place. . . . It’s a constant
114 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

reminder of what they can do to you if you ever get too comfortable. I’m
one of those Negroes that’s allowed into certain parties, but if I start
believing the hype, like I’m the ‘special Negro,’ then I could end up just
like that.”48

Dismantling the Master’s House: Black Youth’s

Project of Linguistic Reclamation
While most people probably never expect to utter Humpty Dumpty and
Hip Hop in the same breath (unless they talkin bout that Oaktown
playa Humpty from Digital Underground!), these two debates over
semantics and pragmatics, or how we use and make meaning in lan-
guage, force us to call the Question: In this social struggle over lan-
guage, who is to be master? The response from the Hip Hop Nation,
both those in Public Enemy’s generation of the 1980s and 1990s and
younger, twenty-first-century Hip Hop headz, is that they are the mas-
ters of the Black Word. In their language reclamation project, they are
asserting that nigga belongs to the speakers of Black Language. It is
theirs to reshape, to redefine, and if they so choose, to circumscribe its
use. While this might strike some as racial and/or youthful arrogance,
history is instructive.
For centuries, nigger was used in a neutral sense, simply as an iden-
tifying label for African and African descent people. It was not a way
of calling a Black person outta they name but used simply as a way
of referring to a person who was racially Black. The precise histori-
cal moment when nigger became a term of racial disrespect in White
American discourse is unknown. One possibility is that the semantic
negativity emerged during the beginning of the “separate but equal”
Jim Crow era (roughly 1877, end of Reconstruction) and the backlash
against the all-too-quickly-aborted movement for political and economic
empowerment of America’s formerly enslaved Africans. Throughout the
nineteenth century and even during the Civil War, the question had per-
sisted: What should America do with its enslaved African population?
Resettle them in Africa? Make them citizens of the American state? If
so, they don’t have anything but the clothes on their backs. What repa-
rations are they due? “Forty acres and a mule”? The issue of what to
do with the freedmen became a question that was ultimately never set-
tled. The period following the end of the Civil War—the Reconstruction
Era—brought with it the (threatening?) possibility of millions of freed
Africans, working and living among the White population. In this socio-
political context, the previously neutral racial label nigger would have
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 115

Table 4.1 Dismantling the master’s house with language: Humpty

Dumpty and Pharcyde break it down
“I don’t know what you mean by Booty Brown: There’s more than just
‘glory,’ ” Alice said. one definition for words! We talk
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptu- in slang. We always talk basically in
ously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell slang. We don’t use the English dic-
you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock- tionary for every sentence and every
down argument for you.” phrase that we talk!

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice Pharcyde: No, there’s a lot of words
knock-down argument,’ ” Alice out of the words that you just said
objected. which all . . .

“When I use a word,” Humpty Booty Brown: Yeah, but the way
Dumpty said, in a rather scornful I’m talking is not the English lan-
tone, “it means just what I choose it guage. . . . We’re not using that defini-
to mean—neither more nor less.” tion. . . . We’re making our own. . . . Just
like they use any other word as a
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether
slang, my brotha! Anything. I’m not
you can make words mean so many
really your brother. Me and your
different things.”
blood aren’t the same, but I’m your
“The question is,” said Humpty brother because we’re brothas. . . . I
Dumpty, “which is to be master— mean, it depends whose definition you
that’s all.”49 glorify, okay? That’s what I’m saying.
Whose definition are you glorifying?50

—From Lewis Carroll, Through the —Members of Hip Hop group Tha
Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found Pharcyde
There (1871)

been recast as a term to linguistically re-enslave African slave descen-

dants (or at the very least, to keep them from goin buck wild). In any
event, by the time of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, when a
“new negro” was born (albeit still lowercased!), nigger had become a
name-calling word.
On the other hand, the term has always been owned by the Black
speech community, for only Blacks have had access to its multiple
meanings. Many older Blacks have childhood memories of hearing folk
ditties like “You my nigga if you don’t git no bigger, and if you get
bigger, you gon be my bigger nigga.”51 In the 1960s, lyrical activists
The Last Poets used nigga (then spelled “nigger”) in semantic solidar-
ity with their people, rappin: “I love niggers / I love niggers / I love
niggers / Because niggers are me / And I should only love that which
116 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

is me.”52 In the twenty-first century, cofounder of the West Coast Hip

Hop group Niggaz Wit Attitude and now actor/producer, Ice Cube said:
“We take this word that’s been a burden to us . . . digest it, spit it back
out as . . . a badge of honor.”53 Writer J. Clinton Brown put it this way:
“I have heard the word “niggah” (note the spelling, dig the sound) all
of my life. Many of my elders and friends use it with phenomenal elo-
quence. . . . These people are very much about being themselves—proudly,
intensely, sometimes loudly.”54
There is a certain sense of linguistic mastery here, a sense of Black
identity and bonding, fully understood only by those who have endured—
and lived—the Black Experience, both the bitter and the sweetmeat
parts. Building on this linguistic history, Hip Hop headz are pushing the
linguistic envelope. As Hip Hop has expanded its cultural imprint in the
past two decades, part of that expansion has been a conscious rhetori-
cal effort to reclaim and redefi ne the “N-word.” For Hip Hop headz, posi-
tive nigga can be used to speak to a profound connection, a relationship
beyond friendship, a ride-or-die allegiance. Thus late Hip Hop artist Tupac
Shakur rapped about a sista, “I don’t wanna be her man / I wanna be her
nigga.”55 Co-signing Pac, Hip Hop artist DMX said about his wife: “I tell
my wife shit I don’t tell nobody. She’s like everything to me. . . . Th at’s my
nigga.”56
Whereas nigga has a long history of use within the confi nes of the Black
community, a new generation has boldly made this language reclamation
project a matter of public record, which is the source of the generational
confl ict around this as well as other Black Language forms—although none
so problematic as nigga. Few, if any Blacks, regardless of age or social sta-
tion, would claim that the term has not been widely used in Black social
contexts. Their objection is that a new generation has taken the commu-
nity’s term to the public, in prime time, and to the farthest corners of the
globe. Sometimes, though, this new generation gets linguistic vindication.
This has occurred on those rare occasions when older Blacks have also gone
public with nigga.

Caught with Their Linguistic Pants on the Ground:

Generational Conflict When Niggaz Go Public
One such event occurred on the Michigan Supreme Court on May 10,
2006. The court’s only Black member, Justice Robert Young Jr., a middle-
aged Republican from an affluent Detroit suburb, used nigga during the
court’s discussion of commissioner report cases. Th is was not revealed to
the public until the fall 2010 elections in a transcript of a recording of that
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 117

discussion provided by retired Justice Elizabeth A. Weaver. The transcript

was posted on delayedjustice.com, on Weaver’s private website, and also
referred to in a speech she gave during the fall election campaign (state-
ment by Justice Weaver, October 25, 2010). Young is reported to have said:
“Watch out for those niggas out there. (Laughter) Really.” Justice Young
acknowledged to a reporter that he had used nigga but attempted to justify
his use of this “N-word” in the public setting of Michigan Supreme Court
deliberations by declaring that he had been making an “impassioned plea”
to emphasize how a person was being treated “without rights, without dig-
nity. . . . That’s why I used the word. I remember the heat and the purpose
for using it.” However, when he was pressed for details he couldn’t recall
any particulars of this case about which he had been “very hot.”57
Some citizens questioned Weaver’s motives for recording the court’s
meeting back in 2006 and releasing the transcript during the 2010 cam-
paign (she was not up for re-election). However others did not allow this
question to obscure the fact that a Black state supreme court justice had
not only used nigga in the public sphere but had added insult to injury with
his “untruthful” statement about it, as Philip posted in “No, Mr. Justice,
not according to her transcript”:

The transcripts that Justice Weaver has supplied show that Justice
Young was untruthful in his statement to the reporter—plain
and simple. No one can justify what Justice Young said. . . . It was
cavalier, unprofessional, vulgar, and a violation of judicial deco-
rum. Instead, Justice Young’s supporters try to deflect the fact of
what he said by trying to impugn the motives of Justice Weaver.
Obviously, Justice Weaver felt the need to record Justice Young
because she knew that he and his supporters . . . would otherwise
question her credibility in addition to her motives.58

The website attorneybutler.net posted the following:

In the aftermath of the revelation that Michigan Supreme Court

Justice Robert Young used the “N” word during a Supreme Court
conference, I was reminded of an instructional video, shown below,
from HowCast, showing how to Backpedal, Spin and Dodge. It
appears Justice Young may have indeed studied that video before
responding to the AP reporter. He used many of the video’s tac-
tics. He blamed someone else: Justice Weaver. Justice Young
expected his use of the word to remain private and secret. . . . He
tried to make himself the victim. Justice Weaver had never been
called the “N” word, though he and his family had. . . . For a “rule
118 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

of law” “textualist,” who only goes by the plain meaning of the

words he encounters in his work, he certainly has an “activist”
explanation for his words in this instance. What a surprise. 59

The other public use of nigga by an older African American occurred on

the national scene during the Obama presidential campaign. On July 6,
2008, Reverend Jesse Jackson was taking a break from taping a television
interview for Fox & Friends news show. Unaware that his mic was still on,
Reverend Jackson began complaining that Obama was “talking down” to
Blacks in a speech where he took Black men to task for not fulfilling their
role as fathers in their children’s lives. He said that Obama was telling
“niggaz how to behave.” (He also, by the way, said that he wanted to “cut
[Obama’s] nuts off.”) Jackson apologized profusely for what he called his
“hurtful words,” stating that he was “deeply saddened and distressed by
the pain and sorrow that I have caused as a result of my hurtful words. I
apologize again to Senator Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, their children
as well as to the American public . . . I hope that the Obama family and the
American public will forgive me.” This was the same Jesse Jackson who had
made national appeals to Hip Hop artists, entertainers, actors, and others
to stop using nigga and who had supported the NAACP’s funeral and burial
of nigga at its national convention in Detroit less than one year before.
The range of responses to Reverend Jackson’s remarks raised the issue
of his choice of words and his relevance to the Struggle today. One reader
of Slava Kuperstein’s “Jesse Jackson Reportedly Used N-Word in Tirade”
responded:

Jesse has proved himself to be nothing more than a big hypocrite

with this one. He said all these terrible things once he THOUGHT
the camera was off so these were his TRUE feelings coming out.
I wonder if he is upset that Obama is closer to being President
than he was back in ‘88? How can you advocate banning the N
word and you’re still ABUSING it. . . . Damn Jesse, you used to be
one of my heroes back in the day . . . it’s a new day now.60

Hip Hop artist Nas and fi lmmaker Spike Lee each made similar points.
Spike Lee said:

I’m very disappointed in Jesse Jackson. These old heads. I don’t

know why they’re doing this stuff. . . . I think jealousy has to
be somewhere in there. . . . I think it’s really making Jesse look
bad. . . . In life, sometimes you have your moment. . . . You have
your window that lies upon you and then it leaves. Th is is not
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 119

Jesse’s time right now. Th is is Barack Obama’s time, and I think

he’s having a problem with that.61

Nas, perhaps one of the most critically acclaimed and politically conscious
lyricists in Hip Hop, had this to say:

I think Jesse Jackson, he’s the biggest playa hata. His time is up.
All you old niggas, time is up. We heard your voice, we saw your
marching, we heard your sermons. We don’t wanna hear that shit
no mo. It’s a new day. It’s a new voice. I’m here now. We don’t
need Jesse. I’m here. I got this. We got Barack. . . . We’re the voice
now. . . . No more Jesse. . . . You ain’t helping nobody in the hood.
Th at’s the bottom line. Goodbye, Jesse, Bye!”62

If Nas’s comments appear harsh, it’s probably because he had been embroiled
in his own N-word controversy with Jesse Jackson just a year before Jesse’s
nigga went public. Nas had planned to release his ninth studio album under
the title Nigger. And while most Hip Hop artists supported his decision,
the NAACP put out an official statement denouncing Nas’s album title and
Jesse Jackson appeared on Fox News to condemn Nas. Al Sharpton went
so far as to say that Nas, rather than taking the power away from White
folks, was actually “helping out the racists.”63 Speaking to MTV News, Nas
explained:

We’re taking power away from the word. . . . No disrespect to none

of them who were part of the civil-rights movement, but some
of my niggas in the streets don’t know who [civil-rights activist]
Medgar Evers was. I love Medgar Evers, but some of the niggas
in the streets don’t know Medgar Evers, they know who Nas is.
And to my older people who don’t now who Nas is and who don’t
know what a street disciple is, stay outta this muthafuckin con-
versation. We’ll talk to you when we’re ready. Right now, we’re
on a whole new movement. We’re taking power [away] from that
word.64

Responding directly to Jesse Jackson’s derisive comments about his album

title and pointing out his generationalism and possible classism, Nas added:
“If Cornel West was making an album called Nigger, they would know he’s
got something intellectual to say. . . . To think I’m gonna say something that’s
not intellectual is calling me a nigger, and to be called a nigger by Jesse
Jackson and the NAACP is counterproductive, counter-revolutionary.”65
Like many Hip Hop artists have argued in the past, Nas continued to insist
120 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

that elders in the Black community who may have legitimate concerns with
his music should talk to him first rather than “acting like you know what
my album is about.”66 Then in an incredible moment of foreshadowing, he
cautioned Jesse about Fox News: “Whether you in the NAACP or you Jesse
Jackson. I respect all of them. . . . I just want them to know: Never fall vic-
tim to Fox. Never fall victim to the shit they do.”67 Ironically, a year later,
it was Fox & Friends that recorded Jackson’s private nigga and took it pub-
lic. As the old saying goes, “with friends like these . . . ”
While the negative reactions dominated, including some from Jesse
Jackson’s own son, a few reminded us that Jesse was and is a race man
and that he has contributed to the Struggle. These sympathizers called for
understanding how Reverend Jackson might have “misspoke” or perhaps
that he had taken Obama’s comments too much to heart “since he himself
has fathered a child (or children) out of wedlock.”68
The fact that Jackson and Young, both older, elite, respected African
Americans, used Black Language’s highly “controversial” word, nigga, should
not have come as a surprise to anyone. The term is a household word in
Black communities, easily rolling off many Black folks’ tongues in pri-
vate Black social settings and contexts. For some Blacks, that’s the “under
what conditions” answer to the Hymesian question of who can say what
to whom under what conditions when it comes to nigga. The irony is that,
unlike Hip Hop headz and other young Blacks who have boldly insisted on
their right to use nigga when and wherever they please, neither Jackson
nor Young anticipated that their niggas would go public. They were, one
could say, caught with their linguistic pants on the ground.

Deeper Than a Muthafucka: The Implications

of Black Language in White Public Space
The term muthafucka sits right alongside nigga as one of Black Language’s
most popular and “controversial” words. Smitherman previously described
the Black semantic interpretation of muthafucka (and its euphemistic rep-
resentations, M.F., Marilyn Farmer, Mister Franklin, motor scotor, monster,
mutha, mamma jamma) in these terms:

The word is used in both negative and positive ways and some-
times just as a fi ller with no meaning at all. Here are some
examples:
1) In an urban ghetto, a Brother described a Cadillac Eldorado as
a “bad muthafucka.” Here the speaker was obviously expressing
approval. Possible translation: “beautiful car.”
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 121

2) One middle-class Black female commented to another, concern-

ing her man who she’d just discovered was going around with some-
one else: “That no-good muthafucka.” Here the speaker is obviously
expressing disapproval. Possible translation: “deceitful man.”

3) One Black middle-class male says to another, in a barber shop,

“You muthafuckin right I wasn’t gon let him do that.” Here the
speaker is simply emphasizing how correct the listener’s assess-
ment is, using the “obscenity” as a grammatical intensifier, modi-
fying “right.”

. . . The whole point, of course, is that in none of these statements

does the speaker refer to the act of sex with anybody’s mother.69

The same intensifying use of muthafucka in statement (3) is what we find

in the recent Hip Hop song/YouTube video “Baracka Flacka Flames—Head
of the State.”70 Using Atlanta Hip Hop artist Waka Flocka Flame’s “Hard
in Da Paint” for its musical framework, “Head of the State” is a parody of
both President Obama and Hip Hop Culture. Performed by Black comedian
James Davis, in the persona of President Obama, the piece opens with the
lyrical refrain, “I’m the head of the muthafuckin State, nigga.” 71 As with
Smitherman’s 1977 example quoted in the third statement there clearly
is no obscene—lewd, indecent—meaning conveyed by this 2010 Hip Hop
use of muthafucka. Rather, again, this is an instance of muthafucka used
as a grammatical intensifier. Like, “I, Barack Obama, am the head of not
just some corporation or organization. I am the head of not just any old
state in the world. I’m the head of the Supreme State, the one and only
Superpower State in the world. I’m the head of the only state in this global
world that could be called the ‘muthafuckin State.’ ” Nonetheless, there have
been plenty of objections to the song and video, mainly from those who
don’t roll with the uncensored mode’s linguistic rules and norms. (Despite
these objections, as of April 2012, this YouTube video’s gotten almost eight
million muthafuckin hits, nigga!)
In linking the Obamas’ seemingly harmless pound—performed between
two adults happily in love—with some of what are perceived as the most
“controversial” features of Black verbal culture, our focus is not on the spe-
cific gestures or words but rather on the social process of how Black com-
munication becomes controversial. Becomes is highlighted to indicate the
fact that nothing is inherently controversial. Rather, through social pro-
cesses of valuation and devaluation, controversies are of our own making.
Thus, what becomes controversial in any given society over time—as we
saw with the changing meanings of the N-words—often reveals the nature
of social relations between groups, attempts at social control, and the
122 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

struggle for power. As social phenomena, languages are tied up in a world

of unequal power relations, gaining or losing status not based on techni-
cal linguistic grounds but on social judgments, biases, and stereotypes that
are based on the status of their speakers. As such, we argue that White
America’s love-hate relationship with Black modes of communication can
only be interpreted within a framework that considers language as a pri-
mary site of cultural contestation. It should be clear by now that it’s about
more than a muthafucka, right? Our analysis of Black Language forms that
the dominant culture considers inflammatory, controversial, or stigmatized
allows us to make several crucial observations.
First, building off what anthropologist and linguist Arthur Spears
noted in his discussion of uncensored speech, Black verbal culture, like
all cultures, is “a complex network of predispositions, values, behaviors,
expectations, and routines.”72 Language practices, in their varying socio-
cultural contexts, can only be understood if read within the full range
of the community’s speech activities, and that requires rigorous ethno-
graphic research and analysis. Second, the community’s beliefs and ideas
about language—its language ideologies—should be the primary point of
departure for investigation and interpretation. When it comes to mutha-
fucka, for example, we should consider not only that some speakers experi-
ence the pleasure of the poetics of the term, using it in all its variations,
with all its nuances, and within verbal routines that require clever wit and
sophistication: Who can forget Rudy Ray Moore’s artful use of the term in
“Dolemite” or, not too long ago, the way D’Angelo sang it so smoov and
soulful, “Shit . . . damn . . . muthafucka”? But we should also consider folk the-
ories about the politics of muthafucka. Two examples come to mind, each
levying sociopolitical critiques at mainstream America.
Black folk etymological theory posits that motherfucker was a term devel-
oped by the children of enslaved Africans in the United States. According
to this theory, the neologism was invented by these children as the best
way to refer to White slavemasters, who enacted a particularly savage form
of physical and sexual abuse on the bodies and spirits of Black women. To
make it painfully plain: It was used to describe White men who raped your
mother in order to break the Black family down, physically and psycho-
logically, and as a means to avoid calling your slavemaster your “father.”
Muthafucka, as the theory goes, then became the worst thing you could
call somebody, next to an Uncle Tom (someone who betrayed the race). In
historicizing the use of the word in the sociopolitical context of enslave-
ment, this theory provides a sociopolitical critique by positing the word’s
use as having stemmed from the inhumane and horrific treatment of Black
folks. Over time, through the linguistic process of semantic inversion and
as a result of the changing material conditions of Black life, the word took
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 123

on additional meanings, even nuancing positive characterizations of people,

objects, and events.
Our second example references specific moments when Black speakers,
such as Hip Hop artists, come under attack for their use of the word in
public. One of these high profi le moments came in 1993 during the fi lm-
ing of Poetic Justice, which starred Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur. When
asked if there was a point in the fi lm when he thought there was just a
little too much “muthafuckin” in there, Pac responded: “I fought to have all
the muthafuckas and more of them.”73 Not only did Pac not shy away from
them muthafuckaz, but while there was the usual conservative clamor about
“preserving the image of the race” (albeit no call to alleviate the material
conditions of the race), he displayed a particular kind of double irreverence
for the White gaze and those African Americans who fashion themselves as
the arbiters of respectability.
Tupac hung out in the streets in order to get an ethnographic feel for
the specific setting of the fi lm. “I just threw myself around that L.A. crowd.
Learned the language. Learned the culture.”74 He insisted on remaining
faithful to the language and culture of the streets because he wanted to
display the multidimensionality of Black men with all of its complexity
and contradictions. “I took that signal from my brothers, put it in the
movie very loud.” 75 For Tupac, there was a practical reason for maintain-
ing faithfulness to the language and culture of the Black men whose lives
he portrayed: “I fought to have all that shit in there so people could see it
and go, ‘Oh yeah. That’s how we do it. Oh shit! Damn, maybe that’s how
she feels when I be calling her [bitch]. . . . But if I’m not talkin the language
they talkin, they won’t even see themselves. . . . So, I’m fitna give y’all this
whole big picture. I want everybody to see the details.” 76
Pac’s philosophical take on muthafucka is crucial. He recognizes that a
particular variety of Black Language comes from the streets, from those
locked out of participation in mainstream society. Rather than acquiesce to
demands to “clean up” his language, he insisted that society “clean up” the
mess that is the plight of many urban communities. Pac made a conscious
decision to highlight the problem of Black folks’ social marginality, rather
than covering it up with inauthentic dialogue or trying to sweep it under
the rug. In short, it was about much more than censoring a muthafucka. It
was about the censoring of the working-class, Black poor from America’s
narrative and the erasure of White folks’ responsibility for creating what
sociologists refer to as the “Black underclass” and what Smitherman once
referred to as the “UN-working class.”77 Whether empirically verifiable or
not, the Black folk etymology and Tupac’s observation about muthafucka
flip the script on dominant culture by pointing out the tragically absurd:
Some folks’ moral panic over a pound, a nigga, and a muthafucka eclipses
124 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

their moral panic over the poverty created by centuries of oppression and
injustice.
Importantly, as Spears notes, it is not at all useful for African Americans
to “turn automatically apologetic when African American cultural behaviors
have a negative value within a White mainstream context, even though they
have a positive or neutral value within the context of the African American
community.”78 The kind of irreverence displayed by Tupac and advocated
by Spears here is certainly part of what Barack Obama appreciated about
Michelle’s public pound and what Black folks more generally appreciated
about Barack’s reciprocating The Pound. Their communicative behavior
takes on great importance not solely because they are now President and
First Lady of the United States, but because it usually occurs in spaces
where White mainstream culture and language are expected to prevail. In
these same spaces, Black Language and Culture are not only made highly
visible but are highly monitored, policed, and scrutinized for anything that
might be considered “problematic” or as further signs of Black folks’ “defi-
ciency,” “inadequacy,” or “incompetence.” Recognizing this particular type
of racializing hegemony brings us to yet another fundamental concern in
relation to Black speech: “On what basis is speech to be judged negative,
positive, or neutral? On whose norms is such an evaluation based? . . . In all
cases, scientific analysis is required before we dismiss behaviors with nega-
tive value judgments, especially when those negative judgments are based
on imposed values of an oppressive outside culture.”79 Or as Spears put it
more succinctly: “If muthafucka is not an obscene word for me but it is for
you, whose norm should prevail?”80
While most Black folks are happy about the expression of Black Culture
that The Pound symbolized, many also question White America’s embrace
of the gesture. Their skepticism arises for many reasons, not the least of
which is the observation that in the supposedly even cultural exchange
between groups, White folks emerge enriched while Black folks leave empty
handed. Folks that are hip to the history know that White participation
in Black cultural forms has almost always been preceded by White abhor-
rence of the forms, followed by White appropriation (theft, as some call
it). This process is completed (at least for the time being) when Black folks
finally forfeit the form and invent something altogether new. Like, “Okay,
you want that? It’s all yours. We’re on to something else anyway.”
In light of that, it’s easy to see why some Black folks are not so thrilled
about White mainstream culture’s embrace of Michelle and Barack Obama’s
pound. Their gesture has taken on a life of its own, as a “fist bump,” a label
that Blacks look at sideways. The Pound, reinvented (stolen?) as the White
folks’ fist bump, has been lifted up out of its Black cultural context and
carried to some far out and unexpected places. Further, for many Black
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 125

folks, to paraphrase De La Soul, the stakes is even higher because language

and culture are some of the few things they actually own in a context
in which Blacks are often culturally rich but materially dispossessed. As
Ta-Nehisi Coates humorously lamented about this unauthorized transfer of
cultural ownership:

It’s funny the stuff that some white people want to take owner-
ship of. I mean, can’t we have shit??? We had to concede basket-
ball after the Argentine team won the gold medal, then sprinting
after Jeremy Wariner, and even Paul Wall wears diamond fronts.
(Can’t claim golf, cause Tiger says he’s not black.) Now we got to
concede giving people a pound? What’s next . . . the black hand-
shake, too? Damn, I guess at least we can still have locs, cocoa
and shea butter, barbeque (I had to check on this and Wikipedia
says it traces back to the Taino Indians, whew) the inner city,
goo macaroni and cheese, and of course, the Black church! And
of course if nothing else we keep the correct name—that would
be “dap” or “pound” . . . because if it’s now a “fi st bump,” we won’t
be doing it anymore anyway!81

For now, given that the process of cultural crossover in the United States
often takes place within the broader context of the marginalization of
Black people, it’s difficult for Blacks to see genuine, well-intentioned White
participation as a nonthreatening sign of cultural appreciation.82 This is
especially true when the overwhelming collective pattern of cultural inter-
action suggests that White folks—like most other dominating groups in
postcolonial or postenslavement societies—are complex enough to fi nd a
way to love the culture and yet hate on its creators (Well, complex is one
word for it). Black Communication becomes controversial only in a society
that deprecates Blackness. If people continually deny this racially discrimi-
natory context, mutual respect will prove to be elusive as a muthafucka.

NOTES
1. This was Michelle Obama’s greeting to the cast of the popular daytime show The View,
only days after the “fist bump” firestorm. Check the video: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=59twO1fJwtQ. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
2. See Patrice Evans’s article, “The Bump Heard ‘Round the World: Why You Should Be
Celebrating the Anniversary of President Obama’s Famous Dap for the Democratic
Nomination,” posted June 2, 2009, at: http://www.theroot.com/views/bump-heard-
round-world. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
3. From pages 239–240 of Arthur Spears’s chapter, “African-American Language Use:
Ideology and So-Called Obscenity,” in Salikoko Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bai-
126 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

ley, and John Baugh (eds.) African-American English: Structure, History, and Use (New
York: Routledge, 1998).
4. See Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts’s article, “The Fist Couple: Giving a Big
Bump to Authenticity” posted on June 5, 2008, at: http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/04/AR2008060404521.html. Last accessed:
09-14-11.
5. Check the full article at: http://trickledown.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/the-obama-
fist-bump-its-called-giving-dappound/. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
6. Annette Powell Williams, “Dynamics of a Black Audience,” in Thomas Kochman (ed.)
Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black America (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1972, 106).
7. See: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200806060007. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
8. See: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/07/15/552233/-Cal-Thomas,-Terrorist-Fist-
Jab,-and-MiniTruth.
9. We say “contentiously so” here because, from the perspective of many Native Hawai-
ian sovereignty movements, Hawai’i’s statehood process was an invasion, annexation,
and colonization. To those Indigenous Hawaiians who resisted the annexation of their
land, the statehood process was riddled with intentional perversions of the truth and
shady voting practices that excluded those who refused to accept the imposed Ameri-
can citizenship. And since most high school history teachers never teach about the
contentious process of how Hawai’i became US property, check out Noenoe K. Silva’s
Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2004) for an excellent account of this silenced narrative. Crucially, Silva
goes beyond English-language sources and relies on thousands of archival sources
written in the language of Native Hawaiians in order to challenge conventional histo-
ries.
10. Quoted in Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts (June 5, 2008). See link in note 4.
11. Check also: http://superbeesphilosophy.blogspot.com/2008/06/thats-it-im-in.html.
Last accessed: 09-14-11.
12. See Katie Halper’s article, “In Historic Moment, White People Exposed to ‘Fist
Bump’ for First Time,” first posted on June 6, 2008, at: http://www.alternet.org/elec-
tion08/87230. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
13. Quoted in M. J. Stephy’s article, “A Brief History of the Fist Bump,” first posted on June
5, 2008, at Time.com: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1812102,00.
html. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
14. Quoted in Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts (June 5, 2008). See link in note 4.
15. Rachel Sklar (2008). See link in note 7.
16. See: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2008–06-05/news/17899960_1_michelle-obama-
bump-barack-obama. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
17. See, “Fist Bump in the News” on worldfistbumpday.org. Last accessed January 2011.
18. See Jim Rutenberg’s article, “THE NEWS MEDIA; Deconstructing the Bump,” posted
on June 11, 2008, at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E7D81138
F932A25755C0A96E9C8B63. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
19. See Frank Rich’s New York Times op-ed at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/
opinion/27rich.html?hp. Last accessed: 09-15-11.
20. See: “J. Peder Zane: Fist Bumping,” posted on June 9, 2008, at: http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=9ixVBlA6zFk. Last accessed: 09-15-11.
21. See this site for a discussion of this moment: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-
sheppard/2008/06/08/medias-fist-bump-focus-shows-theyre-obama-fixated-out-touch.
Last accessed: 09-15-11.
22. Check the photo and the broader context here: http://sociologistsforobama.blogspot.
com/2008/07/franceand-obama-hit-it-off.html. Last accessed: 09-15-11.
23. Check James Gerber’s July 2, 2008, article, “Obama Fist Bump Refusal? Not So
Fast,” at: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/political-radar. Last accessed: 10-31-11. Check
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 127

the video at: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5294981. Last accessed:

10-31-11.
24. Can’t make this shit up, y’all. On http://www.nationalfistbumpday.com/store/ you
can actually purchase different T-shirt designs celebrating the “fist bump.” This is
the commodification of Black Culture and Communication at one of its most absurd
moments. Fist bump gear? Get the hell outta here.
25. Check: http://worldfistbumpday.org. Last accessed January 2011.
26. Check out World #tweetbump Day at: http://prsarahevans.com/2009/05/29/world-
tweetbump-day-is-coming-on-june-3/. Last accessed: 09-15-11.
27. In M. J. Stephy (June 5, 2008). See note 13. Last accessed: 09-14-11.
28. See Maureen Dowd’s article, “Mincing up Michelle,” here: http://www.nytimes.
com/2008/06/11/opinion/11dowd.html. Last accessed: 09-15-11. As William Jelani
Cobb put it in The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (New
York: Walker and Company, 2010): “[The fist bump] said to those arrayed around a
massive flatscreen—and to those watching around the world—that Michelle Obama
was not only his wife but also his teammate and collaborator, his homegirl.” (85).
29. D. Dalby’s work has shed light on Africanisms in African American (and broader
American) culture. Check out his July 19, 1969, New York Times piece, “American-
isms that May Have Once Been Africanisms.” Also, see his “The African Element in
American English,” in Thomas Kochman (ed.) Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in
Urban Black America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972, pages 170–186).
30. Renee D. Turner’s article from Ebony magazine can be found online at: http://findar-
ticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_n10_v46/ai_11098726/. Last accessed: 09-15-11.
31. Benjamin Cooke, “Nonverbal Communication among Afro-Americans: An Initial Clas-
sification,” in Kochman, ed., (1972), page 42. Also, for an update on how Black youth
view Cooke’s classification, see Deric M. Green and Felicia R. Stewart’s article, “Afri-
can American Students’ Reactions to Benjamin Cooke’s ‘Nonverbal Communication
among Afro-Americans: An Initial Classification’,” in Journal of Black Studies April,
2011, 42(3): pages 389–401. According to the authors, Black youth noted some “dif-
ferences and variations” in contemporary Black nonverbal communication, yet there
“remains a similarity in the cultural significance and motivation behind the displays”
(389).
32. African Holocaust is a term used by Black writers, rappers, activists and others to
refer to the enslavement of African people in the United States and throughout the
Diaspora. The term captures the experience of the wholesale disruption of African
communities in the European slave trade, during which it is estimated that as many
as 100 million Africans were forcibly removed from their native lands, not all of
whom reached the “New World.” Millions perished as a result of torture, disease, and
the horrendous Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. A number of contemporary
Black historians and scholars have argued that the consequences of this mass terror
against Africans and its impact on present-day Black communities have yet to be fully
assessed.
33. See J. L. Dillard’s Black English (New York: Random House, 1972).
34. See Norman Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” in Dissent, reprinted in San
Francisco by City Lights Books in 1969.
35. Check Elizabeth Ahlin’s article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.
com/2004/08/16/national/16dutch.html. Last accessed: 09-15-11.
36. See Geneva Smitherman, “From Dead Presidents to the Benjamins: The Africanization
of American English,” in Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to
the Amen Corner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
37. Mailer (1957), page 11. See note 34.
38. Check out Dell Hymes’s Foundations in Sociolinguistics (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1974). We’ll refer to the question of “Who can say what to whom
under what conditions” as the Hymesian question.
128 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

39. See Julianne Malveaux’s December 24,1998, article, “Just a Nappy-Headed Sister with
the PC Blues,” in Black Issues in Higher Education, 15(22): page 30.
40. In Smitherman’s Talkin That Talk (New York: Routledge, 2000, pages 226–228).
41. See Alim’s You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshift-
ing in a Black American Speech Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004). Also, we discuss the educational implications of this verbal art and dueling
in chapter 6.
42. From Arthur Spears, “African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscen-
ity,” in Mufwene, et al.,eds., pages 232–233. See note 3.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid, page 226.
45. Check Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, reissued with revisions, Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1986, pages 59–62).
46. Ibid., page 62.
47. Check Geneva Smitherman’s “Word from the Mother: Language and African
Americans” (Routledge: New York, 2006, page 52). Also see both editions of Smith-
erman’s Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1994, revised 2000).
48. Diddy was quoted in L. Ogunnaike’s article, “The Passion of Puff,” in Vibe magazine,
August, 2004, pages 88–100.
49. That’s your boy Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and
What Alice Found there, way back in 1871.
50. Them’s your boys Tha Pharcyde. Check the full interview in James G. Spady, H. Samy
Alim & Charles G. Lee’s Street Conscious Rap (Philadelphia: Black History Museum,
1999), page xix.
51. Most folks don’t know that the San Francisco Bay Area’s Hip Hop legend JT the
Bigga Figga gets his name from that old ditty. See interviews with JT the Bigga
Figga in James G. Spady, H. Samy Alim & Samir Meghelli’s Tha Global Cipha: Hip
Hop Culture and Consciousness (Philadelphia: Black History Museum, 2006, 209–236,
404–40.
52. These lyrics are from the Last Poets’s well-known poem, “Niggers Are Scared of Revo-
lution.” Check their self-titled album, “The Last Poets” (Harlem, New York: East Wind
Associates, 1970).
53. Cube was quoted in the Detroit Free Press on June 14, 2004, page 2E.
54. See J. Clinton Brown’s article, “In Defense of the N Word,” in Essence magazine, June,
1993, page 138.
55. Pac rapped this along with Richie Rich on “Ratha Be Ya Nigga,” from the album All
Eyez on Me (Death Row/Interscope, 1996).
56. DMX was quoted in an interview with The Source in February 2000, page 170.
57. See the Associated Press article, “Up for Re-Election, Michigan Supreme Court Justice
Robert Young Jr. Explains Use of N-Word,” October 23, 2010, updated October 29,
2010: http://www.mlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/10/up_for_re-election_michigan_
su.html. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
58. Posted on November 9, 2010, on: www.mymicourt.com. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
59. See “How to Backpedal, Spin, and Doge [sic]—Justice Robert Young and the ‘N’
Word,” on: http://www.attorneybutler.net/2010/10/page/2/. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
60. See: http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.7331/title.jesse-jackson-reportedly-used-
n-word-in-tirade. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
61. Quoted in “Spike Lee: ‘Jealousy’ Behind Jackson Remark about Obama,” July 12,
2008, at: http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.7300/title.spike-lee-jealousy-behind-
jackson-remark-about-obama. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
62. See Danielle Harling’s article, “Nas Reacts to Jesse Jackson’s Comments,” July 11,
2008, at: http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.7296/title.nas-reacts-to-jesse-
jacksons-comments. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
 “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World” 129

63. Watch the video of Al Sharpton’s comments at: http://www.mtv.com/videos/

news/182827/rev-al-sharpton-says-nas-is-helping-out-the-racists.jhtml. Last accessed:
09-19-11.
64. See Shaheem Reid’s article, “Nas Explains Controversial Album Title, Denies Reports
of Label Opposition,” on: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1572287/nas-explains-
controversial-album-title.jhtml. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. See the video and read responses to “Jesse Jackson Wants to ‘Cut Obama’s Nuts
Off ?’ ” posted on July 11, 2008, at: http://www.youdecidepolitics.com/2008/07/11/
video-jesse-jackson-wants-to-cut-obamas-nuts-off/. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
69. See Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin (1977), page 60.
70. Check the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ-hPNrKdZI. Last accessed:
09-19-11.
71. Not only does he repeat the refrain, “I’m the head of the muthafuckin State, nigga!”
but this rap throws the “controversy” around Black Language’s uncensored mode
into high relief by using both muthafuckin and nigga frequently throughout. With ill
lines like “See, Hillary, that’s my muthafuckin nigga / I hang in DC wit them Senate
House killas / Baracka Flocka Flame one hood-ass nigga / In the 6–4 bendin corners,
my nigga . . . “ and “See, Oprah, that’s my muthafuckin nigga / We hang in the Chi wit
them hit squad killas / Oprah Flocka Flame one hood-ass nigga / Ridin real slow,
bendin corners, my nigga,” it’s clear that nothing and nobody is sacred in this parody,
not Barack, not Michelle, not Hillary, not Oprah, not Waka Flocka, not politics, not
Hip Hop! The Hillary line is especially poignant given her and Bill’s attempts to use
“Blackness” to box Barack out of the broader American public. And the Oprah lines
instantly—and hilariously—reference the widespread opinion in Hip Hop circles that
Orpah Winfrey hates on Hip Hop (in large part because of the “language”).
72. From Arthur Spears, “African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscen-
ity,” Mufwene, et al., eds., page 240. See note 3.
73. Tupac Shakur’s full interview can be found in James G. Spady, H. Samy Alim, and
Charles G. Lee’s Street Conscious Rap (Philadelphia: Black History Museum, 1999,
563–568).
74. Ibid., 563.
75. Ibid., 564.
76. Ibid., 565.
77. See Smitherman’s “ ‘A New Way of Talkin:’ Language, Social Change and Political The-
ory,” paper presented at the conference “Race and Class in the Twentieth Century,”
Oxford University, Oxford, UK, 28–31 January 1988. A revised version was published
in Smitherman, Talkin That Talk (New York: Routledge, 2000).
78. From Arthur Spears, “African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscen-
ity,” Mufwene, et al., eds., page 241. See note 3.
79. Ibid., 244.
80. Ibid.
81. See “The sacred art of giving dap,” posted on June 4, 2008, at: http://www.ta-nehisi.
com/category/entertainment/page/3. Last accessed: 09-19-11.
82. Tricia Rose makes this point exceptionally well in Black Noise: Rap Music and Black
Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
See especially her breakdown of White rapper Vanilla Ice’s straight up robbery of his
Black “friend” and producer, Chocolate, pages 11–12. In this chapter, Rose busts up
simple arguments of neutral cultural “borrowing” or “equally-owned” cultural forms
by foregrounding “the racially discriminatory context within which cultural syncretism
takes place,” page 5.
5
“My President’s Black,
My Lambo’s Blue”
Hip Hop, Race, and
the Culture Wars
I think the potential [is there] for [Hip Hop] to deliver
a message of extraordinary power, that gets people
thinking—you know, the thing about Hip Hop today is
it’s smart. I mean, it’s insightful . . . the way that they can
communicate a complex message in a very short space is
remarkable.1
—Barack Obama, 2008

Th is was a chance to go from centuries of invisibility to

the most visible position in the entire world. He could,
through sheer symbolism, regardless of any of his actual
policies, change the lives of millions of black kids who
now saw something different to aspire to. . . . Th at’s why
I wanted Barack to win, so . . . kids could see themselves
differently, could see their futures differently than I did
when I was a kid in Brooklyn and my eyes were focused
on a narrower set of possibilities. . . . Since he’s been
elected there have been a lot of legitimate criticisms of
Obama. But if he’d lost, it would’ve been an unbelievable
tragedy—to feel so close to transformation and then
to get sucked back in to the same old story and watch
another generation grow up feeling like strangers in
their own country, their culture maligned, their voices
squashed. Instead, even with all the distance yet to go,
for the fi rst time I felt like we were at least moving in
the right direction, away from the shadows. 2
—Jay-Z, 2010

Some time before the most historic presidential election in the history of
the United States, then-senator Barack Obama was captured on fi lm talking
to a crowd of mostly young Black people in his home turf of Chicago.

130
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 131

He was speaking at an event that, in part, celebrated Chicago’s Hip Hop

and R&B station, WGCI 107.5FM. From the screen of the cell phone cam-
era, we see Obama with mic in hand: “So, my three year old, she espe-
cially loves GCI, that song, ‘Drop—Drop It Like It’s Hot.’ [Laughter and
cheers from audience]. She thinks it’s ‘Drop It Like A Sock’! [Laughter] So
she’s singin all in the back, ‘Drop it like a sock, drop it like a sock,’ ” At
this point, Obama starts dancing like his little girl and then continues:
“And she loves GCI. I appreciate . . . ” And before he can get any further, the
DJ drops Snoop Dogg’s hit song of the summer, “Drop It Like It’s Hot,”
and Obama, not skipping a beat, starts dancing to it and says, “Drop it!”
For the next 20 seconds, Obama entertains the audience, while the crowd
cheers, “O-bama! O-bama! O-bama!” He keeps dancing, pointing his finger
up in the air and bobbin his head to the beat.3 As you could imagine, the
crowd went bananas after witnessing a US senator gettin down to Snoop!
Later, in February 2008, the West Coast Hip Hop icon Snoop Dogg
appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live to discuss the presidential campaign.
Larry King asked the question on everybody’s mind that year: “Do you
think America is really ready for a Black President? You see prejudice all
the time.” After acknowledging the continuing racial prejudice in America,
Snoop responded:

I think America is ready for a Black President. By him winning

you know like he’s winning so far, and even competing, to be in
the talks right now—you know, I remember in the past when we
had Presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, it was a gimmick,
it was like a joke because nobody really believed Jesse could
win. . . . Right now, people really feel like this man could really
win. He’s got the right thing goin for him; he’s got the right con-
versation. . . . You know, whether he wins or loses, I feel like he
made a great step for Black America by even steppin to the table
and pullin off something like this.4

Snoop Dogg’s description of Barack Obama as having “the right conversa-

tion” was dead on point. With these three words, Snoop concisely captured
Barack’s ability to styleshift in linguistic terms (as discussed in detail in
chapter 1), as well as his ability to navigate treacherous racially and politi-
cally charged terrain by reaching multiple constituencies at once. Speaking
with National Public Radio (NPR) about Barack Obama’s relationship to
Hip Hop, Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal suggested that
many high profi le Black artists understood this strategy because it is one
that they use all the time. “There’s a version of, for instance, Snoop Dogg
that sells records, but that’s a very different version of Snoop Dogg that’s
132 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

sitting with Larry King talking about the election.”5 This “multiple-versions”
strategy is necessary because, as highly visible (and powerful) members of
a maligned social group, both Barack Obama and Hip Hop are aware that
dominant culture consistently frames them as “dangerous to America.”
When Snoop says, “Whether he wins or loses, I feel like he made a great
step for Black America by even steppin to the table and pullin off something
like this [our emphasis],” he implicitly acknowledges the racially discrimina-
tory context of American politics. Obama—like Hip Hop has done over the
years—stepped up to the table and pulled off what many assumed to be
the impossible. As a high profile Black public voice, his having “the right
conversation” was a prerequisite for his success in both Hip Hop commu-
nities and “mainstream” America. He went platinum in politics through
his ability to use language to pass America’s most treacherous racial test
(would White Americans accept a Black man in the White House?). And he
also went platinum in Hip Hop through his ability to linguistically navigate
Hip Hop’s unrelenting critique of government (would he really understand
where the Hip Hop community was comin from?).
Hip Hop language and style were critically important symbols during
the 2008 presidential campaign (and continue to be so). However, the ques-
tion of Barack Obama being the first “Hip Hop president” is about more
than just Barack’s ability to kick it. This question is one that gets at the
complicated relationships between Hip Hop music, race, and the culture
wars in America. As Brown University professor of Africana Studies Tricia
Rose argues in The Hip Hop Wars, even when it’s not explicit, Hip Hop has
become a primary means by which we talk about race in the United States.6
As we will see below, a critical analysis of artists like Young Jeezy, Nas,
Jay-Z, and Tupac (as well as the discourse of Hip Hop heads and haters,
including Fox News)—demonstrates that the controversies that surround
Barack Obama’s relationship with Hip Hop have everything to do with
issues of race, language, and cultural hegemony.

“Black Man Running and It Ain’t from

the Police”: The First Hip Hop President
Let’s take a trip down memory lane. In the early 1990s, Hip Hop icon
Tupac Shakur spit a classic Hip Hop quotable in his record, “Changes”: “And
although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a Black president.” 7
More than a decade and a half later, Hip Hop rode hard for Barack Obama,
with most believing he could take the White House (talk about changes, huh,
Pac?). West Coast legend Ice Cube, who rapped “Dream ticket: Ice Cube and
Obama!” explained: “I think America, I hope it’s smart enough to pick the
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 133

best person. And right now it looks like nobody’s better than Obama, you
know . . . it seems like people are sick of the way it’s goin, and nobody happy
with the country, the way it’s goin. People want a real change.”8 Artists all
over California, from Oakland to Sac-Town, the Bay Area and back down,
were also ridin for Obama, including San Francisco’s JT the Bigga Figga,
Oaklands’ Mistah F.A.B, Vallejo’s E-40, and East Los Angeles’s Will.I.Am.
Heads from “the Dirty Souf” were also stompin for Obama, including folks
like New Orleans’s Mia X, Houston’s Scarface and Paul Wall, and Atlanta’s
T.I., Young Jeezy, Cee-Lo and Ludacris. T.I. agreed with Cube that the per-
son who addresses—“and I mean really addresses”—the matters “that I
think most affect this country’s state right now, sincerely, passionately, is
Obama.”9 Focusing in directly on the issues, he added: “Nothing against
McCain, I just haven’t really heard him talk about the things I’m concerned
about, like getting out of the war and doing things for the ecosystem and
conserving energy.”10
The East Coast, too, rode hard for Obama, with big names like P. Diddy,
Will Smith, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Fat Joe, Lil Kim, Nas, and Jay-Z all comin
out in strong support. These and other Hip Hop artists supported Obama
in interviews or in their recordings. (Obama may very well be the most
cited US president in Hip Hop Culture, rivaling the enormous amount of
negative attention George W. Bush received from across the spectrum). Hip
Hop artists also donated to the campaign, put on concerts and fundrais-
ers, and designed T-shirts with catchy slogans (“Black Man Running and
It Ain’t from the Police!”). Some, like Jay-Z, donated their time to travel
with Obama and even put out calls on his behalf. HipHopforObama.com
posted Jay-Z’s campaign call for Obama on their site the night before the
election.11
Of course, the Midwest, especially The Chi, rode hard for Barack Obama,
with artists like Kanye West and Kidz in the Hall representin. In 2007,
long before Obama had even won the Democratic nomination, Chicago’s
Common released “The People,” in which he rhymed, “My raps ignite the
people like Obama!” On BlackTree.TV, Common spoke out at the height of
the Reverend Wright controversy, fearing that Obama’s candidacy was in
jeopardy:

Well, I mean, you know, the media’s defi nitely tryna work him
and tryna fi nd something bad about him, because they lookin
like, ‘Man, this dude is just doin too much good.’ You know, it’s
like, you see this guy talkin about unity for all people, talkin
about helpin people that’s poor . . . and people wanna go against
that. You know, it’s kinda crazy to hear the media tryna pull him
down, especially you know, over a pastor. . . . I go to that church,
134 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Trinity. . . . And since I was eight years old, and I ain’t never left
the church one Sunday ever feelin hatred towards anybody. So,
you know, the media gotta find something, but the people know
what’s up.12

Hip Hop artists from around the world, including the Haitian-born Wyclef
Jean and Senegal’s Positive Black Soul, were vocal in their support of Barack
Obama. While Hip Hop had Obama’s back—even callin him “B-Rock”—
Barack Obama was also showin Hip Hop some love.13 In many high profi le
media outlets, he continually cited Hip Hop as one of his music interests.
When Hip Hop critic and political journalist Jeff Chang asked him what
he “got down to,” he ran down his usual roster of Old School classics like
Stevie Wonder, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, and Earth
Wind & Fire. But then he added: “So when the Fugees were together [the
group included Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Pras Michel], I loved listening
to the Fugees. I think OutKast does a lot of interesting work. My fellow
Chicagoan Common I think is outstanding. I really dig his stuff.”14 Later,
in Rolling Stone, Obama explained: “Jay-Z used to be sort of what pre-
dominated, but now I’ve got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some
other stuff.”15 And in a widely circulated interview on Black Entertainment
Television (BET), Obama was asked if he liked Hip Hop:

BET: Do you like Hip Hop?

Obama: Of course.
BET: Who do you like?
Obama: You know, I gotta admit, lately I’ve been listening to a
lotta Jay-Z, you know, this new American Gangster album is
tight.
BET: What do you like about it?
Obama: You know, it tells a story, and, you know, as Jay would
say, he got flow. But Kanye, I like, you know, but I have to
admit that I still am an old school guy. I’m still, you know,
Stevie, Marvin, you know if you look at my iPod it’s Earth
Wind & Fire, Isley Brothers, Temptations, you know, I’ve got
a lotta of that old school stuff. So, you know, I enjoy some of
the newer stuff.16

In interview after interview, Obama kept it real by stating that he’s “an old
school guy,” but he also continually mentions Hip Hop as being in regular
rotation in his iPod. Will.I.Am’s video “Yes We Can” became the Obama
campaign’s leading pop culture ad. DJ Green Lantern and Russell Simmon’s
mixtape took care of the streets (everybody from Busta Rhymes, Rhymefest,
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 135

Styles P, Wale, Joell Ortiz, Nas, Jay-Z, Twista, and Joe Budden was on that
joint). And Chinese American rapper Jin’s “Open Letter 2 Obama” burned
up the Internet and was available as a free ringtone download on Obama’s
official campaign site.
Aside from harnessing the power of Hip Hop Culture for his campaign,
Barack Obama also became a very powerful symbol for the Hip Hop com-
munity because he could “get with” Hip Hop like no other president before
him. While often commenting on his politics, artists also picked up on
Obama’s style. Folks like Antonio “L.A.” Reid, Chairman of Island Def Jam
Music Group, commented on Barack’s “swagger,” while artists like Devin
the Dude saw Barack as “intertwining culture just like Hip Hop does.”17
Rapper D.M.C. of Run-D.M.C. even likened Obama to “a dope MC.”18 A
prime example of Barack’s familiarity with Hip Hop came during one of
his speeches in South Carolina where he responded to the negativity that
was being hurled at him from the Clinton campaign. Barack calmly and
coolly, and to resounding applause, looked over his shoulder and brushed
it two or three times. While many in the crowd appreciated the gesture,
those familiar with Hip Hop knew that Barack, by gettin that dirt off his
shoulder, was sampling Jay-Z’s hit from The Black Album.19 The fact that
a presidential candidate sampled a popular Hip Hop gesture in order to
rebuff classic, textbook Washington politics was defi nitely not missed.
As Common noted on CNN in summer 2007, “He’s fresh, you know, he’s
got good style.”20 He later explained in an interview with BlackTree.TV: “I
think he’s a reflection of Hip Hop Culture in a way that he’s in tune with
it. . . . And I know that the fact that he’s in tune with it is a great example
of what we need in the future cuz it’s, to me . . . he’s aware of what’s goin on
with the youth and we need that.”21
Barack Obama also flexes his linguistic style, especially in his ability to
use various features of Black Language. In the Chicago radio station event,
we see and hear a Barack Obama who knows how to “drop it like it’s hot”
and, in linguistic jargon, monophthongize his diphthongs. In nontechni-
cal terms, he pronounces my like mah and CGI like C-G-ahh, which is a
salient feature of African American (and southern) pronunciation. He then
not only lists Jay-Z’s American Gangster album as something he likes but
says that it’s “tight,” in part because Jay-Z “got flow.” His familiarity with
Black Language and Hip Hop’s lexicon is not merely symbolic. It represents
a presidential first. This is part of what prompts folks to refer to Barack
Obama as the “first Hip Hop President” and also part of the reason why
many political observers credit Hip Hop for bringin out the largest youth
vote in presidential election history. Many Hip Hop artists, like KRS-One,
B.G., Mike Jones, Plies, and others, explained in interviews that this was
the first time that they were inspired to vote.22 The Game even said he’d
136 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

“vote twice” if he could. Meanwhile Fat Joe was busy packin people in
his car to get them to register. After highlighting that Black and Latino
communities were “getting hit the hardest by inadequate health care, fore-
closures, and an unjust war,” he stated: “I always been one of those who
would say Register to vote. . . . Now I’ve forced my wife to register. I drive my
cousins, nephews, and friends to the library so they can register.”23 It was
clear that Hip Hop heads wanted to “change the game in Washington,” as
Barack Obama wrote in his letter to Vibe magazine, again, capitalizing on
Hip Hop’s language.24

“I Can Only Pick a Nike or Adidas?”: Hip Hop’s

Diverse and Sophisticated Political Views
As Hip Hop historian, critic, and journalist Davey D pointed out imme-
diately after the inauguration, while race, culture, language, and age may
have been important factors in Hip Hop’s support of Barack Obama,
it was his politics, fi rst and foremost, that Hip Hop heads gravitated
toward. Conservative columnists and pundits were quick to assume that
Hip Hop voted for Obama either “just because he was Black” or “just
because he speaks their language.” However, as Davey D argued, these
kinds of assumptions hinged on racist stereotypes of Black youth because
they ignored the myriad sophisticated conversations and dialogues that
occurred nationwide about the 2008 elections.25 They also ignored the
fact that Hip Hop did not offer unconditional support for Barack Obama.
Rather, heads engaged the broader political issues more generally and
pressed him on issues that directly impact many Black and Brown com-
munities specifically.26
Davey D offers several examples of these kinds of Hip Hop political
forums and conventions which addressed such key issues as “police bru-
tality, education, poverty and crime” as well as global, environmental,
and trade issues. He also highlighted the spirited political debate between
Chicago rappers Lupe Fiasco and Rhymefest. Similar debates raged in Latino
communities as well, like the highly publicized debate between Fat Joe and
rapper/reggaetonero Daddy Yankee, who was one of the few supporters of
John McCain.27 Overall, these debates showed thoughtful, nuanced politi-
cal views that demonstrated that many in Hip Hop “were not just blindly
following a charismatic figure.”28 Importantly, these discussions “moved
well beyond the 30 second soundbite, one size fits all mentality that this
Obama and Hip Hop discussion is often reduced to.” 29 They also reminded
us that Hip Hop is, as Black historian, journalist, and Hip Hop critic James
G. Spady has long argued, an “art form/forum.”30
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 137

Many in Hip Hop also expressed a healthy skepticism toward Obama’s,

and government’s, ability to fulfi ll promises of change. Some critical play-
ers urged folks to push Obama to make more difficult choices and to take
more firm stances on progressive issues. Others urged youth to engage
the political process, with or without Barack Obama, and to consider the
Green Party’s women of color ticket Cynthia McKinney and Hip Hop activ-
ist Rosa Clemente (who some argued was “the real Hip Hop” ticket).31 Like
D.M.C. noted, “You got the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. I’m
neither. I’m Hip Hop.”32 Others, like the Pharcyde’s Imani, lamented the
two-party system through clever metaphors: “Are you telling me I get to
pick, but I only get to pick out of two people? I can only pick a Nike or
Adidas? My first pick was Reebok, my second pick was Puma. So now I’m
left with Adidas and Nike? I’m going Adidas, man.” And then he added jok-
ingly, “I’m going with the black high-top Adidas. Hint, hint.”33 Others like
the Afro-Peruvian Immortal Technique continually urged Hip Hop heads to
think beyond Barack. In a blog post, he pushed folks to view political poli-
cies and processes as imbricated with global economic interests.34 Stic.Man
from dead prez kept it concise, “Even if Barack Obama wins, Uncle Sam
still ain’t our friend.”35
While there were few public anti-Obama statements coming from Hip
Hop communities, artists often found themselves in the difficult position
of having to balance their usually uncompromising critiques of govern-
ment with their support of Barack Obama. He was a candidate whom some
viewed either as not progressive enough or as part of a hopelessly broken
system in Washington. Still, they walked that fine line, often expressing
opinions mixed with support and skepticism, with hope in Barack Obama
and a lack of faith in Washington. Mississippi’s David Banner reminded
folks that Obama’s election would not be “the end of anything,” and while
it “may be the most important election in history, it won’t change things
by itself. It’s just the beginning.” He added: “We’re going to have to work
hard. We’re going to have to continue this process. Let’s say if everyone
in the South gets out to vote, Obama gets in, you know—will that trend
continue? That is the important thing.”36

“Art Can’t Just Be a Rearview Mirror”: Obama’s

Delicate Dance with Hip Hop Heads and Haters
The president has also had to walk a fine line in terms of how he repre-
sents his relationship to Hip Hop. Obama’s delicate dance with Hip Hop
heads and haters alike needed to show that he was willing to come down
on Hip Hop, but at the same time, remain down for Hip Hop. While many
138 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

used the phrase, “Hip Hop president” as a way to celebrate Obama’s relative
youth, hipness, and comfort and familiarity with Hip Hop Culture, others
used the label as a means of fear mongering. Conservative critics, such as
Craig Smith, for example, attempted to use “hip-hop” to scare White voters
away from Obama, whom he described as “merely” a “hip-hop senator from
Illinois.”37 In his racist, reductive rant against “the first hip-hop president,”
he suggested that the Obamas will use “ghetto slang” in the Oval Office
and have “no sense of decorum.” This lack of decorum would lead the “hip-
hop president” to offer “bling-bling” to his guests instead of the customary
cuff links and, even worse, to refer to his cabinet members as his “bitches.”
He then links Obama to a Hip Hop Culture that is not only dangerous and
angry but has been “infi ltrating every class and race in America for years”
and “has led people to believe they deserve more” and that “things need
to change” (the very reasons why Hip Hop supported Obama!). Smith goes
on to frame both Barack Obama and Hip Hop as “dangerous for America.”
Returning to language one more time, he concludes condescendingly: “But
hey, he will be dope. He will use all the cool language and slang. He will
be a President who is able to hang with the homies.”
While the Hip Hop community appreciates Obama’s linguistic ability to
styleshift, others read it as a threat to “standard English” and use it in rac-
ist, race-baiting rhetoric against the president. But language has also been
a major part of President Obama’s criticism of Hip Hop; he is often as crit-
ical of Hip Hop as he is celebratory. The previously cited BET interview is a
case in point. In the interview, Barack states:

[A]nd, you know, honestly, I love the art of Hip Hop, I don’t
always love the message of Hip Hop. There are times where even
on the artists that I named, the artists that I love, you know,
there’s a message that is not only sometimes degrading to women,
not only uses the N-word a little too frequently, but also—some-
thing I’m really concerned about—is always talkin about mate-
rial things and always talkin about how I can get something, you
know, how I’ve got more money, more, you know, cars, more.38

Here, Obama makes two very important points for two very different
constituencies. First, for many members of the Hip Hop community, it was
the first time that they had ever heard a presidential candidate (and now
44th president) refer to “the art of Hip Hop.” While this point is obvious
to many African Americans, the public discourse on Hip Hop Culture still
remains woefully unsophisticated. (Outlets such as CNN, for example, still
lead their Hip Hop stories with the headline: “Hip Hop: Art or Poison?”
followed by menacing music.)39 Obama, in this one interview, was seen as
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 139

having the potential to reframe the conversation about Hip Hop music as
really a conversation about art, poetry, and lyrical production. Hip Hop
may not have needed to hear that because it already knew it, but it needed
to hear those words in order to science out where Barack Obama stood vis-
à-vis Hip Hop Culture. By using the word art, he demonstrated his respect
for a culture that, despite its enormous commercial and global success, con-
tinues to be misunderstood and misinterpreted in the mainstream.
The second important point Barack Obama makes is that he is critical
of “the message of Hip Hop.” This was interpreted by some in the Hip Hop
community as legitimate criticism and by others as Obama’s need to sup-
port Hip Hop while not losing his broader base. As one young Black woman
put it, “Can you imagine how quickly he would lose all of his White sup-
port—especially his White women supporters—if he didn’t critique rap for
its demeaning images of women?!”40 When it came to the hot button issues
of gender and race, Obama gave a little to both sides. He critiqued Hip Hop
for messages that are “degrading to women” but prefaced that with “some-
times”; and he critiqued use of the N-word but followed that with “a little
too frequently.” In other words, his use of adverbs in these cases indicated
that he wasn’t just following the popular, reductionist scripts of “all Hip
Hop is degrading to women” or “Hip Hop artists need to stop using the
N-word altogether.” His qualifiers here were a subtle yet important signal.
When it came to something less controversial, though, Obama chose an
adverb that gave the impression that he was really comin down hard on
Hip Hop: “always talkin about material things.” Th is is a critique that Hip
Hop heads have heard many times before, and of course, while it could
have been more nuanced, it was nothing new.
The BET interviewer continues by asking Obama if his administration
would “explore how Hip Hop can be effectively used” to aid in issues such
as education and incarceration. Obama, once again, walks the tightrope
and achieves balance by embracing the Hip Hop community, though only
conditionally, while appeasing constituents who were eager to hear him
denounce “those Hip Hop people.” In his response, Obama says that Hip
Hop can “absolutely” be used in positive ways in his administration. He
demonstrates his respect for Hip Hop by showing that he engages directly
with the culture and that he appreciates it for its complexity and politi-
cal potential (definitely a far cry from how any Republican president ever
viewed Hip Hop, or even how President Clinton treated politically conscious
Hip Hop artist Sista Souljah in the 1990s).41 As Obama put it:

You know, and I’ve met with Jay-Z and I’ve met with Kanye, and
talked with other artists, about how potentially to bridge that
gap and, you know, I think the potential for them to deliver a
140 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

message of extraordinary power, that gets people thinking—you

know, the thing about Hip Hop today is it’s smart. I mean, it’s
insightful. And, you know, the way that they can communicate a
complex message in a very short space is remarkable.42

Again, referring to Hip Hop as smart, insightful, and complex art with the
potential to produce thought-provoking music demonstrated to the Hip
Hop Nation that Barack “gets” the culture. Yet again, Barack followed this
praise with a critique of Hip Hop music that gave his Hip Hop−hating con-
stituents something to cling to:

So, the question then is, what’s the content? What’s the message? I
understand folks wanna be rooted in their community, they wanna
be down. But what I always say is, is that, you know, Hip Hop
is not just a mirror of what is, it should also be a reflection of
what can be. And, you know, a lotta times folks say, ‘I wanna keep
it real,’ and ‘I wanna be down.’ Then we’re just trapped in what
is. . . . Art can’t just be a rearview mirror, you know, it should have a
headlight out there, you know, pointing to where we need to go.43

Hip Hop heads done heard this critique a thousand times and often in the
form of internal critiques—recall the elongated debates between Ice Cube
and Common in the 1990s or the more recent debates between Nas and
Young Jeezy about the state of Hip Hop. Yet many of those outside of the
Culture seem to be wholly unaware of Hip Hop’s sharp, self-reflexive criti-
cism. Obama’s comments assuaged the worries of the Hip Hop haters by
lending a presidential voice—and a Black one at that—to their concerns
about Hip Hop’s “message” and its “negative influence on young kids.” At
the same time, the critique rolled off of Hip Hop’s back because: 1) Hip
Hop is used to being thrown under the bus by politicians and scapegoated
by society-at-large, 2) the community often delivers far more scathing self-
critiques, and 3) again, while his critique could have been more nuanced, it
was certainly nothing new.
Mark Anthony Neal describes Barack’s delicate dance like this: “The chal-
lenge that Barack Obama had was really to be able to wink to the hip-hop
community and say, ‘I really can’t acknowledge you in the mainstream, but
understand that I’m hearing what your critique is . . . what your concerns
are, and you now have a wide-open space in the so-called underground
to talk about why my candidacy is important.’ ”44 By the same token, as
noted by Public Enemy frontman and global Hip Hop icon Chuck D, Hip
Hop’s challenge was to be ever alert so that “you don’t drop the ball when
Obama throws you a no-look pass.”45
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 141

“My President Is Black, My Lambo’s Blue”:

(Mis)Interpreting Barack Obama’s Biggest
Hip Hop “Controversy”
Given this general background and context, now we wanna get deep into
what was perhaps Barack Obama’s biggest Hip Hop “controversy”—the
release and aftermath of Young Jeezy and Nas’s “My President” (off of
Jeezy’s The Recession album, 2008, produced six months before Obama’s vic-
tory) and Jay-Z’s remix. “My President” was referred to by the Washington
Post’s Chris Richards as “the most compelling” Hip Hop record (there
were dozens upon dozens) in support of Barack Obama’s candidacy. It is,
in his words, “a powerful confluence of pop hit, street anthem and rally
cry . . . over a triumphant beat.”46 “My President” is not just compelling; it
is perhaps one of the most “controversial” rap records and videos in recent
memory. Though race is not the principal theme nor is Whiteness explicitly
critiqued, the incredible amount of race talk generated by this record bears
witness to its symbolic meanings. The response to “My President” and the
remixes that followed underscored the deeply tense nature of contempo-
rary race relations in America. The aftermath exposed the fact that Black
and White Americans possessed radically differing ideologies of race and
deeply contrasting views of who can talk about race, how, when, to whom,
and for what purpose.
Some would say that Young Jeezy is everything that President Obama
critiques and then some. Many Hip Hop heads and academics will realize
that, relatively speaking, Jeezy is not by any stretch of the imagination
one of Hip Hop’s most complex lyricists. Nor does he fit neatly into accept-
able paradigms of Blackness and masculinity espoused by many middle-
class, university students at elite private institutions. Neither does he fit
the “progressive” agendas of some Black bourgeois academics or, for that
matter, the “radical” agendas of some working-class, anticapitalist, “socially-
conscious” Hip Hop heads. As Mark Anthony Neal notes about Jeezy, in
particular:

Jeezy’s a fascinating figure in this conversation because if we

think about his rap persona, as a cat that’s slinging dope on the
corner, who’s disaffected because the political process doesn’t
work . . . for a figure like that to come in from the cold and go
into a voter booth and decide. ‘Th is is going to be the first time
that I’m going to cast a vote’—I think it speaks volumes to where
the larger community is in terms of these kinds of marginalized
figures, who’ve never been involved in the process.47
142 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Jeezy has always viewed his music as inspirational, in part, because he

knows that his fans understand that he’s been through a lotta difficult
shit. But in this case especially, he hopes that his fans will hear him “take
a pause from all the normal rapper stuff ” and say, “You know what, we got
a problem and we got to address this. If you’re out here, [a] hard-working
American, and you can’t even put food on your table, there’s a problem
with your system.”48
When taken seriously as a cultural or literary text, “My President” is
rich for its artistic and aesthetic qualities, its verbal wit and dexterity, its
creative sociopolitical critique, and its attentiveness to multiple audiences.
It is also notable for its ability to merge narratives of bleak, sociocul-
tural, historic, and economic realities with the audacity to hope (to borrow
a phrase from the homie) for a political change that’s been a long time
comin.49
The video opens up with a audiovisually dramatic scene right out of any
Hollywood fi lm. Over the loud roar of the engine and the screech of the
tires, you hear and feel the built-up anticipation of a cheering crowd as a
bright blue Lamborghini pulls up onto the scene. As the guards direct the
driver to a parking space, the crowd continues to roar over a helicopter’s
propeller. It’s the kind of grand entrance reserved for presidents. As the
Lamborghini parks, its doors open upward and out comes, not the presi-
dent dressed in a suit, but Young Jeezy, a Hip Hop artist dressed in a black
hoodie, black baseball cap, and black stunna shades! Through the crowd and
media cameras, you catch a glimpse of a guard whispering something into
Jeezy’s ear (some sort of intelligence perhaps). Under a political rally sign,
a young White woman dances, fi lled with happiness. Young men, women,
and children cheer even more loudly as Young Jeezy embraces two smiling,
happy little kids.
The camera quickly cuts to a Hollywood fi lm director’s sign that reads,
“Young Jeezy: My President Is Black,” and underneath that the name of
the director, “Gabriel Hart.” As the arm of the sign swings down, the inspi-
rational, anthemlike music begins. The camera scans the crowd, which is
now clearly a political rally. Supporters hold (usually blue = Democratic)
signs that bear the names of supporting groups (“Women for Obama,”
for example), various American cities and states (including Las Vegas,
Brooklyn, Iowa, Colorado, Alabama, Arkansas, Hawai’i, Maryland, Maine,
Missouri, etc.), other continents and countries outside the United States
(from Jamaica, Japan and China to Haiti, Israel, and Africa), political rev-
olutionaries and freedom fighters (from Che Guevara and Malcolm X to
Gandhi and Sojourner Truth, and of course, Barack Obama), and impor-
tantly, fallen Hip Hop heroes and legends (including Tupac Shakur, Run
DMC’s Jam Master Jay, Soulja Slim, and the Notorious B.I.G.). The signs are
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 143

a symbolic spatiotemporal collage that move across regional and national

borders and travel centuries back to the American slavocracy and forward
to the recent death of Black comedian and actor Bernie Mac. The crowd
then becomes a swirl of ecstatic Black children smiling ear to ear, with an
unfettered happiness and joy.
Over that image comes Jeezy’s intro, where he boasts to other emcees
and the Hip Hop community more generally: “Yeah, this be the realest shit
I never wrote / I ain’t write this shit by the way, nigga, some real shit
right here, nigga / This’ll be the realest shit you ever quote.” Jeezy’s intro-
duction is important mainly because it highlights Hip Hop as a creative
process, through which texts are written, circulated, reinterpreted, and put
to various uses. While the politics of Hip Hop often lead to misinterpreta-
tion, the art and aesthetics of Hip Hop are often wholly misunderstood. In
a cultural space where the aesthetic is political, these misreadings take on
even greater importance. A listener must be in conversation with multiple
discourses within and beyond the African American community in order to
interpret these, as President Obama would have it, complex, multilayered
texts.
In many cases, we can see how even the well intentioned and open
minded can misread Hip Hop cultural texts, despite their professed love
of and familiarity with the Culture. One interpreter, a young, White sup-
porter of Barack Obama, writes passionately that the song is “nothing
short of epic” because it “addresses the social, political, personal, historical,
regional, religious, and literary just to name a few.” After explaining how
authenticity and “the real” are central to Hip Hop cultural production,
he writes: “Most importantly, perhaps, in this regard are Jeezy’s first few
lines. He gleefully notes, ‘I ain’t [write] this [shit] by the way nigga, some
real shit right here nigga.’ Jeezy is willing to sacrifice that he is the writer
behind the song to simply show that he is truthful. That he would under-
mine himself in his quest for the ‘real’ is most telling.” What is most telling
here is not Jeezy’s relinquishing his authorship but, rather, this young
man’s gross misreading of even the first few lines of the text (despite being
an avid listener of “underground” Hip Hop).
In these few lines, Young Jeezy is doing everything but giving up his
authorship. Quite to the contrary, he’s boasting about his ability to “write”
rhymes without “writing” them. The oral production and memorization of
rhymes is privileged in some emcee circles to the point that verbal artists
such as Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel claim to write all of their rhymes in their
heads. So, when Jeezy says, “I ain’t write this shit,” he’s not speaking literally
about authorship but, rather, the literacy practice of putting pen to pad. Not
only is Jeezy placing himself in the most skilled circle of emcees who privi-
lege orality as a means of lyrical production, but he is also placing himself in
144 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

direct conversation, across time and text, with artists like Tupac Shakur. In
1996, Tupac opened up “Against All Odds” with the lines, “Th is be the real-
est shit I ever wrote . . . truest shit I ever spoke.” Picked up by artists around
the world since then, Tupac’s text is loop-linked to the present. Artists like
Atlanta’s Young Jeezy and Oakland’s Mistah F.A.B., among others, continue
to signify on the lines by transposing ever and never. They reinterpret Pac’s
text in such a way as to highlight both its importance (“realness”) as well as
the oral means of its production. Recognizing the continuous life and inter-
textuality of rap lyrics, Jeezy not only boasts that he “never” wrote the shit
but that it’s so dope that he knows you gon quote it too.
Throughout the song, there is a conversation being had among members
of the Hip Hop community. The song’s full interpretation depends on one’s
familiarity with Hip Hop Nation Language, including an ever-evolving
slang. But more importantly, it depends on one’s familiarity with a range
of Hip Hop texts and discourses, including all of the latest Hip Hop news
and events. The artist often weaves this running conversation seamlessly
into the rest of the text without detracting from the main thrust of the
song. This is done by using double entendres, creative word play, and play
on words. In addition to the preceding lines from Tupac Shakur, one critical
interpreter, a 19-year-old from Botswana, notes that the opening of Jeezy’s
first verse cites and builds on one of Ice Cube’s most famous refrains, “it
was a good day,” from the song by the same title (Predator, 1992). The
interpreter refers to the start of the verse as “optimistic” because Jeezy’s
borrowing from Ice Cube “signifies the advent of a brighter future for Black
people and the rest of the nation. He expresses that he hopes the good
times continue by saying, ‘hope I have me a great night.’ From this, we can
gather that he hopes that Obama will win the election.”
Other Hip Hop internal references abound. Jeezy continues his first
verse by voicing one of Hip Hop’s major points of critique of the Bush
presidency and the McCain candidacy—the motives behind the US govern-
ment’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He raps: “Mr. soul
survivor, does that make me a convict? / Be all you can be, now don’t that
sound like some dumb shit? / When you die over crude oil as black as my
nigga Boo / It’s really a Desert Storm, that’s word to my nigga Clue.” In
these lines, without being familiar with any of the references, one would
hear a straightforward message describing: (1) a young Black male’s struggle
to “survive” (despite being cast as a convict), (2) a clear renunciation of the
US Army’s recruiting slogan (“Be All That You Can Be”), and (3) a question-
ing of the US government’s motivation for the war in Iraq (i.e., the merce-
nary profits gained through control of Iraq’s oil fields and production).
Aside from the direct political conversation, however, the artistry of
Hip Hop often revels in its ability to encode messages to its listeners
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 145

while maintaining the central meaning for those outside the critical circle.
While this is often done for political purposes, there is also the pleasure
involved in the poetic play. For example, in the first line, Jeezy’s referenc-
ing his own hit “Soul Survivor” (2005, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101),
which was a collaboration with Muslim Senegalese artist Akon. With some
minor orthographic changes, the word convict becomes Konvict, a reference
to Akon’s record label, Konvict Muzik. Further, the critique of the war on
Iraq as being motivated by a quest for “crude oil as black as my nigga Boo”
(his homie who appears in the video) and labeled a “Desert Storm,” sug-
gests on one level that Bush Junior is merely completing the work of Bush
Senior (George H. Bush’s war on Iraq was labeled Operation Desert Storm).
One White interpreter rightly notes that Jeezy’s reference to Desert Storm
points to the “echo it represents of the past Iraq War” and describes the
verse as a critique of “the Iraq War recruitment which overly targets
blacks.” However, he misreads the following line (“word to my nigga Clue”),
indicating that it’s either a reference to “a friend that died or a nigga who
needs a clue as to what is really going on.” So, on another level, the hid-
den conversation that’s being had here is that, in addition to critiquing
the Bushes’ military operations in Iraq, Jeezy is referencing Akon’s Konvict
Muzik and shouting out DJ Clue (“word to my nigga Clue”), who released a
mixtape by the name of “Desert Storm.”
Beyond these Hip Hop discourses, Jeezy weaves other discourses into
his critiques of George W. Bush: “Bush robbed all of us, would that make
him a criminal? / And then he cheated in Florida, would that make him
a Seminole?” One Latina interpreter passionately described “My President”
as a song that dually expressed the “hurt” of America’s past as well as the
“hope” of America’s future. She writes eloquently, “When hurt and despair
would otherwise rule those formerly treated, at best, like the step-children
of America, we find in our less-affluent, in our ‘poor,’ the saving grace of
America.” Despite the depth of her reading, she and others critiqued Jeezy
for “blatant racism” against Native Americans because it undermined his
political activism on behalf of the Black community. While she appreci-
ated the critique of former president Bush’s “victory” in Florida (“And
then he cheated in Florida, would that make him a Seminole?”), she did
not appreciate that (in her interpretation) it came at the expense of Native
Americans because “cheating is a stereotype of that ethnicity.” These lines
assume political knowledge of the 2004 US presidential voting scandal in
Florida (where many perceived George W. Bush’s victory in Florida as due,
in part, to the fact that his brother Jeb Bush was governor). However, the
discourse that is crucial to unlocking the meaning of this passage is that
of college athletics. Rather than being a wrong-headed, racist attack on
Native Americans, as some suggested, the line actually is a reference to the
146 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

academic cheating scandal that rocked the Florida State Seminole football
team in 2007.50
The point of this detailed explication is not to belittle these earnest
efforts at textual analysis or simply to make the reader hyperaware of their
own ignorance when critiquing rap music. Rather, it is to highlight the body
of knowledge that listeners must possess in order to approach even the first
few lines of what heads consider a straightforward rap record. It also under-
scores the fact that whether or not you agree with Obama’s assessment
of Hip Hop’s remarkable ability “to communicate a complex message in a
very short space” depends on your interpretive skills and familiarity level.51
The average listener incorrectly assumes that their life experience—as far
removed as it might be from the Hip Hop cultural world—has prepared
them to unpack the various layers of these texts. It’s this assumption of pre-
paredness that often leads to and stokes the flames of some of the biggest
“controversies” around Barack Obama’s relationship to Hip Hop music.52

Inside the Mind of a Politicized

“Snowman”: Young Jeezy Speaks for
“the Young and the Oppressed”
On its surface, “My President” is a celebration of the (not yet elected)
nation’s first Black president. The song is also a continuation of Hip Hop’s
relentless and uncompromising critiques of social inequality, poverty, gov-
ernment policies in relation to war, the “War on Drugs,” and the criminal-
ization and disenfranchisement of African Americans. What many readers
might not know is that Young Jeezy has made his career around a persona
(Snowman) known for selling “snow” or “white” (cocaine). Jeezy portrays
himself in much of his music as a drug dealer turned rapper, not an unfa-
miliar storyline. In 2005, however, not only was his album flying off the
shelves, so were his custom designed Snowman T-shirts, which featured a
snowman with a scowl. Schools all over the country banned the T-shirts,
youth refused to stop wearing them, parents bugged out, and the Snowman
firestorm was on!53
While some of Hip Hop’s language is encoded in the relatively harm-
less and playful ways previously described, some of it is also encoded in
contemporary street argot, especially the idiom of the informal economy.
In the hook to Jeezy’s “My President,” he sings: “My President is Black,
my Lambo’s blue / And I’ll be goddamned if my rims ain’t too.” Most folks
only recognize these first few rhymes, but the rest of the hook is critical:
“My momma ain’t at home, and daddy’s still in jail / Tryna make a plate,
anybody seen the scale? . . . My money’s light green and my Jordans light
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 147

grey / And they love to see white, now how much you tryna pay?” Some
earnest interpreters misread Jeezy’s question, “anybody seen the scale?” as
a reference to the scales of justice: “Clearly he wants to ask the audience
to look at the breadth of history and the current inequality.” However,
in street slang, the scale refers to the equipment used by drug dealers to
weigh their product. Further, the chorus ends with an apparent glorifica-
tion of drug dealing: “And they love to see white [cocaine], now how much
you tryna pay.”
This hook has been described by some as just that same old “bling-bling”
Hip Hop, where young Black men rap about all the material things “that
all rappers talk about” like “cars, money, and shoes.” Another commenta-
tor, after identifying as a “huge Obama supporter,” one who “even paid
1500 dollars to fly to Washington to see him sworn in,” asks: “[B]ut this
song is talking about hoes and rims and lambos—how the hell does any of
that pertain to Obama and what he’s bringing to the table?” Many listen-
ers were blinded by the bling of the blue Lambo and, surely, by the already
well-established master narrative that explains the behavior of young Black
men as unintelligent, empty, and nonsensical. As a result, they could only
read the images as “classless,” “ostentatious,” or “showy” modes of wealth
bereft of meaning (“This song is so stupid it’s not even funny”). However,
Jeezy offers a radically different perspective: “I’m putting meaning back
into the music business. Everybody been thinking our music is about fancy
cars and champagne. That ain’t helping people get through their day.”54
One critical interpreter, a 19-year old gay, South Asian male, respond-
ing to the hook, offers a much more insightful reading of these displays of
Black wealth:

The lambo remark seems to detract from the potency of this idea
(“fi rst Black president”) because it is so materialistic and trivial
in comparison. Yet, I would argue that by showing a Lambo,
these black artists are able to question the low-income economic
spheres that black people are socially and economically desig-
nated in our society. . . . By fl aunting this wealth, the artists are
able to portray African American people occupying new economic
space just as Obama is able to demonstrate an African American
person occupying a new political space.

And we would add, not just African American people but a particular
type of “ghetto fabulous” hood aesthetic that prioritizes Black, working-
class stylistic choices despite their broader social deprecation (“And I’ll be
goddamned if my rims ain’t too!”). Further, Jeezy knows that it is and it
ain’t about a blue Lambo. As he speaks over the fading music in the outro,
148 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

he says, “I’m important too though. . . . I was, I was the first nigga to ride
through my hood in a Lamborghini, yeah.” Then he laughs knowingly, “Ha
ha!” and concludes, “Nah, forreal though, we ready for change.”
What remains problematic for some is that the means of achieving
wealth in “My President” remains outside acceptable social norms. The
hook, though, can be read as an internal dialogue about the complex deci-
sions that some Black youth living in poverty have to make while grow-
ing up in dire socioeconomic circumstances. Here, Jeezy is not necessarily
speaking for himself. Rather, he becomes the Everyman figure, speaking
on behalf of all Black men in similar situations. Growing up in the proj-
ects of Atlanta in what he describes as a “dysfunctional family,” with a
mother “who had a lot goin on . . . personal problems, the streets”55 might
certainly have provided the fi rsthand experience necessary to speak on
this issue. But that’s not what’s important. What’s critical here is that
Jeezy’s so-called glorification of drug dealing can be read as a sociopo-
litical critique, one that points out that Black youth often only turn to
the informal economy out of necessity. Th is is especially the case when
their families are torn apart by the criminal justice system. As Jeezy raps,
conveying the frustration of the struggling Black poor (those dispropor-
tionately affected by the worst recession since the Great Depression): “I
said I woke up this morning, headache this big / Pay all these damn bills,
feed all these damn kids / Buy all these school shoes, buy all these school
clothes.” With the continuing overrepresentation of Black men in prison
cells and unemployment lines (hovering between 15−20 percent unem-
ployment as this chapter is being written), selling drugs to put food on
the table (to “make a plate”) is viewed as a means of survival when the
odds been stacked against you due to centuries of race- and class-based
social inequality. 56
As the Snowman, Jeezy often raps about the drug game as a “trap,”
where society offers you an existential dilemma with no way out. Like Nas
rhymes on his verse to “My President,” the “trap” has important political
consequences: “Yeah, our history, Black history, no President ever did shit
for me / Had to hit the streets, had to flip some ki’s [kilograms of cocaine]
so a nigga won’t go broke / Then they put us in jail, now a nigga can’t go
vote.” Nas continues Jeezy’s narrative but highlights the fact that govern-
ment failures to address centuries of inequality (“no President ever did shit
for me”) create desperate circumstances of poverty. Forced to make incred-
ibly difficult choices (as Jeezy once said, “My aunt need a kidney, but she
don’t have no insurance”), some Black youth turn to the informal economy,
which then leads to the “trap” of death or imprisonment. Nas makes it
plain that these policies and “choices” conspire to take away folks’ right to
vote and lead to political disenfranchisement.
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 149

This perspective, where illegal or criminal behavior becomes framed

as less of a moral question and more an issue of survival in the face of
extreme poverty and structural racism, is a recurring theme in Hip Hop.
It is also what makes many Americans extremely uncomfortable. As Tupac
Shakur rapped in “Changes,” highlighting the intersecting oppressions of
young Black men, “I’m tired of bein poor, and even worse I’m Black / My
stomach hurts, so I’m lookin for a purse to snatch.” As Princeton University
professor of African American Studies Imani Perry explains in her Prophets
of the Hood: The Politics and Poetics of Hip Hop, this perspective must be
understood within a Hip Hop interpretive framework. Th is view places
narratives of “gangsterism, drug-dealing and other violence” within a large
body of texts that provide a critique of “poverty, desperation, lack of edu-
cational opportunity.” As a whole, these texts give us numerous examples
of the “inconsistency between the constitutional and symbolic meanings of
Americanness and the experiences of African Americans.”57 What is per-
haps most troubling to many Americans, as Perry notes, is that Hip Hop
continues the African American folk tradition of “embracing the outlaw,” a
literary, metaphorical, and sometimes personified figure that lives outside
the bounds of dominant American social norms and “African American
modes of social respectability.”58
As with outlaw figures in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout
the world—Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example—Hip
Hop’s irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the sta-
tus quo creates alternative, counterhegemonic spaces. In these spaces, art-
ists personify and exploit America’s worst nightmare—“young, Black, and
holdin my nuts, chyeah!” (Jay-Z, “Young, Gifted, and Black”)—in order to
tell America about itself in a way that restores power to Black youth in the
form of authorship. This is why Jeezy can be heard in the last few lines
of the song—after recognizing the importance of the candidacy of Barack
Obama—saying “I’m important, too, though.” This verbal call for recogni-
tion is accompanied by visual signs of Hip Hop heroes right alongside the
conventional icons of the Civil Rights Movement. These signs function as
a testament to Hip Hop’s importance as well as a corrective to Hip Hop’s
invisibility in contemporary historical narratives of the United States.
Far from nihilistic, Hip Hop has always been a major source of Black
youth agency. The Hip Hop artist’s pen allows the young and the oppressed
to not just write rhymes but to right wrongs. In the process, youth write
themselves into history in a way that restores their humanity. In this pro-
found sense, the mic provides a sense of power to those who are often
made acutely aware of their overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Hip Hop
is not only, as Russell Simmons and many other supporters of Hip Hop say,
“a sociological mirror of society.” Hip Hop narratives do not merely reflect
150 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

society; they reflect on society, providing critiques of the United States of

America’s most pressing social problems and broadcasting them to every
corner of the globe. While some Americans would rather just pull the plug
on Hip Hop or press the mute button, these texts serve an important func-
tion in that they consistently and relentlessly bring “the ghetto back into
America’s [and the world’s] public consciousness.”59
With this understanding, it’s no wonder that Jeezy breathes new life
into Tupac Shakur’s verses. Jeezy’s artistic practice of reinterpretation
also creates a sociopolitical continuity between “The Trap Life” and “The
Thug Life.” When Tupac Shakur raised his shirt in front of television
cameras and showed the world his new “THUG LIFE” tattoo across his
midsection, his actions were immediately interpreted within the domi-
nant master narrative that paints Black youth as angry, violent savages
who are the cause of their own social problems. The media narratives
continued nonstop, as they do today, depicting all Hip Hop artists as
nihilistic and glorifying thuggish behavior. As a once 22-year-old Tupac
explained in Street Conscious Rap, “THUG LIFE” was an acronym that
stood for “The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucked Everybody.”60 Imbedded
in this acronym is a sociopolitical critique that insists on attributing
society’s problems to a sociostructural system of neglect and purpose-
ful destruction. Tupac’s social theory, for example, located the absence
of a male figure in the lives of “thug niggas” within a framework that
acknowledged American society’s historical destruction of Black families,
contemporary media portrayals of dysfunction, and in part, a government
welfare system that provides incentives that destroy families—“And the
government won’t give my mama welfare money unless she tells them
where my daddy is and says bad things against him and they put him
in jail.”61
Tupac and other outlaw figures in Hip Hop not only provide sociopolitical
critiques and Hip Hop social theory, they also actively seek to restore the
humanity of Black folks. Tupac’s political agenda was not limited to political
concerns; at its core, it was a human agenda that aimed to disrupt the
overwhelming power of Whiteness in cultural and psychological terms.
Tupac:

I am a revolutionary in every sense of the word. I take care of

anything that’s mine and I’m handling my business every day.
The fact that I can still sit here and look in people’s faces and
still be smiling, shows you that I am a human being. Th is is my
agenda. I tackle some of these problems head on. My whole thing
is to show young black men that you do not have to give up the
essence of you to be successful in this country. You don’t have to
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 151

do that. You can do whatever the fuck you want do to. You can
curse how you want to, live how you want to, throw your fi nger
in the air how you please and still make money. . . . So, I represent
that thug life—all of the underdogs coming together and just
uniting. Taking over. Instead of asking for any of they shit, just
taking what we got and building on it.62

While not as overtly political and perhaps more flamboyant in his public
performances than Tupac, Young Jeezy’s private conversations often reveal
a similar agenda. In 2005, he spoke to the authors of Tha Global Cipha:
Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness and had this to say in response to the
question about his writing process:

My music is like ghetto gospel. It comes from my heart. . . . It’s heart-

felt music. You know how when a preacher preaches and he gets into
it and he really feels it and he’ll do a hymn, stompin and movin like
this [he demonstrates]. I feel music like that. . . . I’m basically telling
them about our struggle. I’m speaking about a hard struggle, our
struggle, our pain. And when I say our pain, it’s the things we go
through everyday, whether they be good or bad.63

Making a direct link between Tupac’s thug life and thug ideology and
Jeezy’s “thug motivation” and “thug inspiration,” he explains who he
represents in his music:

It’s basically this. I speak for the young and the oppressed. I
speak for the people who ain’t got it and who are trying to get it,
dogg. I speak for those who do what they do. At the end of the
day, I’m giving them hope. . . . I’m helping people get through their
day cuz it’s a real world out there. As bad as America try to hide
me and make me look like the bad guy, they know just as well as
I know that that is what really goes on in the streets.64

Jeezy continues:

They scared because they know if I can go do a stadium with

20,000 people and they recite me word for word, that’s a problem.
I can go to every city in America and do that. It ain’t but two
teams, theirs and ours. They don’t wanna see that! They don’t
want nobody out here tellin people in the hood and in the
ghetto, ‘The Sky’s the Limit.’ They mad because the people in
the suburbs, the White people, like the music, too, because they
152 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

know it’s real. And I think that’s what’s bothering them. I think
that’s why they’re trying to ban my stuff, saying ‘Snowman this,’
‘Snowman that.’ But at the end of the day, Snowman is a good
dude. How you gonna knock a young brotha out here trying to
mediate everything, trying to let everybody know, ‘I understand
y’all gangbangers, but are you gangbanging when you get some
money and take care of your family? Why would you stay in the
streets all of your life when you just saw your mans leave a situ-
ation and made a bad situation better?’65

As Jeezy’s response shows, America’s struggle with Hip Hop is often

framed in racialized terms, with “White people” critiquing “Black artists”
who view their role as mediators between Black youth and White society.
It is Hip Hop’s direct confrontation with Whiteness and power, its outright
rejection of White norms and values, and its out-loud refusal to be silenced
that often lead to some of the biggest “controversies” involving Hip Hop.
In terms of Young Jeezy and Nas’s “My President” and the various per-
formances and remixes of that song, it was Hip Hop’s open race talk that
incited an overwhelmingly negative reaction from White listeners and
overhearers. Even though most Black folks viewed this talk as benign and
positive in its celebratory, unity-inspiring tone, online debates raged about
Young Jeezy, Nas, and Jay-Z’s “racist” and “divisive” discourse. Rather than
viewing the celebratory video as capturing a moment of euphoria and joy
for African Americans, many White Americans felt threatened and offended
by the fact that Black Americans would actually be happy to see one presi-
dent of Color after a string of 43 straight White presidents. As we noted
earlier, while the song was entitled “My President,” the song’s hook was,
“My president is Black”—and in the word Black lies the controversy.

“Who You Callin a Racist?!”: “Sly Foxes,” “Bad

Niggas,” and the Framing of Racist Discourse
While some Internet listeners referred to “My President” as “really good,”
“great,” “amazing,” “historic,” “awesome,” and “inspirational,” the non-Black
Internet audience described it as “controversial,” “offensive,” “bigoted,”
“racist,” “demeaning,” “ridiculous,” “irrelevant,” and “horrible.” Despite
the deep inquiry that Jeezy and Nas’s text warrants, a large number of
folks described the song as “some stupid random shit,” “the most igno-
rant shit I’ve ever heard,” and advised Jeezy to “think before he writes
a song.” The most common descriptors used to describe Jeezy (and Black
people) were “stupid,” “illiterate,” and “uneducated.” Some folks chimed in
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 153

with exacerbation, using phrases like “grotesquely ignorant” and “mind-

bogglingly stupid.” Many posted about how Black people voted for Obama
“just because he was black” or because they were “idiots” who “think that
just because Obama is black he is going to do everything for you” and that
“you won’t have to work” and “you can just go on welfare.” In some cases,
respondents apologized for their grammar, acknowledging their “run-on”
sentences but unapologetically referred to Blacks as “lazy” or “ignorant.”
The absurd number of overtly racist comments about this song, and Black
people generally, most definitely revealed the ugly underbelly of anti-Black
racism in the United States.
Rather than seeing the song and the video as a celebration of a multi-
racial American society or the fact that America can one day elect anyone
other than a White, heterosexual male as its leader, the very mention of
the word Black agitated White listeners and pushed them to the point of
rabid anti-Black rhetoric (the N-word “came out” repeatedly). While pointing
out the overtly racist discourse is important, in some ways, it’s the least
interesting aspect of these online debates. What is fascinating is how
some White people called the song “racist” and “bigoted” for the simple
fact that it referred to the president’s race: “The very fact that you’re cel-
ebrating the election of a black man . . . is confl icting with the idea of racial
equality.”66 The national television network Fox News, which Nas refers to
as “Sly Fox” in his sustained critique of the network, fi xated on this issue.
Unfortunately, their analysts proved as unsophisticated as these online
readers.
In January 2009, just days after the inauguration of President Barack
Obama and the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, viewers watching Fox
News heard the voice of a White woman anchor, Megyn Kelly, reporting
about a cell phone video of Young Jeezy and Jay-Z’s performance at the
inauguration party celebrating Barack Obama’s victory.67

Megyn Kelly: Well, having an African American President in

the Oval Office is certainly a watershed moment for America,
but some very visible supporters of Barack Obama may have
tainted the moment for some. Th is is rapper Jay-Z and rapper
[pause, and then articulating with exaggerated head nods, as
if struggling to pronounce the name] Young Jeezy celebrating
the inauguration in Washington at a club on Monday night.
And we warn you [dramatic pause], this is explicit. [The news
feed at the bottom of the screen reads: “Some listeners call
Jay-Z’s rap, ‘My President’ racist.” The program then cuts to a
cell phone video of the celebration featuring Young Jeezy and
Jay-Z.]
154 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Young Jeezy: [Speaking in front of a cheering audience] I wanna

thank two people. I wanna thank the muthafucka [bleeped
out by Fox with a loud tone] overseas that threw two shoes
at George Bush. And I wanna thank [loud cheers]—wait, and
listen, listen! And I wanna thank the muthafuckas [bleeped
out again] who helped them move they shit [bleeped out]
up out the White House! [loud cheers] Keep it movin, bitch,
because my President is muthafuckin [bleeped out] Black,
niggaaa [bleeped out] [Loud cheers].
Jay-Z: [Begins rappin the last few lines of his unreleased re-mix
of “My President”] Never thought I’d say this shit [bleeped out]
baby, I’m good / You can keep your puss [bleeped out], I don’t
want no more bush [Bush] / No more war, no more Iraq / No
more white lies, my President is Black! [Crowd goes wild!]
Young Jeezy: Yeahhhh!

At this point, a few things are worth noting, especially in relation to

the pauses in this dialogue, which as we know, can be pregnant with
meaning. From the beginning, the reporter frames rap and rappers as
strange, with several online commentators noting that Kelly’s exaggerated
pause before mentioning Young Jeezy’s name appears like an intentional
attempt to undermine the rapper’s legitimacy. (“I love how these Fox News
folks try to pronounce rapper names like they don’t speak English,” as one
critical interpreter pointed out. “She’s acting like she’s speaking Chinese or
something.”) After the awkward pause, there’s a dramatic pause in between
the words, “And we warn you . . . this is explicit.” The language of these
“rappers” is something to prepare yourself for, to fear. The broadcast con-
tinues with the introduction of Fox News conservative contributor of Color,
Michelle Malkin.

Megan Kelly: [As if bewildered] Uhh, you know, this, this is stun-
ning. Uh, this is the way they choose to celebrate the inaugura-
tion of our fi rst Black President. Uh, so much for a postracial
America, I guess.
Michelle Malkin: Yeah, I posted the video on Monday night in
the midst of the feel-good kumbaya leading up to the inaugura-
tion, and a lotta folks didn’t want to pay attention to this very
ugly underbelly that was going on in Washington, D.C., but it’s
not a shock to people who’ve been paying attention to these
very high profi le supporters of Barack Obama in the enter-
tainment industry. . . . [Th is performance] really gives lie to the
concept that Barack Obama has ushered in this quote-unquote
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 155

postracial era. In fact, the color-coded culture is alive and well,

and it has been stoked by the rap industry, and unfortunately,
you have heard no denunciations from the postracial president
about this very vitriolic rhetoric, you know, that really is sup-
posed to be something we’ve discarded and left behind.
Megyn Kelly: Well, and it would be one thing if these were
rappers who were sort of doing their own thing, on the out-
skirts, you know, what have you. Th at’s been going on for a
while, but Jay-Z, I, I believe he was in the VIP section watching
the Inauguration. I mean, he was a welcomed guest, along with
his wife Beyonce. Th is guy is well respected. I don’t understand
why he would participate in something like this. I think the
Young Jeezy is the one who’s been making these comments all
along, but it’s a little bit more controversial now that Jay-Z
joins in and has no problem with these sorts of terms being
thrown around. The N-word came out repeatedly, uhh, I mean,
what kind of an example is this setting for, you know, young
African Americans who would look to them for guidance on
this?
Michelle Malkin: A very poor and bigoted example, Megyn.
And exactly the kind of example that Barack Obama said he
had distanced himself from, from the campaign. . . . It’s the same
old Democratic mentality of treating people based on the color
of their skin rather than the content of their character, or the
content of their resumes. You know, not exactly the kind of
legacy Martin Luther King was supposed to leave.
Megyn Kelly: Well, I know Michelle that when you comment on
these things, and when others comment on these things, some
people come out and call you racist for even commenting on
it, which seems a little bone-headed, to have the exact wrong
message as a result of these . . . 68
Michelle Malkin: [Nodding very seriously]
Megyn Kelly: . . . but we appreciate you blogging about it. We saw
the tape. We were rather surprised by it, and we hope that we
don’t see more of it.

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly finds it “stunning” that “they” [Black people,
rappers, etc.] would celebrate the inauguration of the first Black president
by pointing out that he was, well, Black. The perspective of one critical
interpreter, a fi rst-generation Black college student, conveys the feeling of
joy (rather then racism) felt by many African Americans that night: “The
gravity and magnitude of the song didn’t hit me until election night after
156 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Obama was elected. I felt intense happiness as I listened to the song all
night in my room and reflected on there being a first Black President. Here
I was during my first year in college, as a Black student, first-generation,
and the first Black President was elected. The song captured the emotion of
how inspirational it was.” A White critical interpreter adds his perspective
that, rather than hate and division, he liked “how the music video captures
the pure joy and excitement that swept across the nation in November
2008 and shows smiling, happy people coming together for a collective
celebration of change and renewal.” Another reminds us that Young Jeezy
raps “Obama for mankind,” not “Obama for Black people.”
Rather than reading Young Jeezy, Nas, and Jay-Z’s work as racist, these
interpreters read “My President,” the video, and the performances of the
song as a multiracial celebration of the diverse group of voters who helped
elect Barack Obama. They further acknowledged the special significance
this victory has for African Americans, with one saying:

Many women, Democrat or Republican, would have been ecstatic

if Hillary Clinton won, and many Latinos would have loved to
see Bill Richardson as Obama’s choice for Vice President. It just
makes sense that people who belong to groups that have not yet
achieved full equality can be happy that their group—it could
be a gay man or woman next—is making progress, especially
because it means that our country’s making progress in terms of
equality.

Interestingly, we see in the Fox News clip and Internet message boards that
Black happiness somehow translates into hatred for Whites, as if express-
ing a deep-seated fear that Black Americans will somehow gain power and
treat White Americans as poorly as Blacks themselves have been treated.
In Vibe magazine’s coverage of the campaign, Jeff Chang recalled Jon
Stewart’s satirical question to Obama, “Will you pull a bait-and-switch, sir,
and enslave the white race? Is that your plan?”69 While Stewart humor-
ously captures irrational White fear, many Internet commentators’ rants
show that this scenario does not seem impossible and outlandish to some
folks. Some writers actually feared that Black people would empower them-
selves and then wage some kind of “race war” against Whites. We warn you
[dramatic pause], this is explicit:

Th is song just goes to show how fucked up black people are in

this country. I hate to be the racist one that lies in every white
person but what I’m saying is true. And I’m no white supremi-
sist [sic] either. . . . It seems like now that Obama has become
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 157

president of the U.S., african americans have become so igno-

rant to a point where it’s just ridiculous. It seems like they think
they have won some kind of war over white people because
the president is now black. Trust me, there was/never will be
a war against black people . . . BLACK PEOPLE STOP BEING SO
FUCKING IGNORANT . . . just because we have a black president
doesn’t mean you have any power over white people and don’t
boast like you actually did something for this country because
there’s a good chance you didn’t do shit except complain that
white people have so much power. (sorry for the run-on) . . . I’m
sure 99% of black people in this country are in fact ‘racists.’ 70

The video for “My President” probably had more non-Black people than most
other Hip Hop videos. Also, it was interpreted by many as a multiracial cel-
ebration by a diverse coalition of Obama supporters who made history by
proving that America was “ready for a Black President.” Despite this, White
viewers more often than not framed it as “racist.” Further, in this previous
example, the Internet commentator seemed to recognize the counterhege-
monic possibilities that the song opens up for African Americans, ending
his racist rant by warning Black folks that this victory does not mean that
you have any real “power over white people.” And that’s what this “contro-
versy” is really all about, isn’t it?
Not only did the aftermath reveal anti-Black racist discourses, but it also
exposed the more subtle racist-classist workings of White hegemony. This
is especially evident in the different ways that Jay-Z and Young Jeezy were
framed. The anchorwoman is perfectly OK with Young Jeezy and other art-
ists as long as they are unable to gain access to power or acceptance from
mainstream White America—as long as they remain invisible. But, Jay-Z,
she exclaims, is someone to worry about because he is a “very visible” and
“welcomed guest,” for Christ’s sake! The anchorwoman seems to be making
the case that, since the establishment let Jay-Z have a seat at the table—
instead of fighting for the crumbs with the likes of those other “danger-
ous” rappers “on the outskirts”—that he should now “behave properly.” He
should act in a way that not only conforms to White linguistic and cultural
norms but that ultimately caters to White interests. As Imani Perry notes,
not all wealthy Blacks are, to use the anchor’s words, “welcomed guests” at
the table of American power. In US society, as Perry writes, “Black wealth
is supposed to have a respectable face” and in order for Black folks to
succeed they are “supposed to fit into a White American comfort zone—
charismatic entertainers to be paid for, or Bill Cosby-style professionals,
or even better, actually meretricious Colin Powell-style achievers.” If the
Black wealthy, like Jay-Z, who, as Kelly laments, was “in the VIP section
158 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

watching the Inauguration,” do not neatly fit into any of these categories,

“much speculation arises as to how this ‘bad nigga’ was ‘let in.’ ”71
Jay-Z, Jeezy, and Nas are most definitely some bad-ass niggas. Jay-Z,
in particular, was the strongest supporter of Obama’s candidacy. In The
Source magazine’s politics issue, he speaks with a sense of urgency about
the impact of this election: “If [Barack Obama] loses I really will feel sorry
and sad for the state of America. The world is watching. And the world
will judge us on that.” Being in the public eye has made Jay-Z hyperaware
of the intense level of scrutiny, monitoring, and policing that Black public
figures receive. As if pre-empting the race-baiting question, he continues
(taking a page out of Obama’s book), “And I’m not voting for him simply
because he’s Black. The worst thing ever for Black people would be to put
someone in who wasn’t capable. I’m voting because he’s capable.” That said,
Jay-Z does not deny the symbolism that this election could hold for young,
poor Black children who, like him, grew up in the inner city’s housing proj-
ects: “What he represents to a little kid in Marcy Projects right now is to
make him feel like he’s part of America. We never felt like we were part
of the American Dream.”72 Jay-Z’s comments underscore the irony that the
hopeful narrative of Black inclusion was repeatedly read as a hateful nar-
rative of White exclusion.
Before the election, Jay-Z expressed this hopefulness on the remix of
“My President”: “Hello Ms. America / Hey pretty lady / that red white and
blue flag / wave for me baby.” After the election, he explains this line in
his book, Decoded:

After Barack was elected, I realized that the same thing hip-hop
had been doing for years with language and brands—that is,
reinventing them to mean something different from what they
originally meant—we could now do to American icons like the
fl ag. Th ings that had once symbolized slavery, oppression, mili-
tarism, and hypocrisy might now begin to legitimately represent
us. We’re not there yet, but Barack’s election offered a tantalizing
hint of what that might look like, including things like having
the American “fi rst lady” be a beautiful Black woman who could
trace her ancestry to American slaves.73

Sensing that some folks might be upset with his final line, “No more white
lies, my President is BLACK,” Jay-Z explains: “The point of the song is
that we were progressing beyond simplistic talk about race and could start
being honest about it so that we could, eventually, move on.” 74 However,
as the Fox News clip and the Internet message boards show, as a country,
we have a long way to go before open, honest discourse about race can take
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 159

place outside university classrooms, if it even takes place there. For now,
it is clear that Hip Hop continues to challenge Whiteness by resisting sim-
plistic discourses of “colorblindness” and “postraciality” and talking directly
about race in an effort to take the conversation to the next level.

“I’ve Never Seen a Presidential Candidate

Do That”: Revisiting the First Hip
Hop President
In exploring the question of Barack Obama as “the first Hip Hop president,”
our aim is not to link Barack Obama to Hip Hop by superficial characteris-
tics, such as his race, age, or relative coolness, nor is it to draw a straight
line “from Barack Obama directly to the hip-hop community.” 75 It would be
simplistic to do so. However, there are some final points to consider. “Rap
music,” as Tricia Rose wrote in 1994, “is a black cultural expression that
prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America” and continues
to “articulate the shifting terms of marginality in contemporary American
culture.”76 Just because we have seen the music go mainstream and global
in the last decade, dominating record charts and the Internet, does not
mean that Hip Hop is not Black American music. Not only does the lan-
guage of Hip Hop Culture, “from Oakland to Auckland” (as Lupe Fiasco
rhymes), draw inspiration from Black Language and Culture, but as Imani
Perry notes, Hip Hop continues to occupy a “political location in society
distinctly ascribed to black people, music, and cultural forms.” 77
Arguing from a distinctly Black political location, Hip Hop continues to
broadcast a particular physical location into America’s public consciousness
and conscience: the ghetto. The very act of speaking up and out from this
particular marginalized social location is to express a form of agency in and
on the world. In Hip Hop, the lyrical is political for the very reason that
its authors and narrators speak for folks who come from the bottom—or
like Calle 13 put it—los de atrás y los de abajo. Further, as a self-reflexive
community, many of these artists know that they are subject to dispropor-
tionate monitoring and uninformed critique. They know—as Barack Obama
does—that before they even spit the first syllable outta they mouth, they
are already framed as unintelligent, lazy, dangerous, or worse. In the face
of, or perhaps because of, these potentially overwhelming discourses, Hip
Hop remains one of the few, if not the only, musical genre in America that
consistently talks openly, boldly and honestly about race.
Perhaps it is this political location that matters most in our conver-
sation about Hip Hop and Obama. While others painted a caricature of
Barack’s relationship to Hip Hop (what you mean, growin up without a
160 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

father and witnessing poverty ain’t “Hip Hop”?), Hip Hop identified with
Obama’s experience as a community organizer in the hoods and churches
of South Side Chicago, his commitment to buck the status quo in terms of
health care and the economy, his radical position against the war in Iraq
(forcefully and publicly calling it “a dumb war”), and his commitment to
various social justice issues. But it wasn’t just about issues. Perhaps most
importantly was the strong, unflinching, smooth way he confronted the
racial minefield of US politics as a Black man in an election cycle where
the terms of racial reference constantly shifted from “Black” to “not Black
enough” to “too Black” to “Arab” to “Muslim” to “nigger” and back again.
In the midst of the racially charged Reverend Wright controversy, it was
Barack’s delivery of the “Race Speech” in Philadelphia that was perhaps the
single most important event that captured the heart of Hip Hop. Because,
as Mississippi’s David Banner told The Source magazine, “Obama showed
America that he wasn’t no punk. He showed his strength by addressing
what people viewed as his weaknesses. He didn’t run from them. I’ve never
seen a Presidential candidate do that.” 78
Hip Hop heads knew that Obama, as the first Black candidate for presi-
dent with a serious chance of winning, would be subject to the kinds of cri-
tiques that they faced on the regular. During the contentious campaign, Hip
Hop recognized Barack’s political location and offered words of caution. Nas,
in his verse on “My President,” warned Obama: “Gotta stay true to who you
are and where you came from / Cause at the top will be the same place you
hang from.” Nas and others knew that being the first Black editor of the
Harvard Law Review or the only serving Black member of the US Senate—
and even becoming president of the United States—would not necessarily
mitigate the fact that he was Black. At the end of the day, even a presi-
dent can get lynched from the political tree. Given the ever-present possibil-
ity of “lynching” and the extraordinary amount of pressure to “denounce”
Reverend Wright, heads like David Banner, Common, and Jay-Z appreciated
the fact that Barack, rather than backing down, stood up and said the very
words that his detractors were hoping to hear: “I can no more disown him
than I can disown the Black community.”79 As one, young Hip Hop head put
it at the time, “Gotta respect the man’s gangsta on that one!”
Despite the fact that we’re talkin about politics, not pop culture, Barack
occupied a version of that political location that Hip Hop had come to
almost call home. After all, in a political world dominated by White men,
Obama was the “OutKast.” This was evidenced not only by the covert racist
practices involved in the intense scrutiny of his every word but also—lest
we forget—through threats of assassination. These last two points were
not lost on rapper Big Boi of OutKast, who rhymed: “And who you votin
for, Republican or Democratic? / Don’t say it doesn’t matter cuz that’s how
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 161

they stole the last one / Assassin’s bullet might be waitin for Obama / Do
you think they’ll have a brotha before Billy’s babymama? C’mon!”80 Many
Barack supporters, Blacks especially, recall praying silently when Hillary
Clinton rather cavalierly compared Obama to Robert Kennedy, drumming
up the specter of assassination.81 Many others watched intently as his oppo-
nents tried desperately to paint him as overly concerned with race, being
“one of those militant Blacks,” or even worse, a “terrorist.” Yet despite all
this, Obama couldn’t be faded.
Obama’s ability to break barriers, defy odds, explode stereotypes, and
exceed all expectations—his outright, Public Enemy−style “refuse to lose”
mindset—is what, to many, makes him Hip Hop. As Hip Hop head and
journalist Davey D wrote: “What makes Obama Hip Hop is that he’s intel-
ligent. . . . He defies all the nasty stereotypes that have been put out by
corporate media that have left everyone around the world with a false
impression of Black men.” Then, as if comparing Barack Obama to the
Trickster figure of Hip Hop and the African American Oral Tradition, he
continues: “The fact that he was able to come seemingly out of nowhere
and outsmart and outmaneuver the mighty Clinton machine when they
appeared to have everything all sewn up. . . . The fact he was able to defy
the odds by outlasting and overcoming all the racism heaped on him by
his Republican opponents and full onslaught by Fox News and all their lies
was incredible. . . . That’s what makes him Hip Hop.”82

NOTES
1. Check out the full interview by Jeff Johnson on the BET special What’s In It for
Us?, posted on February 3, 2008, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/
hsamyalim?feature=mhee#p/a/12D691D04C9B36F5/0/pFSVG7jRp_g. Last accessed:
09-22-11.
2. From Jay-Z’s (Shawn Carter’s) highly recommended (dope-ass) book Decoded (New
York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010, 168–171). Props to dream hampton.
3. Check the video, “Obama Dancing to Snoop Dogg,” at: http://www.youtube.com/user/
hsamyalim?feature=mhee#p/c/12D691D04C9B36F5. Last accessed: 09-22-11.
4. Check out the video of Snoop representin on CNN’s Larry King Live at “Rapper
Snoop Dogg Says Senator Barack Obama Can Win!”: http://www.youtube.com/user/
hsamyalim?feature=mhee#p/a/12D691D04C9B36F5/1/Od2tQyrf4vU. Last accessed:
09-22-11.
5. Quoted in “Obama Hip-Hop: From Mixtapes to Mainstream” at: http://www.npr.org/
templates/story/story.php?storyId=96748462. Last accessed: 09-22-11.
6. Read Tricia Rose’s The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip
Hop—and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
7. Pac originally recorded “Changes” in 1992. The remix, which sampled Bruce Hornsby’s
“That’s the Way It Is,” became extremely popular in 1998 and hit number one around
the world in places like Norway and the Netherlands. RIP 2PAC.
8. Check Cube’s interview at: http://www.youtube.com/user/hsamyalim?feature=mhee#p/
c/12D691D04C9B36F5/17/xz6TOLclg2U. Last accessed: 09-22-11.
162 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

9. Quoted in “Hip-Hop Stand Up!” in The Source magazine’s politics issue, November
2008, Number 227, page 52.
10. Ibid.
11. This the transcript of Jay-Z’s message: “Hey, this is Jay-Z callin on behalf of Sena-
tor Barack Obama’s campaign urging you to vote tomorrow. Bring your friends and
families. Make sure your voices are heard for change. It’s time for change. It’s time
for Barack Obama. The polls are open from 6:30am to 7:30pm. Take your Ohio ID.
If you don’t have an ID, a utility bill, pay stub, bank statement or government docu-
ment with your address is all you need to vote. Please call 1-866-675-2008. If you
need a ride, need to find your polling location, or for any voting question, you can
also visit ohio.barackobama.com. Vote for Barack Obama for President tomorrow. He
is the change we can believe in. Paid for by Obama for America.”
12. Quoted in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FecQidSTTu0, posted March 29, 2008.
Last accessed: 09-22-11.
13. See the November 2008 historic collector’s edition of Vibe magazine.
14. From Hip Hop activist, cultural critic, and writer (and Executive Director of the Insti-
tute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University) Jeff Chang’s, “Barack Obama—The
Vibe Interview.” Online at: www.thelavinagency.com/images/ . . . /1212688601_chang-
vibe.pdf. Last accessed: 09-22-11.
15. From Jann S. Wenner’s September 28, 2010, article, “Obama in Command: The Rolling
Stone Interview,” at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obama-in-command-
br-the-rolling-stone-interview-20100928.
16. From Jeff Johnson’s interview for BET. See note 1.
17. Check the November 2008 historic collector’s edition of Vibe magazine for the article
“It Takes a Nation of Millions: Here’s What 99 Are Saying,” page 100.
18. Ibid., 101.
19. “Dirt off Your Shoulder” was released in 2003 on The Black Album by Roc-A-Fella
Records.
20. See Peter Hamby’s CNN article “Obama Gets Name-Dropped in Hip Hop” posted
August 17, 2007, at: http://articles.cnn.com/2007–08-17/politics/obama.hip.hop_1_
hip-hop-appeal-obama-campaign-jen-psaki?_s=PM:POLITICS. Last accessed: 09-22-11.
21. See the BlackTreeTV interview in note 12.
22. See Vibe’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions: Here’s What 99 Are Saying,” pages 98–105.
See note 17.
23. Ibid., 101.
24. Barack Obama’s September 9, 2008, letter to Vibe magazine appeared in the Novem-
ber 2008 issue, page 91.
25. See Davey D’s January 30, 2009, blog post, “Is Obama a Hip Hop President and Does
It Really Matter?” at: http://trggradio.org/2009/01/30/is-obama-a-hip-hop-president-
does-it-really-matter/. Last accessed: 09-23-11.
26. For example, as Davey D wrote in “Is Obama a Hip Hop President and Does It Really
Matter?”: “In June of 2007 a number of artists including Saigon, Rebel Diaz, Sess 4–5
and Mia X out of New Orleans teamed up with the Washington DC based Hip Hop
Caucus and the ACLU to do a concert and fundraiser.” The event “brought attention
to the elimination of Habeas Corpus and to the rampant torture that was going on at
Guantanimo Bay [and] the plight of New Orleans residents who still found themselves
unable to return home two years in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” Highlighting
the fact that the event wasn’t merely a “show,” he added, “Each performance was pre-
ceded by artists taking the stage and talking to the audience about specific policy rec-
ommendations and action steps.” In addition, Bakari Kitwana’s Rap Sessions national
tour on Obama and Hip Hop serve as a treasure trove of information and provide
numerous examples of in-depth, political conversation and critique. See both www.dav-
eyd.com and http://rapsessions.org/ for Hip Hop news, politics, and cultural analysis.
27. Daddy Yankee endorsed John McCain and even performed at concerts to raise funds
for his campaign, stating: “He has been a fighter for the Hispanic community, and I
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 163

know that for me personally, I chose him as the best candidate because he has been
a fighter for the immigration issue.” (The Source’s November 2008 issue, 53, see note
9). Responding in the same issue, Fat Joe asks: “How could you want John McCain
in office when George Bush and the Republicans already have half a million people
losing their homes to foreclosure? We’re fighting an unjust war. It’s the Latinos and
Black kids up in the frontlines, fighting that war.” He then urged Daddy Yankee, who
seemed to be a “one issue voter,” to get “educated on politics.” (54).
28. Davey D, January 30, 2009. See note 26.
29. Ibid.
30. See James G. Spady’s chapter, “Password: Nation Conscious Rap,” in the pioneer-
ing Hip Hop volume, Nation Conscious Rap: The Hip Hop Vision (Philadelphia: Black
History Museum, 1991, 401–415). This wordplay highlights both the aesthetic (“art
form”) and the political (“art forum”) in Hip Hop and takes as a given the commu-
nity’s diverse and sophisticated political views.
31. See Rosa Clemente’s article commissioned by the Green Institute, “Why President-
Elect Barack Obama Is Not the First Hip Hop President,” at: http://www.greeninsti-
tute.net/clemente_obama. Last accessed: 09-23-11.
32. Quoted in the November 2008 issue of Vibe magazine, page 101.
33. Ibid., 102.
34. See Immortal’s July 23, 2009, blog post on The Revolutionary Hip-Hop Report, “Amer-
ica’s Great Hope (Obama Was Necessary)” at: http://rhhr.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/
is-obama-a-hip-hop-president-the-debate-continues/. Last accessed: 09-23-11.
35. Quoted in the November 2008 issue of Vibe magazine, page 105.
36. Quoted in a conversation with Jeff Chang, posted on November 2, 2008, at: http://
cantstopwontstop.com/blog/qa-david-banner-on-what-tuesday-means/. Last accessed:
09-23-11.
37. See Craig R. Smith’s August 25, 2008, article, “The Hip Hop President,” on WorldNet-
Daily at: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=73276. Last accessed: 09-23-11.
38. Quoted in Jeff Johnson’s BET special, What’s In It for Us? See note 1.
39. Read the transcript of the 2007 show with Paula Zahn (minus the menacing music)
at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0702/21/pzn.01.html. Last accessed:
09-23-11.
40. Personal communication (February 4, 2008) with education scholar and cultural ana-
lyst Donielle A. Prince.
41. In 1992, former president Bill Clinton attacked the raptivist Sister Souljah for “racist”
lyrics on her album 360 Degrees of Power and comments she made in the national
press. Sister Souljah also happens to be a fiction writer, a graduate of Rutgers Uni-
versity, and has visited and lectured in several countries, including the former Soviet
Union, England, France, Portugal, Finland, Holland, and South Africa. When she
referred to a “war zone” in her comments about the Los Angeles insurrection (riots),
she was referring to the depressed state of many urban communities in America
when, at the time, statistics reported that it was actually safer to have been a sol-
dier in Vietnam than to be a Black male between 14 and 24 living in America. For
more on this, see H. Samy Alim’s Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2006, 28−29). See also Mattias Gardell’s In the Name of Elijah
Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1996, 299).
42. Quoted in Jeff Johnson’s BET special, What’s In It for Us? See note 1.
43. Ibid.
44. Quoted in “Obama Hip-Hop: From Mixtapes to Mainstream.” See note 5.
45. Chuck D spoke at, “Global Flows: The Globalization of Hip Hop Art, Culture, and Poli-
tics,” hosted by Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts and the Cen-
ter for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity on April 28, 2011. Also featured on
the panel were Gaye Johnson (UCSB), Dawn-Elissa Fischer (SF State), Samir Meghelli
(Columbia), DJ Emacipacion, and Jeff Chang (Stanford). Davey D, Omar Offendum,
164 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Blitz the Ambassador, Ragtop, and Mark Gonzales also participated. Check out Davey
D’s Hip Hop Corner for OpenLine Media’s coverage of the event at: http://hiphopand-
politics.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/our-coverage-of-the-global-hip-hop-conference-at-
stanford/. Last accessed: 09–23-11.
46. See Richards’s April 25, 2010, article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2010/04/23/AR2010042300046.html. Last accessed: 09-23-11.
47. Quoted in “Obama Hip-Hop: From Mixtapes to Mainstream.” See note 5.
48. Ibid.
49. Our critical analysis of “My President” represents our own reading of the text, but
importantly, it draws from a racially and ethnically diverse group of critical interpret-
ers of the culture, ranging from 17 to 24 years old. Participants were enrolled in a
Hip Hop course at Stanford University, one of dozens now across the world from
Harvard to Hong Kong University. These students, as a critical circle of interpret-
ers and a cipher, applied the theoretical and methodological approaches of cultural
and literary studies to Hip Hop texts. Our analysis also draws from media discourses,
numerous Internet message boards and online conversations about Hip Hop.
50. Approximately 25 of their players were accused of unethical behavior. See Mark
Schlabach’s December 19, 2007, article on: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/
story?id=3159534. Last accessed: 09-23-11.
51. This point is made brilliantly by Imani Perry throughout her book Prophets of the
Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Close
readers will make a link to Hip Hop’s ability to draw on multiple texts through the
coded use of language to Obama’s coded references to Malcolm X in South Carolina.
Through the use of hoodwinked and bamboozled—among other examples, as we dis-
cussed in chapter 1—he communicated subtle messages to his Black electorate.
52. As Michael Eric Dyson has cautioned all would-be critics of Hip Hop: “It would be
outlandish to comment on, say, metaphysical poetry without interacting critically with
its most inspired poets. At least read Dante. And if one were to make hay over the
virtues of deficits of nineteenth-century British poetry, or, twentieth-century Irish
poetry, then one should encounter the full range of Tennyson’s or Yeat’s work before
jumping, or slouching, to conclusions.” See Dyson’s foreword to Murray Forman and
Mark Anthony Neal’s (eds.) That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2004, xiii).
53. See Jonathan Martin’s November 28, 2005, article, “Snowman Shirts Causing Con-
troversy in Schools,” at: http://www.wrdw.com/home/headlines/2024407.html. Last
accessed: 09-23-11.
54. Quoted in a revealing 11-page interview in James G. Spady, H. Samy Alim, and Samir
Meghelli’s Tha Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness (Philadelphia: Black
History Museum, 2006, 98).
55. Ibid., 102.
56. See Annalyn Censky’s September 2, 2011, article, “Black Unemployment Rate: High-
est Since 1984,” on CNNMoney: http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/02/news/economy/
black_unemployment_rate/index.htm. Last accessed: 09-23-11. Censky writes: “Over-
all, black men have it the worst, with joblessness at a staggeringly high 19.1 percent,
compared to 14.5 percent for black women. . . . Black unemployment has now remained
above 10 percent for four straight years, and given current economic sluggishness,
some experts say it’s safe to predict the rate will remain above 10 percent for four
more years.”
57. Check Imani Perry (2004), page 107. See note 51.
58. Ibid., 107.
59. Check Tricia Rose’s foundational book, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Con-
temporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, 11).
60. Read the full interview with Tupac in James G. Spady, H. Samy Alim, and Charles
G. Lee’s Street Conscious Rap (Philadelphia: Black History Museum, 1999, 566). Pac
breaks it down in there, forreal, but his interview is not without its contradictions.
 “My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue” 165

61. Ibid., 565.

62. Ibid., 567.
63. Quoted in James G. Spady, H. Samy Alim, and Samir Meghelli’s Tha Global Cipha: Hip
Hop Culture and Consciousness, page 101. See note 54.
64. Ibid., 98.
65. Ibid., 98.
66. This is a sad fallout of the simple logic that upholds “colorblind” racial ideologies.
Many White people claim that they are not racist because they don’t see color. There-
fore, the very act of seeing color becomes an act of racism. Go figure.
67. Check the video posted on January 22, 2009, “Fox News on Jay-Z and Young Jeezy’s
Inaugural Anti Bush Rap,” on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuE4WDFaibA. Last
accessed: 09-23-11.
68. If only Megyn Kelly had read Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s chapter, “The Style of Color-
blindness: How to Talk Nasty about Minorities without Sounding Racist,” in Racism
without Racists: Color-Blind Racism & Racial Inequality in Contemporary America (Plym-
outh, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, 3rd edition, 53–74), she would know that her
rhetorical strategies have been well studied. Her use of “projection as a rhetorical
tool” (“They are the racist ones,” for example) is a well-documented strategy of those
who would like to “escape from guilt and responsibility and affix blame elsewhere”
(63–64). Michelle Malkin is incredibly adept at projection, which often goes hand in
hand with co-optation. We see this first in her insistence that Obama has ushered in
a “postracial” era followed by a co-optation of the progressive rhetoric that racism is
alive and well: “[This performance] really gives lie to the concept that Barack Obama
has ushered in this quote-unquote postracial era. In fact, the color-coded culture is
alive and well, and it has been stoked by the rap industry, and unfortunately, you
have heard no denunciations from the postracial president about this very vitriolic
rhetoric.” Then she takes another well-documented approach, co-opting Martin Luther
King’s discourse to project racism onto Black Americans: “It’s the same old Demo-
cratic mentality of treating people based on the color of their skin rather than the
content of their character, or the content of their resumes. You know, not exactly the
kind of legacy Martin Luther King was supposed to leave.” Yawn. Read a book.
69. See Jeff Chang’s November 2008 article, “The Tipping Point,” in Vibe magazine, pages
92–97.
70. Read “romodavid’s” January 26, 2009, post at: http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/
view/3530822107858743658/. Last accessed: 09-25-11. While you’re at it, read all the
comments, if you got the stomach for it. The advent of the Internet has definitely
made it easier for folks to spit anti-Black racism.
71. From Perry (2004), page 113. See note 51.
72. Quoted in The Source magazine’s politics issue, November 2008, page 52.
73. From Jay-Z’s (Shawn Carter’s) in-depth and insightful (deep and dope-ass) book
Decoded (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010, 231).
74. Ibid., 231.
75. Kiese Laymon makes this point well in the June 16, 2010, article, “Is Obama the
First Hip-Hop President?” at: http://www.thegrio.com/specials/hip-hop-politics-from-
the-beat-to-the-ballot/is-barack-obama-the-next-hip-hop-president.php. Last accessed:
09-25-11.
76. Check out Rose (1994), pages 2–3. See note 59.
77. Check out Perry (2004), page 10. See note 51.
78. Quoted in The Source magazine’s politics issue, November 2008, page 52.
79. For a full transcript of the speech, see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (ed.) The Speech:
Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009, 237–
251). It was delivered on March 18, 2008, in Philadelphia and is known as the “Race
Speech” or just “The Speech.” You can also catch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo. Last accessed: 09-25-11. When Barack eventually dis-
tanced himself from Reverend Wright, it wasn’t seen as a backing down—by many
166 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

folks’ standards, Reverend Wright’s hunger for the spotlight was detracting from
Obama’s campaign. This feeling was expressed by Nas, who rhymed, “You ain’t right,
Jeremiah Wrong pastor” (“Black President”). Despite distancing himself from Wright,
Obama made it clear that he was not about to distance himself from “the Black com-
munity.” As we enter 2012, however, certain segments of the Black community may
be the ones distancing themselves from Barack Obama as an increasing number of
vocal Black critics continue to feel that Obama has neglected the concerns of African
Americans.
80. From his song “Daddy Fat Sax” on one of the best Hip Hop albums of 2010,
Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (Purple Ribbon Records and Def Jam
Recordings).
81. If you don’t recall this, check the video at: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=E0QAewVrR28. Last accessed: 09-25-11. Hillary Clinton, at the time (May
2008), was not willing to back out of the race. Further, the presumptive nominee,
Barack Obama, had already received multiple death threats. While many in her party
were pushing her to quit for the sake of “party unity,” she pushed on, saying, “You
know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the Cal-
ifornia primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby
Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” While her campaign brushed off
accusations of “dirty politics” as ludicrous, others couldn’t help but think of the move
as calculated.
82. Davey D, January 30, 2009. See note 26. While this captured the sentiment of Davey
D and many in Hip Hop, Davey D has become a very vocal critic of Barack Obama
and what he sees as his lack of concern for Black communities. Some have even
repeated Kanye West’s famous comments about George W. Bush (“George Bush does
not care about Black people.”) and replaced his name with Obama’s. In the Black tra-
dition, the Trickster figure uses his guile and intelligence to defeat the White power
structure. Obama, on the other hand, ran one helluva campaign, in which he appar-
ently “tricked” much of both White and Black America (as well as progressives of all
stripes, many who are now embarrassed and/or embittered because they were among
the “believers”). Despite everything that they knew about politics—namely, that
“change” almost never happens from the top-down, that politicians do what they do
best (i.e., get elected), and so on—they somehow believed Obama would be different.
Those in Hip Hop who expressed a healthy skepticism toward Obama’s ability—or
any president’s ability, for that matter—to fulfill sweeping promises of change were
ahead of the curve. Take this excerpt from an open letter to the president penned
by Brooklyn MC Talib Kweli: “If someone asked me, I would explain why I didn’t
vote. It was pageantry and I wasn’t with it. This was all before Barack Obama threw
his hat in the ring. My criticism of the political system is that it siphons all rational
thought because you have to be all things to all people. You can stand for anything
doing that . . . I am not delusional about what the office of the president represents . . . ”
(quoted in William Jelani Cobb’s Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, New York:
Walker, 2010, 110). Or as Stic.Man from dead prez put it earlier in this chapter—
even more strongly—“Even if Barack Obama wins, Uncle Sam still ain’t our friend.”
As we ramp up for the 2012 presidential election, it’ll be interesting to watch Hip
Hop’s evolving stance towards Barack Obama and the role Hip Hop will or will not
play this time around.
6
Change the Game
Language, Education, and
the Cruel Fallout of Racism
None of us—black, white, Latino, or Asian—is immune
to the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed
us, especially stereotypes about black criminality, black
intelligence, or the black work ethic. In general, members
of every minority group continue to be measured largely
by the degree of our assimilation—how closely speech
patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to the dominant
white culture—and the more that a minority strays from
these external markers, the more he or she is subject to
negative assumptions.1
—Barack Obama

The language, only the language. . . . It is the thing that

black people love so much—the saying of words, holding
them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing
with them. It’s a love, a passion. Its function is like a
preacher’s: to make you stand up out of your seat, make
you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all
possible things that could happen would be to lose that
language. . . . It’s terrible to think that a child with five
different present tenses comes to school to be faced with
books that are less than his own language. And then to
be told things about his language, which is him, that are
sometimes permanently damaging. . . . Th is is a really cruel
fallout of racism.2
—Toni Morrison

Over the last few years, we have been contacted by journalists seeking
“expert” linguistic opinions on President Obama’s speech. Early into
Obama’s fi rst term, a writer for one of the more progressive Internet
news websites asked us if we would comment on the “growing trend” of
Black parents wanting their children not to “be like Mike” but rather to

167
168 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

“talk like Barack.” Or in her words, “to speak standard English.” After
speaking with her for only a few minutes, we agreed on two facts: One,
Barack Obama was indeed a skilled speaker; two, schools continued to
fail in their teaching of “standard English” to Black students. Eventually,
though, it became clear that she held some pretty strong biases against
“African American English.” After a little more probing, she fi nally rec-
ognized that what she was secretly hoping for was that “Barack Obama’s
public speaking abilities [would] influence African Americans to move
away from African American English,” since this “incorrect” and “unac-
ceptable” way of speaking was “holding them back.” When we asked her
to consider that it was a helluva thing to have your language thought of
as a handicap, she insisted that she didn’t necessarily agree with that
view, but that she was genuinely concerned about the educational plight
of African American students. Th is well-intentioned insistence on the part
of White folks (and many middle-class Black folks) that working-class
Black people need to change the way they talk so that White America can
accept them is troublesome for many reasons, not the least of which are
its racist and classist overtones.
First, it is questionable whether or not it was even a “growing trend”
that Black parents wanted their children “to speak standard English.” Far
as we know, Black parents have always wanted their kids to speak “stan-
dard English,” at least for instrumental purposes like doing well in school
or getting a job. Second, it’s more complicated than her one-way push
toward “standard English” would suggest. In our own work we have found
that many parents want their children to be fluent in multiple language
varieties, including Black Language and “standard English.” 3 Rather than
seeking a linguist to endorse her own views, we suggested that she might
consider talking to members of the Black communities that we study and
participate in. Folks certainly respect President Obama for his mastery of
“standard English,” but he is more often admired as a linguistic role model
for his ability to shift in and out of different ways of speaking.
Third, while this journalist wanted Black Americans to abandon Black
Language in an effort to “talk like Barack,” the irony is that Barack Obama
himself was employing Black Language in an effort to “talk like the peo-
ple.” In other words, unlike this journalist, he recognized Black ways of
speaking as valued symbols of identity and solidarity for members of the
Black community. From the basketball courts to the campaign trail to the
pews of Trinity United Church of Christ and the barbershops of South
Side Chicago, Barack regularly switched back and forth between multiple
ways of speaking—without devaluing any of them. It is in this sense that he
serves as a linguistic role model not just for Black Americans but for all
Americans.
 Change the Game 169

Y’all Don’t Hear Us Though: Recognizing the

Complexity and Richness of Black Language
One of our major goals in this book has been to show how we need to lan-
guage race—to think about the linguistic dimensions of race—in order to
move the national conversation on race forward. From our analysis of the
way Americans describe Barack Obama’s language to the articulate contro-
versy to the complexities of the “Race Speech” and the “fist bump” fiasco, we
have shown throughout this book how Black Language continues to be moni-
tored and maligned in the American public sphere. In this chapter, we shall
see how the complexity and richness of Black Language often goes completely
unnoticed and is regularly censored in American society. In particular, we see
how Black folks’ use of Black Language can often lead to misinterpretation
and conflict in America’s schools and White public spaces. Importantly, we
also argue that the critical linguistic perspective that we adopt in this book
can and should be taught in schools in order to bring about social change.
While differing rules of language use certainly play a role in Black-
White communicative confl icts, that’s only half the story. These confl icts
often occur in sociopolitical contexts where communities are at odds, not
for linguistic reasons but for economic, political, and social ones.4 Any hon-
est look at Black-White communicative conflicts must take into account the
persistent racial tension that exists between communities in the United
States and the White cultural hegemony that undergirds it. It’s no secret
that many White and other Americans still view Black Language through
the ideological lens of Black intellectual and moral inferiority—the overtly
racist message boards following every single online news story about Black
Language can testify to that. Although little acknowledged in these pub-
lic discussions, what usually lies behind comments like “Black Language is
nothing but a lazy, ignorant way of speaking” are racist beliefs about Black
people themselves as “lazy” and “ignorant.” (Hatin on a particular language
is linked to hating its speakers, straight up.)5
The sad and twisted irony for linguists, of course, is that those who refer to
Black Language as “ignorant” are only revealing their own ignorance of basic
linguistic principles. As we stated in chapter 1, Black Language is a linguistic
system born out of a Creolization process that merged African and European
languages and ways of using them. As the linguistic legacy of the African
slave trade, it is oftentimes more complex grammatically and functionally
than any other form of American English. This is one of the reasons—aside
from America’s obsession with anything Black folks say or do—why it’s the
most studied language variety in the United States. Of course, any sociolin-
guist coulda told you that, but y’all don’t hear us though.
170 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Despite linguists’ best efforts to reach the public, most folks read-
ing this book right now are unaware that Black Language is a complex
system of structure and use that is distinct from White Mainstream
English in the US. While it is true that Black Language shares much of
its structure with White Mainstream English, there are many aspects
of Black Language syntactic (grammar) and phonological (pronuncia-
tion) systems that mark it as distinct from that variety. If we examine
syntax alone, sociolinguists have described numerous features of Black
Language, such as copula absence (as we saw in Barack Obama’s use of
“Nah, we Ø straight” for “Nah, we are straight” in chapter 1), invari-
ant be for habitual aspect (“He be talkin a lot in class,” meaning “He
usually/regularly/sometimes talks a lot in class”) and equatives (“We be
them Bay boys” for “We are them Bay boys”), steady as an intensified
continuative (“She steady prayin her son come back from Iraq,” meaning
“She is intensely, consistently and continuously praying her son comes
back from Iraq”), stressed been to mark remote past (“I been told you
not to trust them,” meaning “I told you a long time ago not to trust
them”), be done to mark the future or conditional perfect (“By the end
of the day, I be done collected $600!” meaning “By the end of the day, I
will have collected $600!”), aspectual stay (“She stay up in my business,”
meaning “She is always getting into my business”), 3rd person singu-
lar present tense—s absence (“I know who run this household!” for “I
know who runs this household!”), and possessive—s absence (“I’m brai-
din Talesha hair” for “I’m braidin Talesha’s hair”). These next features
of BL syntax come from Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, where
he represents the voices of various people in his life: multiple negation
(“You can’t help folks that ain’t gonna make it nohow” for “You can’t
help folks that ain’t gonna make it anyhow”), negative inversion (“Ain’t
nothing gonna change” for “Nothing is gonna change”), and generaliza-
tion of was to use with plural and second person subjects (“Tell me we
wouldn’t be treated different if we was white” for “if we were white”),
among several other features.6
While most sociolinguists have focused on grammatical and pronuncia-
tion patterns of Black Language, many also know that it cannot be defi ned
as merely a checklist of features that are distinct from White Mainstream
English.7 Black Language is not just a set of “deviations” from “the stan-
dard”; it is a system in its own right and has been analyzed on its own
terms, not just in relation to some “idealized” form of White speech. Aside
from having an ever-evolving lexicon, speakers of Black Language may par-
ticipate in numerous linguistic practices and cultural modes of discourse
such as signifyin (and bustin, crackin, cappin and dissin), playin the dozens,
call and response, tonal semantics, battlin and entering the cipher, and the
 Change the Game 171

artful use of direct and indirect speech, among others.8 Black Language,
then, refers both to a set of grammatical rules as well as to the way Black
folks use language on a day-to-day basis.
While Black Language is not controversial to linguists, racially charged
national firestorms over Black Language occur about once every 20 years
(with, of course, local fires burnin in between). Who can forget the mad-
ness that broke out after “the King case” in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1977,
when the lawsuit was filed, to the time of the trial in 1979? Or more
recently, during “the Oakland Ebonics controversy” in 1997?9 As the saying
goes, if we don’t learn from our history we’re destined (and in this case,
doomed) to repeat it.

“Inconvenient Truths”: Disrupting White

Linguistic Hegemony (No Matter How
Well-Meaning)
To begin with, we must acknowledge certain inconvenient truths (shout-
out to Al Gore) about American society. For us, there is no skirting the
fact that American society remains one in which, as Barack Obama put it,
“members of every minority group continue to be measured largely by the
degree of [their] assimilation—how closely their speech patterns, dress, or
demeanor conform to the dominant white culture.” The cultural dominance
of Whiteness—the fact that White people consider themselves the “stan-
dard” by which “Others” are measured—has real and tangible effects on
the lives of people of Color.
As folks who study Whiteness argue, Whites can exercise power through
overt (obvious) and covert (hidden) racist practices. Covert practices—the
focus of this chapter—are of special interest because they often reveal racist
ideologies that even the racist may not be aware of. The fact that it is the
language and communicative norms of those in power, in any society, that
tend to be labeled as “standard,” “official,” “normal,” “appropriate,” “respect-
ful,” and so on, often goes unrecognized, particularly by the members of the
dominating group. In our case, White Mainstream English and White ways
of speaking become the invisible—or better, inaudible—norms of what edu-
cators and uncritical scholars like to call academic English, the language of
school, the language of power, or communicating in academic settings.
The following conversation with a well-meaning high school teacher in
the San Francisco Bay Area serves as a good starting point for our dis-
cussion of how Black Language (and its speakers) are viewed in America’s
schools. Below, the teacher is describing the communication goals of the
school and the language and communication behavior of her Black students.
172 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

As you read, check the key words and phrases that reveal this teacher’s
language attitudes:

Teacher: [We] have a lot of presentation standards, so like this

list of, you know, what you should be doing when you’re having
like an oral presentation—like you should speak slowly, speak
loudly, speak clearly, make eye contact, use body language,
those kinds of things, and it’s all written out into a rubric, so
when the kids have a presentation, you grade on each element.
And so, I mean, in that sense, they’ve worked with developing
communication. I mean, I think the thing that teachers work
with, or combat the most . . . is defi nitely like issues with stan-
dard English versus vernacular English. Um, like, if there was
like one of the few goals I had this year was to get kids to stop
sayin, um, “he was, she was.”
Alim: They was?
T: “They was. We be.” Like, those kinds of things and so we spent
a lot of time working with that and like recognizing, “Okay,
when you’re with your friends you can say whatever you want
but . . . this is the way it is. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way.”
And they’re like, “Well, you know, it doesn’t make sense to me.
Th is sounds right.” “She was.” Like, and that’s just what they’ve
been used to and it’s just . . .
A: Well, “she was” is right, right? You mean, like, “They was”?
T: “They was.”
A: And “we was” and that kinda thing.
T: Yeah, “we was.” Everything is just “was.”
A: [Laughter]
T: And like, just trying to help them to be able to differentiate
between what’s acceptable. . . . There’s a lot of “ain’t”, “they was,”
“we ain’t not.”
A: [Laughter]
T: And they can’t codeswitch that well.
A: Uh-huh.
T: Um, and I have to say it’s kind of disheartening because like
despite all that time that’s been spent focusing on grammar,
like, I don’t really see it having helped enormously. Like, if I
stop them in class and they’re like, you know, “The Europeans,
they was really blah-de-blah.” and I’d be like, “Oh, they was?”
And they’d be like, “they were,” like they’ll correct themselves,
but it’s not to the point where it’s natural. . . . They’re like, “Why
does it matter?”
 Change the Game 173

A: “You knew what I said, right?”

T: Yeah . . . I’m not sure they understand why it’s necessary.
A: Do you have any other ideas about language at the school, like
maybe the way the kids speak to themselves versus they way
they speak in class, or do you notice . . .
T: Well, I mean, of course, they’re not gonna be as free as when
they’re speaking to each other when they’re speaking to me. I
mean, I guess the only thing is not so much spoken language
as it’s like unspoken language, like tone, like a lot of attention
is paid to like tone and body language, in terms of respect-
ful attitudes. . . . For a lot of kids, they don’t see the difference.
They’re like [loud voice and direct speech] “Yeah, I just asked
you to give me my grade. Like, what’s the big deal?” And I’m
like, “You just ordered me. I mean, you talked to me like that.”
Like, it’s like, [loud again] “You didn’t give me a grade!” like
that, it’s very abrasive, but they don’t realize that it’s abrasive.
And so, I mean, it’s just like, I guess, teaching them like the
nuances of like when you’re talking with people, what’s appro-
priate? Should you be sitting up, or should you be kinda lean-
ing over [and she leans in her chair].
A: [Laughter]
T: Like that your body language and your facial features like
speak just as loudly if not more loudly than what you actu-
ally say.10 . . . I mean, just even bringing awareness to that, like,
it’s upsetting to them and it’s like shocking to them that we’ll
comment on that, like, maybe their parents let them get away
with that and speak to them that way and having to be like,
“Hey, you know what, like, maybe your parents let you, but
here that’s never acceptable.” 11 Like, there’s just so many—I
mean, thinking about it, it’s just, it’s asking a lot of them to
do, not only to speak standard English but to know all these
other like smaller nuances that they’ve never experienced
before and never had to think about. Like, it’s probably on
some level pretty overwhelming to them to have to deal with
all of these things at once. Because, I mean, their parents say
“they was.”
A: Yeah, is there any talk about what they’re being expected to
do, and what they do ordinarily, in the community, in the
home, or anything?
T: Um, I mean, not officially or regularly, but I’ll always be like,
“I know you might speak this way at home, but in an academic
setting, or if you’re interviewing for a job, or if you’re applying
174 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

to college, and you talk to someone like that, they will like not
even give you the time of day.”
A: Do they ever ask why?
T: Yeah, they’re just like, you know, “Why?” and I’m like, “I don’t
know!” [Laughter!] “You know, that’s just the way that it is!
You have to learn how to play the game guys! I’m sorry.”
A: Right, and I can see that being such an inadequate answer for
a student who doesn’t care about “they was” or “they were,”
being like, “What’s the difference? What’s the big deal? Like
what’s the overall picture?”
T: Right, and I don’t know how to provide that.
A: Yeah.

“We Ain’t Not”: Hearing What’s Not Said

and Missing What Is
Despite its grammatical complexity, the language of the Black child has
consistently been viewed as something to eradicate, even by the most
well-meaning teachers. In fact, this particular teacher is genuine about her
commitment to seeing as many of her students attend four-year colleges
as possible. And when she states, “I have to say it’s kind of disheartening
because like despite all that time that’s been spent focusing on grammar,
like, I don’t really see it having helped enormously,” one gets the sense that
she is actually disheartened and saddened by her lack of results.
What teachers like this one are probably not aware of is how their atti-
tudes and approaches to Black Language uphold White cultural and lin-
guistic hegemony. Let’s take a minute to break it down. One, it is revealing
that the teacher describes the language of her Black students as the thing
that teachers “combat the most.” Her attempt to stamp out the language
patterns of her Black students has been “one of the few goals” she has had
throughout that academic year. Two, the teacher not only works to eradi-
cate the language patterns of her Black students but responds negatively to
what she calls “unspoken language,” or the students’ “tone.” Black students
and their ways of speaking are described with adjectives like abrasive and
not respectful.12
Three, as many of you probably noticed, the teacher points out her stu-
dents’ failure to speak “standard English,” while failing to realize that her
own speech variety—which some would label as White California Valley
Girl Talk—is not exactly what you would call “standard.”13 The teacher also
fails to make several linguistic distinctions in the speech of the students,
 Change the Game 175

implying that Black Language has a random system of negation (“we ain’t
not” is actually not found in Black Language or any other language variety
in the United States) and erroneously pointing out “he was” and “she was”
as use of incorrect Black Language. Further, she’s also not aware of the sty-
listic sensitivity in the use of was and were. When the teacher says, rather
exasperatedly, “Everything is just ‘was,’ ” she is not hearing the subtle sty-
listic alternation of was and were that Black Language speakers employ as
they move through different contexts and situations.
Somehow, despite the vitality of Black Language, teachers continue
hearing what’s not said and missing what is. After years of workin on the
frontlines of education, as teachers and as teacher-researchers from Detroit
to Philly to the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s “one thing that we know
for sure” (word to Oprah): Teachers’ language attitudes have remained
remarkably consistent over the last several decades, particularly in terms
of the language of their Black students. By no means is this teacher alone
in her biases.

“Cuz We Like It!”: Black Linguistic

Flexibility and Creativity
Contrary to the teacher’s comments that her Black students could not
“codeswitch” (we use the term styleshift)—that is, shift in and out of dif-
ferent ways of speaking—our sociolinguistic research with youth at this
same school demonstrates clearly that Black youth possess a wide range
of linguistic styles. These results are outlined in great detail in Alim’s You
Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a
Black American Speech Community.14 Like all speakers, Black youth vary their
speech style based on factors like topic, age, situation, and so on. But they
also vary their speech based on who they’re speaking to, particularly in
terms of the person’s race, gender, and their cultural knowledge (familiar-
ity with Hip Hop, in particular).
Furthermore, while many youth can learn “standard English” grammar,
they resist the constant and unrelenting imposition of White linguistic
norms by their teachers. It’s one thing to learn grammar rules but quite
another to be rewarded for “sounding White” (as if there’s something inher-
ently wrong with “sounding Black”). These youth grew up in speech com-
munities where folks are, as Toni Morrison put it, in love with “the saying
of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing
with them.” So, rather than take their teachers and other White folks for
their linguistic role models, they choose folks who they see as more lin-
guistically creative. They select speakers who, rather than follow a fi xed
176 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

set of rules, know the rules well enough to bend them in ways that are
pleasing to them. Take this example from three youth at the well-meaning
teacher’s school:

Latasha: Yeah, like the way I talk to my teacher ain’t the same
way I talk with the 3L Click.
Alim: 3L Click? What’s that?
L: All of our names begin with “L,” so we named our click after
that, the 3L Click. It’s me, LaToya, and Lamar.
A: And how is the way y’all talk different from the way you talk
to the teacher?
L: Well, it’s like, you know that rapper, Nelly?
A: Yeah, yeah.
L: How he say everything like “urrrr,” like for “here” he’ll be like
“hurrrr”?
A: Yeah! [Laughing] “I ain’t from round hurrrr!”
L: [Laughing] Th at’s how we try to talk!
A: Why, though?!
L: Cuz we like it!

When Latasha’s linguistic role models, Nelly and the St. Lunatics, bust onto
the Hip Hop scene, their language was a major part of their popularity. They
often emphasized words that rhymed with “urrrr” to highlight a well-known
(and sometimes stigmatized) aspect of southern/south midland pronuncia-
tion. As we see from Latasha’s comments, she and her northern California-
based 3L Click borrow this phonological feature of Black Language to play
with different regional and linguistic identities. Although teachers may not
recognize it, Black youth are often more interested in exploiting differences
between “standard English” and “Black Language”—as well as interregional
differences in Black Language styles—than they are with simply mimicking
White ways of speaking.
In addition to preferring a more fluid, flexible approach to linguistic
structure, youth who grow up in Black speech communities also appreci-
ate the verbal art that’s involved in numerous language games. Language
is not just merely a means of communication; its use is meant to “make
you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself.”
Students at the well-meaning teacher’s school often engage in various ver-
bal games, such as battlin and hush mode. Battlin is a form of Black verbal
dueling associated with Hip Hop Culture and the verbal art of improvisa-
tional rhyming. Hush mode is a game associated mostly closely with Black
girls’ interaction, argumentation, and play. In battlin, the object is to out-
smart your opponent through linguistic wit and creativity, while in hush
 Change the Game 177

mode the goal is to leave your opponent dumbfounded and speechless.

Both games highlight the value placed on verbal creativity and competition
in the Black speech community.15
Unfortunately, teachers who are not familiar with Black Culture and
Language often misunderstand these linguistic practices. For example,
while Black youth place extreme value on the verbal inventiveness and com-
petition involved in battlin, teachers broke up the biggest rhyme battle in
the school because, as one student relayed, “Whenever they see a group of
Black folks they automatically think it’s a fight!” One teacher described the
event in these words, “Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t appropriate on
school grounds.” Rather than capitalizing on the skills displayed in these
improvisational verbal exchanges, the teachers viewed these Black linguis-
tic competitions as violence. This misinterpretation is particularly poignant
when one considers that the youth themselves define battlin as “taking the
place of actual fights.” Rather than a physical fight, students gain status in
their peer group by exchanging blows in a game of verbal oneupsmanship.
The stylistic flexibility of Black youth, their various verbal art genres,
and the pleasure some derive from pushing the envelope of the English
language could fi ll—have fi lled—volumes. Rather than interpreting Black
language behavior through the lens of Black inferiority, ignorance, or vio-
lence, these creative language practices should be utilized for educational
purposes. There is a growing community of language and literacy scholars
working to connect the verbal skills that Black youth display outside the
classroom with the verbal skills required inside the classroom.16 Yet, it’s
not only that well-meaning teachers are unaware of these Black linguis-
tic practices. They also have no way to critically engage them (and much
of the scholarship is unhelpful on that point). This places teachers in a
tough situation. In the case of our teacher, despite loving her students and
genuinely wanting the best for them, she continues to feel as if she has
failed them. Or as one teacher put it, capturing the frustration shared by
many, “I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall with this stan-
dard English thing.” When faced with difficult questions, they are left with
unsatisfying retorts like, “I know you talk this way at home, but in an
academic setting, or if you’re interviewing for a job, or if you’re applying to
college, and you talk to someone like that, they will like not even give you
the time of day.”
Sensing that this might be an inadequate answer for her more critical
students, we asked if her students ever push her to explain why particu-
lar varieties are associated with power, prestige, and upward mobility while
their variety is not. The teacher’s answer to them is a frustrated and apolo-
getic “I don’t know! You know, that’s just the way it is! You have to learn
how to play the game guys! I’m sorry.” Unfortunately, we’ve been stuck in
178 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

that same sorry place for decades (at least since the push in the 1960s for
racial integration when Black Language began to be seen as a “problem”).
Unless we come up with better answers, students will continue to resist
the imposition of what are essentially White ways of speaking. Teachers’
traditional focus on grammar—without a critical examination of the social,
cultural, and political forces at play in language use—will continue to fall
short of the mark. In terms of helping her students think more critically
about language, she concludes by admitting that she honestly does not
know “how to provide that.”
So, how can we help teachers provide answers to youths’ critical questions
about language? How can we help teachers move away from eradicating their
students’ language to recognizing, maintaining, and building on the skills
that they bring with them to the classroom? In the remainder of this chap-
ter, we outline one example of a critical linguistic approach to language edu-
cation. This approach addresses the difficult race and class tensions around
language by confronting them head on. Rather than checking students’ lan-
guage at the door, we view it as a rich and complex linguistic system, one
that should be part of any approach to critical language education.

Studying What Gets “Checked at the

Door”: A Critical Linguistic Approach
to Language Education
Rather then rejecting the language of students’ families and communi-
ties, a critical linguistic approach connects meaningfully with youth by
viewing local cultures and language practices as powerful resources for
learning. In the case of this particular high school, the dominant youth
culture was heavily influenced by Hip Hop Culture, music, and language,
as might be the case in other majority-minority communities around the
United States. Of course, if critical approaches are gonna be effective
and relevant, they must be continuously adapted to reflect youths’ social
worlds (Hip Hop or not).

D E V E L O P I N G A N AWA R E N E S S O F
S O C I O L I N G U I S T I C VA R I AT I O N
“Real Talk,” in the language of Hip Hop, is an expression that builds on
what generations of Black Americans have referred to as “straight talk.”
This approach borrows the phrase “Real Talk” to create a new way of
thinking about language in educational contexts. It utilizes “Real Talk”
(naturally occurring conversations) to teach youth explicitly about the
 Change the Game 179

sociolinguistic variation that they manipulate on a regular basis. The proj-

ect begins with the sociolinguistic analysis of a conversation with one of
the local area’s best known street Hip Hop artists, JT the Bigga Figga. The
class exercise begins by listening to an audiotaped interview, and copies of
the tape are then distributed to the students, each of whom has his or her
own tape recorder. They are instructed to transcribe the first small por-
tion of the tape exactly as they hear it. What they then find out as a class
is that they have each produced a unique transcript of the same speech
sample. Invariably, some youth will “standardize” the speech samples, and
others will “vernacularize” them. As we search for differences between our
transcriptions, they begin to notice sociolinguistic patterns in the rapper’s
speech (e.g., “In the first sentence he said, ‘He run everything,’ and then
later he said, ‘He runs everything.’ ”). We take this one feature of the rap-
per’s speech (third-person singular—s variability) and conduct a sociolin-
guistic analysis of his language, which leads to a larger understanding of
the structure and systematicity of spoken language.

L ANGUAGE LE ARNING THROUGH REFLE X I VE,

E T H N O G R A P H I C A N A LY S E S
After learning about the systematicity of spoken speech and that socio-
linguistic variation refers to the variable frequencies of certain features
within a linguistic system, we introduce the concept of variation in terms
of language use, or ways of speaking. The “Language in My Life” project
begins by introducing youth to Dell Hymes’s theory17 of the ethnography of
speaking and ends with student-conducted, reflexive, ethnographic analy-
ses of their own speech behavior. The goal is for them to answer the ques-
tion: How do I use language in my life? They are given an ethnography of
speaking reference sheet that outlines basic concepts in this area, such as
speech situation, speech event, and speech act, as levels of analysis in a
communicative encounter.

ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION

The ethnography of communication is the scientific study of a

culture and their communication patterns. Ethnographers of
communication seek to understand a culture through a detailed
study and description of their language and communication
behavior.

• SPEECH SITUATION—The largest level of analysis. The social occasion in

which speech may occur (for example, lunchtime in the cafeteria; group
work in class; birthday party; Hip Hop concert)
180 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

• SPEECH EVENT—During a speech situation, you will see/hear many

speech events (for example; a Hip Hop concert is a speech situation, and
a backstage interview with the artist—Jay-Z or Kanye West or Nicki
Minaj—is a speech event). The speech event is a smaller layer of analy-
sis that occurs inside the speech situation.
• SPEECH ACT—Each action of speech inside of a speech event. This is the
smallest layer of analysis (for example, during the backstage interview
with Lil Wayne, we might start off by greeting each other—“Wassup,
Weezy?”—that greeting is a speech act). In the middle of the interview,
he might tell me a joke. That joke is also a speech act (greetings, com-
mands, questions, jokes, etc.).

Students are then presented with another sample of Real Talk—this

time with New Orleans rapper Juvenile (in order to use a speaker who
is not from their local community)—and are guided through an eth-
nography of speaking analysis of an interview, which they learn is a
speech event. A small sample from the interview is used to create a
worksheet:

Interview with Juvenile

J = Juvenile
A = Alim

A: Wassup, Juve?
J: Wassup, woadie?
A: What’s goin on?
J: Chillin, you know me. I’m chillin.
A: How would you describe the last year, year and half for you?
J: Spectacular, man! I’ve been blessed, you know.
A: It’s a blessing, ha?
J: Workin real hard, you know. Just a lot of things. A lot of
things have been goin on and so far everything’s been goin
right. I’ve been makin the right moves.

They are encouraged to notate the transcript in detail. Youth are usu-
ally adept at identifying a certain level of informality (through the use of
“slang” like “wassup,” “chillin,” “you know what I’m saying?”) as well as
regionalisms in the New Orleans−based rapper’s speech (such as “woadie,”
which can mean, “man,” “homie,” etc.; “It’s all gravy!” for the commonly
used “It’s all good”), and Alim’s use of “ha?” as an attempt to build rap-
port with (or “be cool with”) the rapper by using one of his most famous
expressions.
 Change the Game 181

Table 6.1 Ethnogography of Communication

S Setting/scene Physical circumstances; your definition of an
occasion
P Participants Speaker/sender/addressor/hearer/receiver/
audience/addressee
E Ends Purposes and goals; outcomes
A Act sequence Message form and content
K Key Tone, manner
I Instrumentalities Channel (verbal, nonverbal); forms of speech
drawn from communicative repertoire
N Norms of interaction Specific properties attached to speaking; interpre-
and interpretation tation of norms within a culture
G Genre Textual categories

But, of course, they are told, you can only gather so much information
by reading a transcript—you have to “go out into the field.” After intro-
ducing the theory and doing a hands-on ethnography of speaking analysis,
we wanted them to be able to analyze their own communication behavior
in their everyday environments, from their actual lived experiences. After
challenging them and asking if they thought that they could do an eth-
nography of speaking with their own language data, we introduced the
“Language in My Life” project. The students were instructed to analyze
their own communication behavior as it shifted across contexts and situa-
tions. As ethnographers, they were charged with carrying an ethnography
notebook and documenting their communicative encounters. The notebook
consisted of grids that were to be fi lled in throughout the day. An example
from an eighth grader follows.

Language in My Life
Immediately, this project validates the language practices that youth
engage in outside the classroom—for example, rappin or battlin—by
allowing them to see their speech behavior taken as a subject of analy-
sis. Further, after collecting data on their own speech, they gain a much
higher level of metalinguistic awareness (speaking of themselves as style-
shifters possessing multiple languages and a range of speech styles). Th is
allows them to not only better understand the abstract theory of speak-
ing but also to better understand the linguistic landscape of their social
worlds. Again, these worlds are not marginalized inside the classroom or
182 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Table 6.2 Language in My Life

Date: Time:
November 22 Early in the morning, like, 7 am
Mode of Language (reading, speaking, writing, listening, etc.):
Speaking, listening, rappin
Name of Language:
Mostly in slang, or Ebonics, but sometimes in standard English because my aunt
was there and she talks like that.
Context (who’s involved, where is it happening, what’s happening):
I was sitting in the kitchen with my dad, eating cereal before I had to go to school.
Before that, I was reading this rap I had wrote over and over again in my room, so
I wanted to rap it for my dad. I did, and he was feelin it! He said the he could do a
better one, so he tried, but it wasn’t better. He called my mom and aunt over from
the other room and told me to rap for them and I did. My mom was like, “Wow,
Lamar! You bad!” I said, “I know.” (Being cocky, as I am!) And my aunt said, “What
a talented young man.” My dad said he was gonna battle me after school.
Comments on the style(s) of language used:
The language with me and my dad was mostly in slang, or Ebonics, as I like to
call it. Nah, I mostly say slang. And my mom, too. But my aunt, she talks stan-
dard English. I don’t know, maybe because she’s older.

left outside the door, but they are seen as valuable cultural and linguistic
spaces for learning.

T H E E T H N O G R A P H Y O F C U LT U R E A N D C O M M U N I C AT I O N
After the students have learned about and conducted sociolinguistic and
ethnographic analyses of their own speech behavior, we encourage them to
“go back into the field” and expand their focus. This time, they are to inves-
tigate their social worlds through an analysis of their peer group and peer
culture. One of the primary ways to accomplish this is through the study
of localized lexical usage (or local words, phrases, and slang). We begin by
raising youths’ awareness of the variety of lexical innovations within Hip
Hop Culture (of course, most are already aware of this, since they actively
participate in these innovations). To pique their interest as well as to local-
ize the dialogue by focusing on the Bay Area, we provide a specific example
of a research interview about the language of Hip Hop Culture with JT the
Bigga Figga. In the following short excerpt, JT provides what ethnogra-
phers call an emic (insider’s) view of Hip Hop’s evolving lexicon.
 Change the Game 183

J = JT the Bigga Figga

A = Alim
A: What does it mean to be certified with game?
J: Certified mean you official. . . . How it got incorporated into our
language in the streets, from my first experience with the word
in the streets, was from mobb cars. And the mobb cars is Caprice
Classics or Chevy Impalas ‘87 to ‘90. Them three years right there.
And if you get a mobb car and it don’t have a certain seal on it,
it’s not certified. So when dudes buy the car, it have to have that
seal. You want yo car to be certified, you know what I’m saying?
And that’s just like if you into the collector’s cars and if it don’t
have the same steering wheel or if you change something it’s not
certified no more. So it’s original, you know what I’m saying? And
another meaning for certified meaning that you official. . . . If I say,
“Man, Alim’s gon handle it. If he said he gon handle it, he certi-
fied, man. He gon handle it.” So somebody who word is good.

Upon reading the transcript aloud as a class, students immediately respond

by critiquing phrases, calling some out of date, providing new or similar
phrases, comparing with other regional phrases, and so on. This excitement
is channeled into further training in ethnographic methods. For this partic-
ular case, we borrow from the introduction to linguist Geneva Smitherman’s
Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner.18 The follow-
ing worksheet translates academic language into a familiar Hip Hop−stylized
way of writing (again, validating multiple forms of language).

ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODS USED BY GENEVA SMITHERMAN TO

WRITE Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. We
should use all of these methods in writing our own book (by the way, we
need a title—what’s up?)

(1) Written language surveys and word lists completed by Black people. She
made up surveys and gave them to some folks that she knew and many
that she didn’t and asked them to fill out the surveys. What would a
survey look like?
(2) Songs and hit recordings. Basically, she blocked out 30 minutes or so in
her daily schedule to play some of her CDs and tapes. As the songs played,
she listened really closely for any unique words and phrases. Most of us
listen to music way more than 30 minutes a day, right? I know I do.
(3) Radio shows. My radio stay locked on KMEL, so this one should be easy.
Whether you listen to Chuy in the morning or Big Von in the evening
for the 7 O’Clock Drop, you’ll hear tons of slang words and phrases.
184 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

(4) Movies and television. You can block out 30 minutes to watch your
favorite TV show (106th and Park, Rap City, BET, whatever) and catch all
the slang that’s being used. If you happen to be watching a movie that
day or that week, pay extra attention to the slang. You can probably get
hecka words from one movie.
(5) Collecting words from community bulletins, leaflets, magazines,
announcements, or other written material. Can you think of any that
you might use?
(6) Face-to-face interviews. You can ask people if they know any slang words
or phrases that you can include for your slang dictionary. Sometimes we
can’t think of all of these terms by ourselves, right, so we need some
help from our people. How would you ask somebody to help you? Who
would you ask?
(7) Eavesdropping. I ain’t gotta tell y’all about that one. Mmm-hmmmm . . .
(8) Participant observation. Participant observation means that you are not
only observing the event or the scene, but you are also actively participat-
ing in it. In what events or scenes do you hear lots of slang talk? I bet you
the talk at lunchtime is full of slang words and phrases, huh? This is your
first official ethnographic assignment. You are to be a participant observer
at lunch tomorrow (Thursday) and at least one other day before we meet
again next Wednesday. Keep your lil notebooks handy so you can jot words
down as you hear them. I know some of you are dying to ask, so yeah, you
can combine this with eavesdropping, but if you get popped in the eye,
I’ma be like Silkk the Shokker and say, “OOOOOH, it ain’t my fault!”

The students are given further training in these methods as we move

through the unit. They are charged with the immense responsibility of
archiving Black Culture—in this case, Hip Hop Culture—through words.
Going above and beyond what is often expected of them, they contribute
to a body of scholarly literature on their own speech variety (an object of
study that has historically been dominated by White researchers).19

MOV ING F ROM INDI V IDUAL TO S T RUC T UR AL

U N D E R S TA N D I N G S O F L I N G U I S T I C R A C I S M
Our goal is to develop an approach that does more than provide students
with the tools to analyze language and to theorize its use in their local,
social worlds. Beyond this, a critical approach helps youth think about
complex issues of language and power. Many of our youth, particularly
those who speak marginalized language varieties, are already acutely aware
of the fact that people can use language to discriminate against “Others”;
they and their families are often those “Others.” To begin with, students
 Change the Game 185

(and teachers) can learn directly about the relationship between language
and discrimination in American society. A critical approach should begin
with teaching about the diverse range of language varieties spoken in the
United States so as to combat linguistic prejudices as well as internalized
feelings of linguistic shame. For example, linguists have helped produce
documentary fi lms that can serve as excellent resources for youth who are
developing ideas about the concept of linguistic discrimination. Students
can share their opinions about the diverse issues and perspectives raised in
the fi lm. For instance, one class was given this handout during a viewing
of the fi lm American Tongues (1986), an effort by sociolinguists to commu-
nicate the fundamental principles of language to a wider audience:

AMERICAN TONGUES

Learning all about American English language varieties

Opening Exercise:

Defi ne these unique words from around the country:

Cabinet, Gumband, Pau hana, Jambalaya, Antigogglin, Snicklefritz,
Schlep
Opening Questions:

What did you get out of this video?

What was the most interesting thing you learned?
What was the funniest part of the movie?
How would you relate this video to your life and the way that
you talk?
Discuss these quotes from the movie with a partner. What’s your
opinion about the issues that these people bring up?
“It’s easy to figure out which dialects are more desirable and
which dialects are less desirable—just look at which groups are
more desirable and which groups are less desirable. We tend to
think of urban as better than rural. We tend to think of middle
class as better than working class. We tend to think of White
as better than Black. So if you’re a member of one of those stig-
matized groups, then the way you talk will also be stigmatized.
This goes on all over the United States—in every community.”
“[The way we talk] it’s ignorant. It sounds ignorant. Oh, come
on, these people hear this stuff they’re gonna say, ‘What the
heck is that garbage coming out of their mouth?!’ Th at’s gonna
happen. And they’re gonna say, ‘Look at them two beautiful
girls. If they’d shut their mouths they’d be great.’ ”
186 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

“I think that the majority of White America, you know, does

not accept Black English. But not because of the language
itself, because of the people who speak it, which is racism.”
“Even though Black English is mocked and looked down upon
by many White people, a lot of Black Americans use it to relate
to one another every day. And those who don’t use it in their
home communities run the risk of becoming outsiders.”
“I have two sons, one’s 12 and one’s 15. And when I hear them
talk, I say, ‘God, am I raising two White boys here?’ And I
don’t mean that to be negative in respect to White males, but
I don’t want my boys sounding like White males!”
“Black or White, Texas or New York, few people talk the same
way all the time. There’s one way of talking with friends and
family, and another way for business or school. We switch back
and forth because we know there’s no one way that works in
every situation.”
“There’s a feeling that anybody who talks like that can’t be very
smart. And if I don’t talk like that I must be smarter than
you, and I don’t want anybody who’s not very smart represent-
ing my company. And those kinds of folks tend to have a hard
time getting a job. So their speech is very, very important.”

Once students have shared their opinions and stories, the goal should be to
focus on how these examples of individual prejudice (which students can eas-
ily point out) lead to structural discrimination (which is a little more difficult
but embedded in the responses that relate to “representing a company” or
“getting a job,” etc.). While most American sociolinguists and teacher educa-
tors do a good job showing America’s linguistic diversity, they often fail to
show how this diversity is linked to America’s social inequalities. In other
words, most of our suggestions about pedagogy on language attitudes and
awareness tend to discuss linguistic stigmatization in terms of individual
prejudices rather than as discrimination that is part and parcel of the socio-
structural fabric of society. This limited understanding is suspect because
it serves the needs of those who currently benefit the most from language
discrimination while ignoring the needs of those who suffer from it.
To serve the needs of our youth, we need to incorporate the full range
of what linguists know about the relationship between language, power, and
discrimination. A great way to do this is to introduce the sociolinguistic
research that addresses linguistic profiling, which has been described by lin-
guist John Baugh as the auditory equivalent of racial profiling.20 This type
of profiling, usually occurring over the phone, can prevent potential home
 Change the Game 187

owners from moving into certain neighborhoods, for example. Students are
introduced to this compelling research by watching a video of ABC cable news
coverage of the Linguistic Profiling Project. The research findings, which show
that the majority of Americans can make correct racial inferences based on
the pronunciation of the single word hello, inspire a whole unit of activities
designed to investigate this phenomenon. Youth are also encouraged to col-
lect data about linguistic profiling in their communities. The following work-
sheet accompanies the video and includes various short assignments:

LINGUISTIC PROFILING WORKSHEET

What is linguistic profiling? What is the relationship between lin-

guistic profi ling and racial profi ling? Do you think you can
tell whether somebody “sounds White” or “sounds Mexican” or
“sounds Black” or “sounds Indian” or “sounds Arab” or any other
race or ethnic group? Today we are going to talk about the rela-
tionship between race, language, profi ling, and discrimination.
We are about to watch a news story that ran on ABC News with
Peter Jennings. Th is news segment is a case of what we call,
“Applied Linguistics”—i.e. an area of research where linguists
apply their scientific knowledge about language to real-life situ-
ations that affect everyday people—like you and me.

FREEWRITE First impressions. What do you think?

OUTLINE OF NEWS STORY

8:52—Language as a criterion for discrimination. Linguistic pro-

fi ling Æ racial profi ling.
9:32—James Johnson’s housing application, his experience and
his experiment. Fair housing agency experiment.
10:32—John Baugh, Stanford University professor—one simple
word, “Hello.” Linguistics and the law.
11:24—Linguistic Profi ling experiment at Stanford in Alim’s Hip
Hop class. Percentages of correct answers. Is this reality?

SUMMARY PARAGRAPH

[Open space for students’ summary of the research presented in

the news story]

ASSIGNMENT

Let’s design a series of interview questions. In the coming week,

interview 3 or 4 people (or more, if you choose)—they can be
188 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

family or friends—about linguistic profi ling and record or take

notes about their responses. Compile your responses and sub-
mit for next week.

It is at this point in the developmental progression of the unit that youth

begin to explore the relationships between language and structural dis-
crimination. They also begin to see how the struggles of their particular
groups relate to the struggles of other groups. For example, while one
Black American student interviewed his aunt and discovered that she had
a very painful experience of discrimination in the housing market (she
would often be told that units were “still open” only to be turned away
upon arrival), a Latina student shared a narrative from her father in which
he was fired from his truck-driving job because of “phony” charges of tar-
diness. In the first case, the Black American aunt spoke “proper” on the
phone, but she was still often denied access to housing based on the visual
representation of her race (“when they saw I was a Black person”). And in
the second case, the Latino father spoke English as a second language and
believed that he was fired not because of his job performance (or his race)
but his “problem with English,” as he put it.
These narratives offer opportunities for our youth to explore and critically
interrogate the links between language, discrimination, and power. Further,
after being made aware of how linguistic profiling affects their communi-
ties, they are motivated to engage in community activism around issues of
linguistic discrimination. Youth are not only thinking critically about lan-
guage, but they are also putting their knowledge to work for their commu-
nities by developing consciousness-raising campaigns. These campaigns help
provide resources for community members to engage in the transforma-
tion of their neighborhoods. From a critical perspective, dissatisfaction and
awareness aren’t enough; action is needed to bring about social change.
At this point, it should be obvious that critical approaches take students
well beyond the elementary skills required for the memorization and produc-
tion of certain grammatical rules in the traditional language classroom. These
traditional approaches expect very little from Black youth. Teachers continue
to read Black students’ resistance to White linguistic norming as a sign of their
inability to grasp “standard English.” As our well-meaning teacher reflected:

I mean, thinking about it, it’s just, it’s asking a lot of them to do,
not only to speak standard English but to know all these other
like smaller nuances that they’ve never experienced before and
never had to think about. Like, it’s probably on some level pretty
overwhelming to them to have to deal with all of these things
at once.
 Change the Game 189

While the blame game is not a useful strategy, teachers often use these
infantilizing discourses to shift blame from themselves onto their stu-
dents. But as we’ve seen, Black youth manipulate language in a number of
inventive ways, engage in creative exploitation of linguistic differences, and
participate in complex verbal games that require high-level improvisational
skills. A critical approach expects much more from students, going beyond
traditional grammar lessons to teach students how to analyze and manipu-
late language in their social worlds (why reserve this knowledge for privi-
leged university students?). Finally, it teaches students that we must do
more than study the relationships between language, racism, and power—
we must do what we can to alter them.

“That’s Just the Way the World Works”:

Exposing the Covert Racism of Cultural Scripts
Undoubtedly, some readers of this chapter are still stuck on the “standard
English” question. Others are still trying to make sense of the conversa-
tions with the well-meaning teacher and the well-meaning journalist (the
one who asked about Obama’s speech). While these folks are obviously not
dressed in white hoods, foaming at the mouth, and shouting out racial
slurs (a limited depiction of racists, to be sure), a critical examination of
their beliefs gets at the subtle workings of racism through language. At the
same time, we can’t stop there. To be honest, we must turn this critical
examination inward on sociolinguistics and teacher education to figure out
how we may be complicit in this type of covert racism.
To focus on the teacher, how did she arrive at the belief that her stu-
dents absolutely needed to learn “standard English” in order to succeed in
society? First, while teachers are some of the most hardworking members
of society and often seem to have supernatural stores of energy, they do
not have superhuman abilities. Teachers, like the rest of us, are not immune
to the stereotypical language beliefs that are at the core of what Americans
“know” about language (rather than poking fun at the teacher, we need to
look at ourselves in the mirror to see our own language prejudices—Real
Talk). Still, it is imperative to ask how she might have arrived at the fol-
lowing conclusion:

I know you might speak this way at home, but in an academic

setting, or if you’re interviewing for a job, or if you’re applying to
college, and you talk to someone like that, they will like not even
give you the time of day . . . that’s just the way that it is! You have
to learn how to play the game guys! I’m sorry.
190 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Let’s begin by taking a closer look at the teacher’s training. This teacher
was enrolled in a teacher education program at the elite, private university
located within a few miles of her high school. In one three-week course,
she learned about Black Language, linguistic diversity, language attitudes,
and teaching strategies for linguistically and culturally diverse students.
The course clearly didn’t have a lasting impact in this particular case. In
fact, we believe that the course may have been at least partly responsible
for perpetuating the discriminatory language attitudes that it was meant
to counter. In the course, the instructor uncritically used the documentary
fi lm American Tongues (recall the worksheet included in this chapter) as a
central text.21 The fi lm, although somewhat outdated, is ideal for expos-
ing teachers to linguistic diversity in the United States. It not only intro-
duces viewers to the concept of language variation, but it also provides
several examples of linguistic, racial, and regional discrimination. After
discussing Black Language at length, the fi lm cuts to an interview with
one of the foremost sociolinguists in the field, who concludes, somewhat
apologetically:

Let’s face it. There are certain consequences for not speaking a
standard dialect. For example . . . you may have certain limita-
tions in terms of the job market. If you don’t wanna deal with
the negatives, it may be very helpful to learn a standard dialect
for certain situations. It may not be fair, but that’s the way it is.
(Walt Wolfram, principal advisor to the fi lm)

While this fi lm was intended to communicate some of sociolinguistics’s

fundamental principles to a wider audience, it also communicated some
of the field’s fundamental biases (check out how this well-meaning soci-
olinguist’s comments map almost word-for-word onto the well-meaning
teacher’s comments). It is clear from this example that the American socio-
linguistic establishment, by and large, has been complicit in speaking from
a position of privilege. Th is position incorrectly depicts speaking a “stan-
dard dialect” as a simple question of individual choice. But as we know,
White America doesn’t just ask Black people to learn a few grammatical
rules. Rather it demands that they act, talk, and sound like Whites if they
are to enter the “mainstream.” Sociolinguists, like teachers, it turns out,
are clearly not immune to discriminatory language attitudes nor do we
always recognize our own subtle forms of racism.22
Rather than insisting on the need for working-class Blacks (and other
groups pushed to the margins of American society) to speak “standard
English,” we need to expose widely repeated American cultural scripts for
the myths that they are. We also need to call out approaches that merely
 Change the Game 191

pay lip service to the “systematic” and “highly verbal” linguistic practices
of Blacks, while turning around and telling Black people to they face that
Black ways of speaking ain’t good enough for any important or intellectual
business. The scripts that claim that “certain languages are appropriate for
certain contexts” or “of course, all languages are equal, but we need to teach
Black students the ‘discourses of power’ ” don’t change a damn thing. Actually
they do a terrific job of maintaining the status quo. These approaches keep
the position of the dominant culture intact, not because Blacks believe in its
superiority, but because Blacks—and Whites—tacitly accept the notion that
the White middle class either cannot or will not accept Black Language.
How many countless White folks have you heard say, “Well, fair or unfair,
that’s just the way the world works”? Black folks got their version of this
too: “It’s their world and we’re just in it—so as long as they’re in charge, we
gotta play by their rules.” Rather than viewing these statements as an end
point, we take them as the starting point for the critical discussion that
we need to be having. Instead of agreeing for one reason or another that
we “absolutely have” to provide “these students” with “standard English,” we
might ask: How are we all involved in perpetuating the myth of a “stan-
dard” and that it is somehow better, more intelligent, more appropriate,
more important, and so on than other varieties? Why do we elevate one
particular variety over all others, even when all of our linguistic knowledge
tells us that “all languages are equal in linguistic terms”? Why does the
“standard” continue to be imposed despite the fact that what we have for a
“standard English” in the United States is nothing short of the imposition
of White, middle-class language norms? How and why do we continue to
measure the worth of People of Color largely by their level of assimilation
into dominant White culture? (See Barack Obama’s quote at the opening of
this chapter.) These questions are especially important since this hegemonic
move is used to grant opportunities to Whites while denying opportunities
to as many others as possible (including poor, marginal Whites).

Challenging Hegemony: Moving from “Playing the

Game” to “Changing the Game”
Asking different kinds of questions and developing different kinds of
approaches, we can stop apologizing for “the way things are” and begin
helping our students imagine the way things can be. By asking different
kinds of questions, we can begin to think differently—that is critically—
about the relationships between language, racism, education, and power
in society. By asking different kinds of questions, we can stop silently
legitimizing “standard English” and tacitly standardizing “Whiteness.”23 In
192 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

leaving out critical issues of race and class, students inevitably begin to
view their culture and language as unfit for school or any other context
linked to status and prestige. If we continue to uncritically present “stan-
dard English” as somehow better than other varieties of English, we are
implicitly devaluing these varieties and the people who speak them. As a
result, many students not only come to see their language as having a lesser
role in places like schools, but more dangerously, they start to see them-
selves in that light too.24 This logical conclusion would be, in Morrison’s
words, the “really cruel fallout of racism.”
Rather than falling back on uncritical conformist and assimilationist
models of schooling, perhaps we can learn from other models of lan-
guage education from multilingual democracies around the world. What
might the research in Sweden, Norway, and other countries which shows
that “recognizing the legitimacy of other varieties of a language” improves
“standard” language learning have to offer us here in the United States?
What about South Africa’s policy of 11 official languages, enshrined in its
Constitution, which elevates its African languages to the status of English
and Afrikaans? What can Americans learn from Perú’s innovative new
multilingual law that calls for the preservation and use of its indigenous
languages? In this so-called developing democracy, bilingual, intercultural
education is now the law of the land: All children who speak an indigenous
language as their first language have the right to be educated in Spanish
and in their first language at all levels of the education system. There are
other more egalitarian, democratic models out there.25 Withholding oppor-
tunities from all folks who don’t talk like you ain’t “the way the world
works”—it’s the way hegemony works.
Our students and teachers need to be made aware of the different ways that
the game’s being played. Rather than creating cultural and linguistic clones,
schooling should be about the serious business of educating young minds to
deal with (and, when necessary, on) a society of power politics and incredible
complexity. Schooling should not be about convincing students to play the
game but, rather, about helping them understand how the game’s been rigged
and, more importantly, how they can work to change it. Real Talk.

NOTES
1. See Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New
York: Crown Publishers, 2006, 235).
2. Check out the full interview with Toni Morrison (by Thomas LeClaire) in The New
Republic, March 21, 1981, pages 25–29. Shoutout to John R. Rickford and Russell
J. Rickford for bringing this to our attention in your book, Spoken Soul: The Story of
Black English (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
 Change the Game 193

3. As one middle-class Black father famously put it in the 1986 documentary film Amer-
ican Tongues, “And I don’t mean that to be negative in respect to White males, but I
don’t want my boys sounding like White males!” For him and others, it’s important
that their children keep their cultural and linguistic heritage intact even as they mas-
ter other ways of speaking and being in the world.
4. Linguist Rosina Lippi-Green makes this point forcefully in her book, English with an
Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1997). This now classic work has just been updated and republished in 2012.
5. As linguist and anthropologist Arthur Spears wrote in the introduction to Race and
Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1999, 12–13): “The more recent neoracism is subtler, in most cases claiming a
cultural basis for what is seen as low achievement by people of color. . . . Neoracism is
still racism, in that it functions to maintain racial hierarchies of oppression. Its new
ideological focus on culture has the same function, and provides a vast new field to
mine for supposed causes of lower achievement of groups of color based on dysfunc-
tional attitudes, values, and orientations.” In our case, folks claim that their attacks
on Black Culture through its language are not racist because they don’t hate “all Black
people.” So, what, you only hate the ones that don’t conform to your norms? You’re
neo, baby. Check yourself.
6. We wasn’t playin (that’s generalization of was to plural subjects) when we said that
Black Language was the most studied variety by sociolinguists. These linguistic fea-
tures and more can be found in William Labov’s “Contraction, Deletion, and Inherent
Variability of the English Copula,” Language 45(1969): 715–762; William Labov’s Lan-
guage in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1972; Ralph Fasold’s Tense Marking in Black English: A Linguistic
and Social Analysis, Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1972; H. Samy
Alim’s You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in
a Black American Speech Community, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004; John
Baugh’s Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival, Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1983; Peter Sells, John Rickford, and Thomas Wasow’s “Negative Inver-
sion in African American Vernacular English,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
14(3): 591–627; and for two excellent books that bring a lot of these sources together
with comprehensive overview and analysis: Lisa Green’s African American English: A
Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and John
R. Rickford’s African American Vernacular English: Features and Use, Evolution, and Edu-
cational Implications (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999).
As mentioned, the last several examples of BL come from Barack Obama. He not
only uses BL when speaking (as we outlined in detail in chapter 1), but his writings
offer plenty of examples. The example of multiple negation (“You can’t help folks that
ain’t gonna make it nohow”) is from Dreams from My Father, page 136. The example
of negative inversion (“Ain’t nothing gonna change”) is from page 248. And the gener-
alization of was to use with plural and second person subjects (“Tell me we wouldn’t
be treated different if we was white”) comes from page 74. While Obama usually
presents his own speech without any distinctive features of BL, he uses the features
generously while reporting other people’s speech (these three features, and especially
copula absence, seem to be his favorites).
7. A must read on this is Marcyliena Morgan’s “The African American Speech Commu-
nity: Reality and Sociolinguistics” in her edited book Language and the Social Construc-
tion of Identity in Creole Situations, (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies,
UCLA, 1994, 121–148).
8. Black lexicon (words and phrases) goes way back, both in terms of scholarship and
in terms of its African roots. Definitely check out Lorenzo Dow Turner’s 1949 game-
changing classic, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press); Clarence Major’s two collections of African American slang, the first from
1970 and his more recent update, From Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American
194 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

Slang (New York & London: Penguin, 1994); Joey L. Dillard’s Lexicon of Black English
(New York: Seabury, 1977); Edith Folb’s Runnin’ Down Some Lines: The Language and
Culture of Black Teenagers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Joseph
Holloway and W. Vass’s The African Heritage of American English (Bloomington: Univer-
sity of Indiana Press, 1997); and Geneva Smitherman’s more contemporary perspec-
tive in Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (Boston/New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994 [2000]).
Check out the work that’s been done on signifyin since the 1960s. It came out of
folklore, intercultural communication, linguistic anthropology, and related fields: Roger
Abraham’s Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Phila-
delphia (Chicago: Aldine, 1964)—you gotta wonder what Schoolly D, Beanie Sigel, and
Freeway would say about this now, almost 50 years later! And this one, Thomas Koch-
man’s “ ‘Rapping’ in the Black Ghetto,” Trans-Action, February, 1969, pages 26–34; and
this one by a sista scholar, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan’s Language Behavior in a Black Urban
Community (Berkeley: University of California, Language Behavior Research Laboratory,
1971); William Labov’s Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacu-
lar (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); Geneva Smitherman’s “The
Power of the Rap: The Black Idiom and the New Black Poetry” in Twentieth Century
Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal (1973, 259–274) and Talkin and Testifyin: The
Language of Black America (Houghton Mifflin, 1977; reissued, with revisions, Detroit:
Wayne State University Press,1986); another sista scholar, Marcyliena Morgan’s “Con-
versational Signifying: Grammar and Indirectness among African American Women” in
Elinor Ochs, Emmanuel Schegloff, and Sandra Thompson’s (eds.) Grammar and Interac-
tion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
For two classic works on playin the dozens, a must-read is H. Rap Brown’s “Street
Talk” in Thomas Kochman’s edited volume Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in
Urban Black America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972, 205–207); also, Roger
Abraham’s “Rapping and Capping: Black Talk as Art” in John Swzed’s edited volume
Black America (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
For classic call and response work, check out Jack Daniel and Geneva Smitherman’s
“How I Got Over: Communication Dynamics in the Black Community” in Quarterly
Journal of Speech 62, February 1976; Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin: The
Language of Black America (Houghton Mifflin; reissued, with revisions, Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1977[1986]); For an updated Hip Hop version of call and
response, check out Imani Perry’s Prophets of the Hood: The Politics and Poetics of Hip
Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) and H. Samy Alim’s Roc the Mic
Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006).
In addition to Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Tesftifyin, check out Cheryl Keyes’s
classic article, “Verbal Art Performance in Rap Music: The Conversation of the 80s” in
Folklore Forum 17(2), Fall 1984, pages 143–152.
These Hip Hop practices extend the Black Oral Tradition and have gone global so
kids thousands of miles apart are adopting and adapting them in their local social
worlds. Check out Dawn Norfleet’s Hip-Hop Culture in New York City: The Role of Ver-
bal Music Performance in Defining a Community (PhD dissertation, Columbia University,
1997); Michael Newman’s “ ‘Not dogmatically / It’s all about me’: Ideological Conflict
in a High School Rap Crew” in Taboo: A Journal of Culture and Education, 2001; H.
Samy Alim’s Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop culture (New York: Routledge,
2006) and H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim and Alastair Pennycook’s edited volume,
Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language
(New York/London: Routledge, 2009).
See Arthur Spears’s “African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called
Obscenity” in Salikoko Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh (eds.)
African American English: Structure, History, and Usage (New York: Routledge, 1998,
226–250) and Marcyliena Morgan’s “More Than a Mood or an Attitude: Discourse and
Verbal Genres in African-American Culture” in the same book, pages 251–281.
 Change the Game 195

9. The word Ebonics was thrust back into the spotlight in 2010 when the Drug Enforce-
ment Administration posted a job announcement for linguists fluent in “Ebonics.”
Check out this article by H. Samy Alim and Imani Perry at: http://www.thegrio.com/
opinion/why-the-deas-embrace-of-ebonics-is-lost-in-translation.php. The term Ebonics
was coined by psychologist Robert Williams during a private meeting of Black lin-
guists, educators and other scholars attending a 1973 conference on language and
the urban child. Williams details the circumstances of this meeting and his and these
other Black scholars’ rationale for preferring the term Ebonics in his 1975 edited
publication of the conference papers, Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks (St.
Louis: Institute of Black Studies). The term made its national debut in 1997 when
the Oakland School Board passed a resolution that teachers take the language of their
students (those for whom Black Language was their primary language) into account
when teaching “standard English.” While the rest of the world went apeshit—to be
blunt about it—linguists were like, “Here we go again.” The Linguistic Society of
America tried to quell the madness with their own resolution, which stated: “The
systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the
African American vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over
the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang,’ ‘mutant,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘defec-
tive,’ ‘ungrammatical,’ or ‘broken English’ are incorrect and demeaning. . . . There is evi-
dence from Sweden, the U.S., and other countries that speakers of other varieties can
be aided in their learning of the standard variety by pedagogical approaches which
recognize the legitimacy of the other varieties of a language. From this perspective,
the Oakland School Board’s decision to recognize the vernacular of African American
students in teaching them Standard English is linguistically and pedagogically sound.”
[our emphasis]. For an excellent breakdown of Oakland’s and the Linguistic Society
of America’s resolutions, read John Baugh’s Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial
Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). And for the best, comprehensive
discussion of what Oakland was actually trying to do—from scholars and the teach-
ers and school board members themselves—a must-read is Theresa Perry and Lisa
Delpit’s The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American
Children (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).
Linguists were used to the racist vitriol that accompanies any effort on the part of
educators to recognize Black Language as a legitimate variety. Two decades earlier in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, what became known as the “Black English case” (Martin Luther
King Jr. Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board) was the talk of
the nation. Geneva Smitherman served as chief consultant and expert witness for
more than two years of litigation on behalf of 15 Black, economically deprived chil-
dren residing in a low-income housing project. Instead of incorrectly placing children
in learning disability and speech pathology classes, Smitherman and others argued
that teachers should take the language variety of their students into account and
use it to help students acquire “the standard.” Though “Black English” was not found
to be a barrier to students’ leaning per se, the uninformed and racist institutional
response to it was. The full story is too long for an endnote. For a full breakdown
of the case with expert linguists, lawyers, and literary figures, definitely check out
Geneva Smitherman’s edited volume Black English and the Education of Black Chil-
dren and Youth: Proceedings of the National Invitational Symposium on the King Decision
(Detroit: Wayne State University, Center for Black Studies, 1981) and also her “What
Go Round Come Round: King in Perspective,” Harvard Educational Review, February
1981, pages 40–56).
One reason we wrote this current book is to help prevent the next 20-year
firestorm and to be about the serious business of educating Black and other linguisti-
cally marginalized youth.
10. Freudian slip? Nah, surely she meant facial expressions.
11. Notice how Black ways of speaking are subtly framed as something to “get away with.” Note
also the troubling view of Black parenting that creeps into many of these conversations.
196 ARTICULATE WHILE BLACK

The fact that her students’ ways of speaking are linked to a different culture of com-
munication altogether (one that values certain ways of speaking that may be at odds
with White, upper-middle-class ways of speaking) is never considered.
12. Of course, White America’s mapping of negative characteristics onto the language of
socially marginalized groups is not unique. Studies have shown that dominant cultures
around the world do the same thing, puttin other people’s language down in order
to lift theirs up. This attribution of negative characteristics due to cultural differences
has been noted frequently in studies of intercultural communication. For pioneering
work on this, see John Gumperz’s Discourse Strategies and his Language and Social
Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982, for both books).
13. We don’t mean to have fun at the teacher’s expense. Valley Girl Talk has actually been
studied by sociolinguists. If you’re not familiar with this kind of talk, you should
check out Robert MacNeil and William Cran’s Do You Speak American? A Companion to
the PBS Television Series (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2005). In the case of
this particular teacher, I mean, like, how many times can you, like, say the word like
in like the same sentence, riiight? In all seriousness, though, the American public has
made teachers out to be monsters in recent years. Our goal here is not to contribute
to that but to see ourselves in that teacher—hope you’re lookin in the mirror as you
read this.
14. For the technical linguistic and ethnographic details, check H. Samy Alim’s You Know
My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a Black American
Speech Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
15. Nobody really puts this better than John Wideman: “There is no single register [style]
of African American speech. And it’s not words and intonations, it’s a whole attitude
about speech that has historical rooting. It’s not a phenomenon that you can isolate
and reduce to linguistic characteristics. It has to do with the way a culture conceives
of the people inside of that culture. It has to do with a whole complicated protocol of
silences and speech, and how you use speech in ways other than directly to communi-
cate information. And it has to do with, certainly, the experiences that the people in
the speech situation bring into the encounter. What’s fascinating to me about African
American speech is its spontaneity, the requirement that you not only have a reper-
toire of vocabulary or syntactic devices/constructions, but you come prepared to do
something in an attempt to meet the person on a level that both uses the language,
mocks the language, and recreates the language.” That’s from his piece, “Frame and
Dialect: The Evolution of the Black Voice in American Literature” in American Poetry
Review 5.5 (Sept.−Oct. 1976), pages 34–37.
16. See especially the work of Carol D. Lee, Shirley Brice Heath, Keith Gilyard, Elaine
Richardson, Ernest Morrell, and Maisha T. Winn. They have produced some of the
most critical work. Most recently, check Gilyard’s True to the Language Game: African
American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2011), which contains a
chapter that examines the political discourse surrounding the rise of Barack Obama.
A valuable resource for those teaching students in high school and first-year college
courses is Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva’s Language Diversity in the Class-
room: From Intention to Practice (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).
The work offers a historical perspective on the “Students’ Right to Their Own Lan-
guage” policy of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Con-
ference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and advocates language
and literacy teaching practices that promote linguistic diversity. The collection was
motivated by the dismal results of a national survey of teacher language attitudes
conducted by the CCCC Language Policy Committee, chaired by Smitherman.
17. Dell Hymes was one of the most influential linguists and anthropologists of the
twentieth century. Check this source for his early theoretical work on ethnographic
approaches to language and culture: Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic
Approach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974). The handouts borrow
generously from his work.
 Change the Game 197

18. Geneva Smitherman’s Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Cor-
ner (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin) was released in 1994 and 2000. The next
handout borrows heavily from her work and down-to-earth explanation of compli-
cated methods.
19. In terms of lexicon and its relation to local cultures, for example, the students docu-
mented the use of the term rogue. The term is a localized example of semantic inversion
that highlights a very specific regionality, as it is used only within their 2.5-square-
mile city. Folks use it to describe those who possess a nonconformist, street ethic,
but it’s also used more broadly to refer to friends and associates (like the terms,
homie, potna, etc.). Semantic inversion involves flippin a bad meaning into a good
one. So, rather than follow conventional meanings of rogue (for example, in the way
that US foreign policy under George W. Bush defined states that did not conform to
the will of the United States as rogue states), they create new ones, used for those
who don’t bow down to the demands of unjust authorities, those who make a way
outta no way when the cards are stacked against em.
20. See John Baugh’s piece, “Linguistic Profiling,” in Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman,
Arnetha F. Ball, and Arthur K. Spears (eds.) Black Linguistics: Language, Politics and
Society in Africa and the Americas (London: Routledge, 2003, 155–168).
21. American Tongues was produced and directed by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker
(New York: Center for New American Media, 1986). The film is one of the best docu-
mentaries ever produced about language in the United States and remains one of the
best teaching tools in the game. While its attempts to address linguistic prejudice are
laudatory, a more critical approach is needed in order to serve the needs of marginal-
ized communities.
22. Walt Wolfram has been on the cutting edge of research on marginalized language
varieties for the better part of five decades. It should be noted that his well-meaning
comments here were not at all controversial to the majority of sociolinguists when
American Tongues was produced; with some notable exceptions, such as Geneva Smith-
erman, James Sledd, and a few others, his comments were par for the sociolinguistics
course.
23. Norman Fairclough, a leader in the critical language approach, refers to traditional
approaches as merely “dressing up inequality as diversity.” Check out the intro to his
classic edited volume in this arena, simply titled Critical Language Awareness (London
& New York: Longman, 1992). Also check out the chapter by Hilary Janks and R.
Ivanic, “Critical Language Awareness and Emancipatory Discourse” in the same book.
These works have been useful in the formulation of our approach here in the United
States. Also, Alastair Pennycook’s work has been invaluable—begin with his already
classic text, Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 2001).
24. David Corson’s overview of the critical approach out of Britain is extremely useful in
this sense. Check it out: Language Policy in Schools: A Resource for Teachers and Admin-
istrators (Mahwah, NJ/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999).
25. Shoutout to Ana Celia Zentella, Laura Graham, and other members of the Society
for Linguistic Anthropology’s Task Force/Committee on Language and Social Justice
for bangin on these issues. Shoutout to John R. Rickford and the Linguistic Soci-
ety of America on Sweden and Norway. Thanks to Luis O. Reyes for bringing the
news of Perú’s new multilingual law. Also, if you wanna see what other models look
like, check out Nancy Hornberger’s edited volume, Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological
Framework for Educational Policy, Research, and Practice in Multilingual Settings (Cleve-
land: Multilingual Matters, 2003). It’s got leading scholars from around the world
offering multilingual, democratic approaches to language and education.
This page intentionally left blank
 Index

Information in figures, tables, and notes is indicated by f, t, and n.

A B
Abernathy, Ralph, 74 Baia, Ashley, 18
acoustic identity, 61n27 Bailey, Guy, 26n7
African American Language. See Black “Ballot or the Bullet, The” (Malcolm X), 82
Language Banner, David, 137, 160
African Holocaust, 104, 127n32 “Baracka Flacka Flame,” 121, 129n71
Ahlin, Elizabeth, 105 battlin, 176–177
Akon, 145 Baugh, John, 26n7, 56, 62n40, 186, 195n9
“aks,” 37–38 “becoming Black,” 14, 28n23
Alexander, Michelle, 89n23 “been,” stressed, 170
Alim, H. Samy, 9, 26n9, 28n15, 28n16, 56, benign neglect, 72, 89n22
61n27, 110, 128n41, 128n50, 128n51, Ben’s Chili Bowl, 7–10
129n71, 163n41, 164n54, 164n60, Bercovitch, Sacvan, 77, 91n36
165n63, 175, 193n6, 194n8, 195n9, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and
196n14 White Denial in the Age of Obama (Wise),
American Dream, 81 33
American Tongues (film), 185–186, 190, 193n3 Biden, Joseph, 31, 34, 59n1, 59n8, 61n24
anaphora, 29n27 Big Boi, 160–161, 166n180
Ann Arbor, Michigan, 195n9 bilinguals, 45–48
Arrested Development, 113 Birther movement, 22
articulate Black folk theory, 48–52
bi- and multilingualism and, 45–48 Black Freedom Struggle, 73, 90n27
as exceptionalism, 32–34, 41–44 Black Language
as gatekeeping mechanism, 52–56 Africanisms, 127n23
Obama as, 34–39 in Ann Arbor case, 195n9
paternalism and, 48–52 ask vs. aks, 37–38
policing and language and, 34–39 as “baby talk,” 49
use of, 39–40 “becoming controversial,” 121–122, 125
Asante, Molefi Kete, 83 complexity of, 169–171
Ashton Filmer, Alice, 61n27 copula absence in, 8–9, 170
Asian Americans, 46, 61n28 creativity in, 175–178
“ask,” 37–38 early scholarship on, 49
assimilation, 167 in education, 171–174
Audacity of Hope, The (Obama), 57, 75 flexibility in, 175–178
audience as inferior, 169
copula and, 9 lexicon, 193n8, 197n19
styleshifting and, 13 in Oakland case, 171, 195n9

199
200 Index

Black Language (Continued) in Standard English, 8

Obama’s symbolic use of, 74–76, 90–91n33 zero form, 9
origins of, 8, 28n16, 60n22, 169 Cosby, Bill, 38
policing of, 34–39 covert racism, 189–192
richness of, 169–171 creativity, in Black Language, 175–178
shame and, 22 Creolization, 8, 38, 60n22, 169
slavery and, 49 critical linguistics, 2–3, 23, 178–181, 189
styleshifting and, 5–11 crossover, cultural, 103–106
uncensored mode in, 110–114 cultural scripts, 189–191
Blackness, 71–74
Blitt, Barry, 95f
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 60n19, 165n68
Bradley, Karen, 99 D
“Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand
into the Wilderness” (Danforth), 77 “Daddy Fat Sax” (Big Boi), 160–161, 166n180
Brown, H. Rap, 73, 90n28 Daddy Yankee, 136, 162n27
Brown, J. Clinton, 116 Danforth, Samuel, 77
Brown, James, 106 D’Angelo, 122
Buchanan, Pat, 107 dap. See fist bump
Bucholtz, Mary, 3, 25n3 Davey D, 136, 161, 162n26, 166n82, 171
Bush, George H. W., 100, 104 Davis, James, 121
Bush, George W., 34, 133, 145 Davis, Paul, 70
“Day of Jerusalem’s Fall, The” (Wright), 69
Delpit, Lisa, 195n9
Devin the Dude, 135
C Dillard, J. L., 104
diphthongs, 7
discrimination
call and response, 18–20, 29n29, 194n8 economic, 81
Calle 13, 159 housing, 54–56, 62n43
Capellas, Michael D., 100 Obama on overcoming, 64
Carmichael, Stokely. See Ture, Kwame structural, 186
Carson, Clayborne, 87n1, 92n43 diversity, 57
Carter, Prudence, 54 DMX, 116
Cee-Lo, 133 Douglass, Frederick, 78–79
Chang, Jeff, 134, 156, 162n14 Dowd, Maureen, 103
Chisholm, Shirley, 35 Dozens, 107–110
Chuck D, 140, 163n45 Dreams from My Father (Obama), 27n13,
Christian. See Obama, Barack, “familiarly 28n23, 170, 193n6
Christian” “Drop It Like It’s Hot” (Snoop Dogg), 131
Clemente, Rosa, 137 Du Bois, W.E.B., 113
Clemetson, Lynette, 35 Dyson, Michael Eric, v, 29n27, 35, 91n42,
Clinton, Bill, 2, 66, 139, 163n41 92n44, 93n51, 164n52
Clinton, Hillary, 64–65, 66, 161
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 98, 125
Cobb, William Jelani, 3, 29n24, 30n31, 127n28
code switching, 15, 47. See also styleshifting E
Common, 133–134, 135
“Confusing God and Government” (Wright),
Eberhardt, Jennifer, 59n7
69–70
Ebonics, 171, 195n9. See also Black Language
Cooke, Benjamin, 104
economic discrimination, 81
copula
education, 81, 171–174, 178–181
absence, 8–9, 28n16, 170
Edwards, John, 40
audience and, 9
empathy, 48–52
in Black Language, 8–9
English. See Black Language; Hawai’i Creole
in first-person singular, 9
English; White English
phonological constraints, 9
English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and
rules, 9
Discrimination in the United States
in sentence-final position, 9
(Lippi-Green), 38
 Index 201

“enlightened exceptionalism,” 32–34 Harris-Perry, Melissa, 34

ethnography of communication, 28n18, Hawai’i, 126n9
179–184 Hawai’i Creole English, 47–48
Evans, Faith, 106 Heath, Shirley Brice, 196n16
Evans, Patrice, 94 hegemony, linguistic, 171–174
Evans, Sarah, 102 Heilemann, John, 36
exceptionalism, 32–34, 41–44, 57 Hendricks, Obery M., 67, 70
Herron, Carolivia, 107
high-five, 103–104
Hill, E. D., 98
F Hill, Jane, 60n19
Hip Hop
Fairclough, Norman, 197n23 controversy with, 141–146
Farrakhan, Louis, 66 criticism of, 138
Fat Joe, 133 education and, 184
Ferraro, Geraldine, 66 2008 election and, 132–136
Fiorina, Carleton S., 100 Obama on, 130, 134
first-person singular, copula in, 9 Obama’s criticism of, 138
fist bump Obama’s relationship with, 137–140
celebration of, 98–99, 100–101 political views in, 136–137
as going global/viral, 99–102 racist discourse and, 138, 152–159
as indicative of cultural-linguistic gap, 96–97 referentiality in, 144
meaning of, 96 youth agency and, 149–150
mischaracterization of, 97–99 Hip Hop Nation Language, 144
at Obama’s nomination, 94–95 Holder, Eric, 3, 25n4
origins of, 103 homogenization, 57
The Pound, meaning of, 96 Hornberger, Nancy, 197n25
White appropriation of, 124–125 housing discrimination, 54–56, 62n43
White unfamiliarity with, 96–97 humor, 10–11. See also signifyin
flexibility, in Black Language, 175–178 hush mode, 110, 176–177
Fox News, 69, 97–98, 118–119, 120, 132, Hymes, Dell, 106, 127n38, 179, 196n17
153–157
Franklin, Aretha, 106
Fugees, 134
I
Ice Cube, 116, 132, 144
G “I Have a Dream” (King), 79–80, 82
Immortal Technique, 137
Game Change (Halperin), 36 Imus, Don, 107
GCI, 131 insult, 108. See also signifyin
gestures. See fist bump; high-five intercultural communication, 194, 196n12
Gilyard, Keith, 196n16 Iraq War, 145
Givens, David, 99
Goff, Keli, 66, 71
Goldberg, Whoopi, 103
Green, Lisa, 26n7, 193n6
J
Green Party, 137
Gross, Terry, 41 Jackson, Derrick Z., 72
Jackson, Janet, 123
Jackson, Jesse, 36, 72, 107, 118–119
Jay-Z, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 143, 153–158,
H 162n11
Jean, Wyclef, 134
hair, 107 Jeezy. See Young Jeezy
Halperin, Mark, 36 jeremiad, 76–80
hand waving, 106 JT the Bigga Figga, 128n51, 182–184
“Hard in Da Paint” (Waka Flocka Flame), 121 Juvenile, 180
202 Index

K Malveaux, Julianne, 107

Mansbach, Adam, 87n6, 92n48
Martin, Roland, 88n12
Kelly, Megyn, 153–157 Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School
Kennedy, Randall, 3, 88n14, 92n48, 93n51 Children et.al. v. Ann Arbor School District
King, Larry, 131 Board, 195n9
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 15, 22, 64, 74, 75, Massey, Douglas, 56, 62n38
79–80, 87 McCain, John, 100, 133, 136, 162n27
Kleinbaum, Sharon, 70 McKinney, Cynthia, 137
Kournikova, Anna, 100 McWhorter, John, 2
Kuperstein, Slava, 118 Mia X, 133
Kweli, Talib, 133, 166n82 monophthongization, 7
Moore, Rudy Ray, 122
More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace
and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in
L the United States (Perry), 51
“More Perfect Union, A” (Obama), 16–18,
66–67, 71–74, 80–86
Labov, William, 26n7 Morgan, Joan, 65, 87n3
Lanehart, Sonja, 26n7 Morgan, Marcyliena, 26n7, 193n7
language. See also Black Language; White Morrell, Ernest, 196n16
English Morrison, Toni, 167
discrimination and, 54–55 Mos Def, 133
feelings about, as reflective of feelings on Moseley Braun, Carol, 35
speakers, 97, 169 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 78
ideologies, 61n27 “motherfucker,” 122–123
Morrison on, 167 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 72, 89n22
Obama on, 1 multilinguals, 45–48
policing, 34–39 multiple negation, 170
race through lens of, 2–4 “multiple versions” strategy, 131–132
skin tone and, 61n27 Muslim. See Obama, Barack, Islamophobia and
socialization in, 58–59 “muthafucka,” 110, 111, 120–124
languaging race, 2–4, 169 “My President” (Young Jeezy), 141–147,
Last Poets, 115–116 152–159
Latinos, 45–46, 61n27
Lee, Carol D., 196n16
Lee, Spike, 60n23, 118–119
Lil Kim, 133
Limbaugh, Rush, 37, 65, 70
N
linguistic hegemony, 171–174
linguistic profiling, 56, 62n43, 186–187 NAACP, 112, 119–120
Lippi-Green, Rosina, 38, 53,193n4, 60n21 “nah, we straight,” 7–10
Ludacris, 133 “nappy,” 107
Lundy, Garvey, 56 Nappy Hair (Herron), 107
Lupe Fiasco, 136, 159 Nas, 119, 132, 133, 141–146, 148
Neal, Mark Anthony, 131, 140, 141
negative inversion, 170
“Negro,” 113–114
M Nelly, 176
Nelson, Ashlyn Aiko, 56
neoenslavement, 71, 88n18
“magical Negro,” 34–39, 60n23, 65 New Yorker (magazine), 95f
Maher, Bill, 107 “nigga,” 110–114, 116–117
Mailer, Norman, 104–105 “nigger,” 114–116, 119
“Makin a Way Outta No Way: The Proverb Nixon, Richard, 89n22
Tradition in the Black Experience” “no,” 7
(Smitherman, Daniel, & Jeremiah), 74–75 nonverbal communication. See fist bump;
Malcolm X, 15, 69, 82, 87 high-five
Malkin, Michelle, 154–155, 165n68 normalization, of linguistic taboo, 111
 Index 203

O Perry, Imani, 29n29, 51, 61n24, 149, 157,

164n51
Perry, Theresa, 195n9
Oakland School Board, 171, 195n9 Persistence of the Color Line, The: The Racial
Obama, Barack Politics of the Obama Presidency
on American Dream, 81 (Kennedy), 3
Americanness of, 89n24 Pharcyde, The, 115, 128n50, 137
as articulate, 34–39 Pidgin, 48
on assimilation, 167 Poetic Justice (film), 123
on Biden, 31 policing, language, 34–39
Biden on, 34 “Politics of Fear, The” (Blitt), 95f
Black lexicon, knowledge of, 27n13 Positive Black Soul, 134
Blackness of, 71–74 possessives, 170
credentials of, 33 “postintent” racism, 51
on economic discrimination, 81 postracial, 71–72, 92n48
on education, 81 pound. See fist pound
“familiarly Christian,” 20–23 Powell, Colin, 32
on Hip Hop, 130, 134 Powell Williams, Annette, 96
Hip Hop and, relationship with, preacher style, 14–20
137–140 Proctor, Samuel DeWitt, 67
Islamophobia and, 22–23, 98 profiling, linguistic, 56, 186–187
Jay-Z on, 130 proverb tradition, 74–75
on language, 1 Puritans, 76–77, 91n34
Limbaugh on, 37
as linguistic role model, 168
as “magical Negro,” 36–39, 60n23
on overcoming discrimination, 64
as preacher, 14–15
R
on race in 2008 campaign, 65–66
“Race Speech” of, 16–18, 66–67, 71–74, “Race Speech, The” (Obama), 16–18, 66–67,
80–86 71–74, 80–86
Reid on, 1, 24, 35–36 critiques of, 92–93n48
Snoop Dogg on, 131 racial exceptionalism, 39, 61n24
Spanish used by, 10, 26n8 Racism 2.0, 32–34, 54, 57
as speaker, opinions of, 4–5 Ray’s Hell Burger, 9–10
as surprise, 32–33 “Real Talk,” 178–179
symbolic use of Black Language by, reclamation, linguistic, 114–116
74–76 “regionalizing hegemony,” 41
on talkin trash, 13 Reid, Antonio “LA,” 135
Walsh on, 36–37 Reid, Harry, 1, 24, 35–36
White English use by, 20–21, 23–25 remote past, 28n16, 170
Wright and, 64–65 Reyes, Angela, 61n28
Obama, Michelle, 94, 98, 99, 102–103, rhetoric, 73–74
125n1 Rhymefest, 136
obscenity, 111 Rice, Condoleeza, 93n50
O’Donnell, Rosie, 107 Rich, Frank, 100
OutKast, 134, 160–161 Richards, Chris, 141
Richardson, Elaine, 196n16
Rickford, John R., 26n7, 27n14, 28n16,
62n31, 73, 192n2
P Rock, Chris, 31–32, 59n3
Roc the Mic Right: The Language of
Hip Hop Culture (Alim), 163n41,
P. Diddy, 12–13, 114, 133 194n8
paternalism, 48–52 Romney, Mitt, 30n31
Paul Wall, 133 Rosa, Jonathan, 61n27
Pennycook, Alastair, 197n23 Rose, Tricia, 35, 129n82, 132, 159
“People Everyday” (Arrested Development), 113 Rutenberg, Jim, 100
204 Index

S by Obama with P. Diddy, 12–13

Substance of Hope, The: Barack Obama and the
Paradox of Progress (Cobb), 3
s absence, 170 syntax, 20–23, 170
Sampson, Frederick, 79
Sandberg, Thomas, 101
Sarkozy, Nicholas, 100
Scarface, 133
scripts, cultural, 189–191
T
September 11, 69
sermonizing, 14–20 taboo words, 111
Shakur, Tupac, 74, 116, 123, 132, 144, 149, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black
150–151 America (Smitherman), xi, 61n30, 62n32,
shame, 22, 38 111–112, 194n8
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, 65 talkin trash, 11–14
Sharpton, Al, 24, 35, 36, 39, 72, 107, 119 Tha Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and
Sigel, Beanie, 143 Consciousness (Spady, Alim, & Meghelli),
signifyin, 10–14, 28n19, 107–110, 194n8 128n51, 151, 165n63
Simmons, Russell, 134, 149 Thomas, John, 68
Sims Holt, Grace, 73 T.I., 133
singing, 15–16 Tonal Semantics, 82, 92n44, 170
Sister Souljah, 139, 163n41 transcending race, 33–34
skin tone, language and, 61n27 Trinity United Church of Christ, 68, 85. See
Sklar, Rachel, 99 also Wright, Jeremiah
Smalls, Dawn L., 56 Trump, Donald, 11–12
Smith, Arthur Lee, 83 Ture, Kwame, 72, 88n21
Smith, Craig, 138
Smith, Will, 133
Smitherman, Geneva, xi, xii, 27n10, 27n13,
29n23, 54–56, 62n30, 62n32, 73, 75,
90n29, 92n44, 108, 111–112, 120, 121,
U
123, 127n36, 128n40, 129n77, 183,
194n8, 195n9, 196n16, 197n18 uncensored mode, 110–114
snappin, 107–108. See also signifyin
Snoop Dogg, 2, 131–132
Snowman, 148. See also Young Jeezy
socialization, 58–59
language and, 26n8
V
sociolinguistic variation, 178–179
Spady, James G., 136, 163n30 Valley Girl Talk, 174, 196n13
Spanish, 10, 26n8, 45–46 van Dijk, Teun, 60n19
Spears, Arthur, 26n7, 94, 110, 122, Vargas, Jose Antonio, 41
124, 193n5 verbal games, 176–177
speech act, 10, 28n18, 180 verbs, s absence in, 170
speech event, 28n18, 180 versions, 131–132
speech situation, 10, 28n18, 179 View, The (television program), 103
“standard” English vowel sounds, 7
copula in, 8
Obama’s use of, 20–21, 23–25
push for, 167–168
“stay,” 170
“steady,” 170
W
Steele, Shelby, 38
Stewart, Jon, 156 Waka Flocka Flame, 121, 129n71
“straight,” 8 Walker, David, 71, 88n19
“straight talk,” 178–179 Walsh, Joe, 36–37
styleshifting, 20–23, 26n9, 175 “was,” 170, 172
audience and, 13 Watkins, Boyce, 24–25
Ben’s Chili Bowl example of, 5–11 Weaver, Elizabeth A., 117–118
 Index 205

West, Cornel, 3–4, 25n6, 59n3, 93n48, 105,

119
Y
West, Kanye, 133
White cultural and linguistic hegemony, “yall,” 10
23–25, 171–175, 191–192 “Yes We Can” (Will.I.Am), 134
White English You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and
copula in, 8 Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a
Obama’s use of, 20–21, 23–25 Black American Speech Community (Alim), 9,
push for, 167–168 26n9, 28n16, 128n41, 175, 193n6, 196n14
White Kids: Language, Race and Styles of Youth “Young, Gifted, and Black” (Jay-Z), 131
Identity (Bucholtz), 3, 25n3, 26n29 Young, Robert, Jr., 116–118
“White Negro, The” (Mailer), 104–105 Young Jeezy, 132, 133, 141–159
Whiteness, 21, 36, 41, 44, 48, 58, 141, 150, Young v. Riverland Woods Apartments et al.,
152, 159 54–55
Wideman, John, 196n15 youth
Will.I.Am, 134 agency, Hip Hop and, 149–150
Williams, Robert, 195n9 linguistic reclamation by, 114–116
Winford, Donald, 26n7
Winn, Maisha T., 196n16
Wise, Tim, 33, 59n5
Wolfram, Walt, 190, 197n22
Wright, Jeremiah, 22, 64–65, 66, 67–71, 75,
Z
79, 85, 133–134
Zentella, Ana Celia, 26n9, 197n25
zero copula form, 9