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Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language and Race in the U.S.
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October 10, 2012
H. Samy Alim, Associate Professor in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Policy Studies in Education (SHIPS) and Educational Linguistics, Stanford University 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." Articulate While Black addresses language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of…
