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  • Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the US by H. Samy Alim, Geneva Smitherman
  • Stuart Davis and Nikole Miller
Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the US. By H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xviii, 205. ISBN 9780199812981. $24.95.

In this intriguing and well-documented monograph, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman take up various language-related instances in Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign and use those instances as a vehicle to examine the relationship between language, race, and power in America. A&S are able to document that Obama’s conscious linguistic awareness and his ability to style-shift depending on the audience played an important role in his being elected president. As they state: ‘Barack Obama’s mastery of White mainstream 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’ (20). While this comment is hard to evaluate when taken out of context, A&S make their case very convincingly, especially in Ch. 3 in their analysis of Obama’s famous March 2008 ‘race speech’ in Philadelphia. This important speech occurred as a response to the Reverend Wright controversy, which at the time had the potential of eliminating Obama from being a serious candidate in the eyes of mainstream America.

Articulate while Black consists of six chapters, plus a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson and a preface, ‘Showin love’, by A&S. We are intrigued by A&S’s collaboration in that they represent different generations of African American scholars working on Black language from a perspective that comes from within the Black community. S is certainly the most well known of a group of scholars on Black language who came of age in the 1970s. It was during that time that Smitherman 1977 was published, and she was deeply involved in the Ann Arbor Black English case. Moreover, for many linguists who do not specialize in African American English or sociolinguistics, but who have to discuss the topic of Black language in teaching introductory courses or in conversations with colleagues in other disciplines, our basic knowledge of the legitimacy of Black English as a linguistic system derives from exposure to S’s work, even if only in one of various anthologies that contain excerpts. A is a leading scholar of a younger generation of African American linguists approaching the study of Black language from the in-community perspective. While A’s research often deals with broader issues of language and urban education, his work on the analysis of hip hop is probably unprecedented in terms of its linguistic sophistication and his intimate knowledge of hip hop culture (e.g. A’s 2003 analysis of the rhyming schemes of the artist Pharoahe Monch). A&S’s collaboration thus represents a generational bridge for Black linguists. Characteristic of both A’s and S’s academic writing styles over the years is the incorporation of Black language as [End Page 280] part of their work. This style-shifting is also found in this book, often occurring when A&S make a side comment or bring home a particularly important point. While mainstream readers of the book as well as some linguists may feel a little uneasy about this, it can be seen not only as an effective rhetorical device, but also as an important way to try to break down—at least to a certain extent— the pervasive language ideology that many readers of the book will have.

Each of the first five chapters is organized around an incident or an event that occurred during the 2008 Obama presidential campaign in which some aspect of language and/or communication was highlighted. This then is used to lead into more general discussion about the nature of Black language and the issue of how race in America is often viewed through the guise of language. A&S make clear Obama’s mastery of Black modes of discourse and his ability to style-shift...

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