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Articulate While Black Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U. S.
Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. Without missing a beat, he often moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of speaking--as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama declined the change offered to him by a Black cashier in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with the phrase, "Nah, we straight."
In Articulate While Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Barack Obama's language use--and America's response to it. In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded, cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President--from his use of Black Language and his "articulateness" to his "Race Speech," the so-called "fist-bump," and his relationship to Hip Hop Culture.
Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America. In challenging American ideas about language, race, education, and power, they help take the national dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same way that Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that "race matters," Alim and Smitherman in this groundbreaking book show how deeply "language matters" to the national conversation on race--and in our daily lives.
In Articulate While Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Barack Obama's language use--and America's response to it. In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded, cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President--from his use of Black Language and his "articulateness" to his "Race Speech," the so-called "fist-bump," and his relationship to Hip Hop Culture.
Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America. In challenging American ideas about language, race, education, and power, they help take the national dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same way that Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that "race matters," Alim and Smitherman in this groundbreaking book show how deeply "language matters" to the national conversation on race--and in our daily lives.
205 pages, Unknown Binding
First published September 3, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
January 22, 2015
As sociolinguistics person, I am elated a popular (secretly academic) book like this even exists! The author style shifts (codeswitchs) between black and academic English with ease, keeps you laughing, keeps you engaged, and most importantly, keeps you learning. Aside from this being just a really good book, I am happy to see an academic actively resisting 'academic' norms and publishing a book that is both a legitimate political statement and a legitimate middle-finger to hierarchy.
Great for undergrad language and culture courses.
Great for undergrad language and culture courses.
January 4, 2020
This is more of an apologia/celebration of the African American style of speech than a linguistic analysis of Barack Obama's thetorical style, which I was hoping for, but it looks OK (and I walked away with some information). Also, this is the first academic book I've read which flirts with colloquial style, and I think I'm too conservative to go with the flow.
October 28, 2012
In 2008, U.S. citizens elected their first black president. Kind of. It depends on whom you ask. Some say Barack Obama is black because he embodies the truest definition of the term African-American—his father was from Kenya and his mother hailed from Kansas. Others declare that Obama is not black but biracial since his mother is white. And well-intentioned, colorblind souls claim his race no longer matters because his election ushered in a post-racial society.
If there’s one thing on which these disparate perspectives can agree, it’s that Obama’s mere presence in the White House inspires national conversations about race and citizenship. H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman’s new book, “Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.,” offers a refreshing take on how language informs those conversations
Continue reading here
If there’s one thing on which these disparate perspectives can agree, it’s that Obama’s mere presence in the White House inspires national conversations about race and citizenship. H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman’s new book, “Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.,” offers a refreshing take on how language informs those conversations
Continue reading here
February 15, 2019
A little late in reading this one in some ways (it's been sitting on my shelf for years), but the content is just as relevant. Written in Black academic language, it packs a punch. And I LOVE that it ends with ethnographic work with students learning about their own language patterns.
I'm all about a strong ending, so check this last line out:
"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."
I'm all about a strong ending, so check this last line out:
"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."
July 6, 2023
Articulate While Black
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.
. 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.
Second, not only did Whites feel that Barack spoke familiarly White, many Black folks felt that he spoke familiarly Black.
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.
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.
The Handbook of Language Socialization (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
H. Samy Alim’s You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
Mary Bucholtz’s White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011
Ana Celia Zentella’s now classic, Growing Up Bilingual (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997
Penny Eckert and John Rickford’s (eds.) Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Soul: The Story of Black English, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000, 154).
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).
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.”
a) dialect-based discrimination takes place, (b) ethnic group affiliation is recoverable from speech, and (c) very little speech is needed to discriminate between dialects.
racist perspectives are usually 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.
The term uncensored mode has been coined in recognition that individuals operate effectively within different evaluative language norm contexts—which is true of language users worldwide…. 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.
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.
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 evaluations.
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 styleshifting applies in the case of Black Language’s most (in)famous widely used term: nigga.
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”:
Close friend, someone who got yo back, yo “main nigga.”2. Rooted in Blackness and the Black experience. From a middle-aged social worker: “That 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.” 5. Rebellious, fearless, unconventional, in-yo-face Black man. From former NBA superstar Charles Barkley, “Nineties niggas … 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
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
we should note that there are actually three so-called “N-words”: nigger, nigga, and Negro.
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. This 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.
Black folk etymological theory posits that motherfucker was a term developed 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 psychologically, and as a means to avoid calling your slavemaster your “father.
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 University 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 histories.
See 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
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)
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 analysis 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, commands, questions, jokes, etc.).
; 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;
Lisa Green’s African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002
John R. Rickford’s African American Vernacular English: Features and Use, Evolution, and Educational Implications (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999
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.
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.
. 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.
Second, not only did Whites feel that Barack spoke familiarly White, many Black folks felt that he spoke familiarly Black.
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.
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.
The Handbook of Language Socialization (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
H. Samy Alim’s You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
Mary Bucholtz’s White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011
Ana Celia Zentella’s now classic, Growing Up Bilingual (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997
Penny Eckert and John Rickford’s (eds.) Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Soul: The Story of Black English, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000, 154).
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).
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.”
a) dialect-based discrimination takes place, (b) ethnic group affiliation is recoverable from speech, and (c) very little speech is needed to discriminate between dialects.
racist perspectives are usually 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.
The term uncensored mode has been coined in recognition that individuals operate effectively within different evaluative language norm contexts—which is true of language users worldwide…. 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.
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.
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 evaluations.
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 styleshifting applies in the case of Black Language’s most (in)famous widely used term: nigga.
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”:
Close friend, someone who got yo back, yo “main nigga.”2. Rooted in Blackness and the Black experience. From a middle-aged social worker: “That 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.” 5. Rebellious, fearless, unconventional, in-yo-face Black man. From former NBA superstar Charles Barkley, “Nineties niggas … 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
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
we should note that there are actually three so-called “N-words”: nigger, nigga, and Negro.
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. This 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.
Black folk etymological theory posits that motherfucker was a term developed 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 psychologically, and as a means to avoid calling your slavemaster your “father.
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 University 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 histories.
See 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
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)
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 analysis 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, commands, questions, jokes, etc.).
; 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;
Lisa Green’s African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002
John R. Rickford’s African American Vernacular English: Features and Use, Evolution, and Educational Implications (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999
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.
November 23, 2020
Excellent and necessary read on African-American English (or as the authors call it here, Black Language). Importantly, the book is written in this dialect, demonstrating that AAE is compatible with academic language. It's an important recontextualization for non-speakers and non-native speakers: AAE is the language of the street, the classroom, hip-hop, and academia.
March 29, 2019
“…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’ “deficiency,” “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?"⠀
.⠀
As someone whose thesis was on codeswitching in my own community, reading this book where Alim and Smitherman style-shifted so gracefully and eloquently between both languages in writing was refreshing and important. Black language (and anything else other than standard English) has been maligned in the American public sphere. And this book helped dissect the politics of language. Everything in this world is political, including and especially language. What makes a language acceptable? What makes an accent acceptable? Whose norms should prevail?⠀
.⠀
I learned a lot from this book. From the etymology of the word muthafucka to how Obama’s speech style becomes a springboard to consider larger thought-provoking questions about language, education, discrimination. You might wonder: wait, what is there to talk about? Well a lot. From the moral panic over the pound, or “muthafucka”, and demands to “clean up” the language (which does nothing but eclipse more perturbing issues like poverty created by centuries of race-based and class-based social inequalities) to how censoring a language is essentially censoring an entire community and an erasure of the larger society’s responsibility to these people.⠀
. ⠀
We need to question how when we insist on sounding “white”, we are perpetuating the myth that the “standard” is somehow more intelligent, more appropriate and more important. And why do we continue to measure the worth of minorities and marginalized communities by their level of assimilation to the majority? ⠀
.
Alim & Smitherman aimed to disrupt the idiom "if it ain't White, it ain't right" & I think they did a phenomenal job at it!
.⠀
As someone whose thesis was on codeswitching in my own community, reading this book where Alim and Smitherman style-shifted so gracefully and eloquently between both languages in writing was refreshing and important. Black language (and anything else other than standard English) has been maligned in the American public sphere. And this book helped dissect the politics of language. Everything in this world is political, including and especially language. What makes a language acceptable? What makes an accent acceptable? Whose norms should prevail?⠀
.⠀
I learned a lot from this book. From the etymology of the word muthafucka to how Obama’s speech style becomes a springboard to consider larger thought-provoking questions about language, education, discrimination. You might wonder: wait, what is there to talk about? Well a lot. From the moral panic over the pound, or “muthafucka”, and demands to “clean up” the language (which does nothing but eclipse more perturbing issues like poverty created by centuries of race-based and class-based social inequalities) to how censoring a language is essentially censoring an entire community and an erasure of the larger society’s responsibility to these people.⠀
. ⠀
We need to question how when we insist on sounding “white”, we are perpetuating the myth that the “standard” is somehow more intelligent, more appropriate and more important. And why do we continue to measure the worth of minorities and marginalized communities by their level of assimilation to the majority? ⠀
.
Alim & Smitherman aimed to disrupt the idiom "if it ain't White, it ain't right" & I think they did a phenomenal job at it!
April 13, 2018
I’d recommend to anyone who wants to be surprised at how deep the study of language (sociolinguistics) can go. Especially if you’re interested in looking at just how complex the Black Language (as the book phrases it) is. There were definitely a couple of spots in the book I was lost in the academic jargon but the authors brought it back home and made their points. The section tying language, President Obama, and Hip-Hop all together was the most interesting part to me!
March 25, 2013
An absolute must read for everyone, but ESPECIALLY English/Language Arts teachers.
September 9, 2020
This book reframed my perspective on Obama’s 2008 presidential run in terms of the fine line he had to walk in the public sphere. Would recommend!
August 12, 2025
A bit technical for the non-linguist, but otherwise a very enlightening and engaging. read. This book definitely prompted me to do some additional research on my own and revisit the contexts, speeches and songs mentioned with new, fresh perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed this book even though it took me forever to read it.
September 14, 2023
It was an okay read, it just got super boring pretty quickly and didn’t focus on the actual linguistics of the language that was used by Obama.
Also its so pro-Obama it made me feel icky (I’m middle eastern, and he kinda dropped a lotta bombs on us)
Also its so pro-Obama it made me feel icky (I’m middle eastern, and he kinda dropped a lotta bombs on us)
April 29, 2020
... :/ Don't know what to think.
May 1, 2020
Should be mandatory reading for, well, everyone. Truly.
May 25, 2020
Outstanding reading.
September 21, 2020
4.5 , very insightful.
November 20, 2022
Discusses Black Language vs Proper Language using Barack Obama as an example of how it can work in America
Want to read
April 6, 2023to-read
November 9, 2024
Super interesting good read
December 10, 2013
I had high hopes for this book, and indeed the first half was pretty interesting, but it gradually became less interesting as the book progressed. I think part of the problem is that the book doesn't really know what it's trying to be: a book about Obama's manner(s) of speech, about Black language, or about how to better value and teach respect for diversity. I found the ending, which was essentially a lesson plan for teachers to discuss Black English with their students, to be particularly frustrating, as it seemed horribly out of place and a very poor conclusion.
While I was rather disappointed in the book overall, particularly its lack of focus, I did enjoy many of the stories. I also found the frequent switching between different styles of language to be distracting and frustrating, I understand the point the authors were trying to make by doing it, but in the midst of a very high level and technical discussion of linguistics they frequently throw in slang sentences written in the style of a teenage black kid talking to his friends, which is enormously distracting. This kind of switching is distracting and unneccessary whether it's the language being discussed in the book in general or the "California valley girl" style used as an example once.
While I was rather disappointed in the book overall, particularly its lack of focus, I did enjoy many of the stories. I also found the frequent switching between different styles of language to be distracting and frustrating, I understand the point the authors were trying to make by doing it, but in the midst of a very high level and technical discussion of linguistics they frequently throw in slang sentences written in the style of a teenage black kid talking to his friends, which is enormously distracting. This kind of switching is distracting and unneccessary whether it's the language being discussed in the book in general or the "California valley girl" style used as an example once.
April 12, 2015
I've been reading this book on and off as I finished my diss and just got back to finishing it. It is such an amazing book not only for thinking about Barack Obama as a model for twenty-first century language, but in thinking about the trends over the last twenty years. As we move into the twenty-first century and "Black language" has become more mainstream in hip-hop and now having a President who code-switches, it's amazing to think we are still holding so tightly to Standard White English. This book does an excellent job tearing down the Standard English myth while also illustrating the powerful sophistication of Black English speakers. The last chapter tied everything together with a look at how teachers can pedagogically tackle this issues surrounding language and discrimination. This is a must-read for anyone thinking about the issues of race and language in our society and classrooms.
September 13, 2013
Well-written book, but I came away from it (as someone who paid a lot of attention during the election) feeling like I didn't really get much out of it. A lot of the book seemed to be arguing against an audience who would never read it. The juicy bits, like the comparison of Obama's speech to some specific rhetorical moves in sermons, were grand, but they were few and far between.
Also had a few issues that every academic book has. Too much time on reviewing at the end, too much time spent premise-setting. I hate the following sentence, and it's in almost every academic book:
“While numerous books on [topic] have focused on [common approaches to topic], none has examined these issues from [my] perspective.” (Alim and Smitherman 2-3)
Also had a few issues that every academic book has. Too much time on reviewing at the end, too much time spent premise-setting. I hate the following sentence, and it's in almost every academic book:
“While numerous books on [topic] have focused on [common approaches to topic], none has examined these issues from [my] perspective.” (Alim and Smitherman 2-3)
January 25, 2017
This book provides an excellent-- also witty and enjoyable--discussion of the ways that American "Blackness" is read/performed/and perceived in the public sphere. Veteran African American linguist, Geneva Smitherman and lead author, H. Samy Alim, draw on recorded and transcribed discourse interactions of President Obama with various demographic audiences, as well as research conducted about the perception of his language and his "blackness" as it was taken up in the press and social media. They draw important connections to the ways American "blackness" can be read through the subject of language and the many ways racism runs rampant yet unchecked in our every day speech.
Read
January 20, 2016The term "Black English" offends me. This is simply just another means of lowering the bar for African-Americans. The notion that Barack Obama is accessible because he can speak "Black English" is ludicrous and reeks of "Ebonics" in the 1990's. My Sisters came to this country in the 70's and they were expected to learn English not "Black English" or "White English", simply English!
March 21, 2013
Alim and Smitherman do a nice job of discussing a frequently ignored area of sociolinguistics -- variation within the individual. As an educator, I especially liked the lesson plans in Chapter 6, although I'm not sure they belong in this book. Still, I'm gonna use them.
Want to read
March 1, 2013My professor mentioned this book in class; she said her sister's boss wrote it so I thought I would check it out and see what it's all about lol
September 9, 2013
Fascinating look at how Barack Obama's ability to utilize multiple rhetorical styles helped him win the Presidency. Argues for a frank discussion about race in America.
December 4, 2015
Interesting. Not exactly what I was looking for, but definitely an interesting and eye-opening read. Worth reading just for info on the "dap!"
January 8, 2017
This should be required reading for high school English teachers (especially the last chapter).
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