Abstract
A large number of American researchers have recently been dedicated to theorize about language and races as a unified social process rather than as two independent disciplines. Within this “new” field of study called raciolinguistics , in which it is intended to apply the different linguistic methods to analyze and solve the most relevant problems on the relations between language , race and power , one can observe how language shapes ethnoracial identities as well as the role it plays in racialization and its importance in the concepts of race and racism, in general. The scope of this paper is to also theorize about language and race but with special attention to how both processes nurture and constitute each other. Through President Barack Obama’s discourse, it is intended to demonstrate what speaking as a racialized subject and as one of the most important social figures in today’s America implies. Likewise, through what is said or what media mentions about his way of speaking , one is able to distinguish why this interdiscipline proposes that race is sociolinguistically constructed and not only socially.
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Notes
- 1.
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 p. 25.
- 2.
The eulogy can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN05jVNBs64.
- 3.
From Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A story of race and inheritance (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995, pp. 73–74).
- 4.
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 (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994, 2000), trifling “describes a person who fails to do something that he/she is capable of doing; irresponsible; inadequate” (p. 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 yellas’ close physical approximation to European Americans…” (p. 303). In Dreams, Barack writes about becoming “familiar with the lexicon on color consciousness” (p. 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, suggesting 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 masters wishes and life before his own…” (p. 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.’” (p. 101–2). House nigger, Smitherman explains, historically referred to “an enslaved African who worked in Ole Massa’s house,” rather than in the field (field nigga), and “was viewed as loyal to Massa.” (p. 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 of 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 not 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.” (p. 406).
- 5.
Rickford, J., 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.
- 6.
The copula is just one example of BL’s complex verbal system and the Africanization of American English. In fact, according to John 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 distinctions 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 verbal affixes strikingly parallels the pattern in Caribbean Creoles.” (from John Rickford and Russell Rickford’s Spoken Soul: The story of Black English, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000, p. 154).
- 7.
Check it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDy9I9C1xUM&feature=related. Last accessed: 09-01-2011.
- 8.
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 ethnography 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 example, 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 acts 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).
- 9.
Signifyin has been described as a means to encode messages or meanings in conversation, 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, p. 82.
- 10.
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.
- 11.
From Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A story of race and inheritance (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995, p. 79).
- 12.
Ibid, p. 72.
- 13.
This excerpt is notated to demonstrate the multilayered use of repetition. For example, 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 like: I am here because of Ashley are marked in bold and underlined.
- 14.
Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson also notes Obama’s use of “anaphora,” which is the repeating 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.
- 15.
For great examples of Obama’s rendering of call-and-response in text, check Dreams from My Father, pp. 293–295. You can also hear this portion of Obama’s South Carolina speech here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19538_Page2.html. Last accessed: 09-01-11.
- 16.
Writing about Black music, Imani Perry writes about 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 sophisticated… 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, p. 36). Relating this to Obama’s speech in South Carolina, Barack put out the encoded Malcolm X call and his Black audience responded. 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 himself was seen as anything but a Muslim qualifies.
- 17.
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.” (please, see Chap. 2 of Articulate While Black, Alim and Smitherman (2012), for a much deeper analysis of “articulate”).
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Alim, H.S., Smitherman, G. (2019). Amazing Grace: An Analysis of Barack Obama’s Raciolinguistic Performances. In: Massip-Bonet, À., Bel-Enguix, G., Bastardas-Boada, A. (eds) Complexity Applications in Language and Communication Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04598-2_13
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