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

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 President Barack Obama’s language use–and America’s response to it. Reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America. In much the same way that Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that “race matters,” Articulate While Black shows how deeply “language matters” to the national conversation on race–and in our daily lives.