Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1770 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Fri 15 May 2009 12:11 Post subject: Obama and speaking "black"
Quote:
Quote Of The Day
"Interesting moment the other night at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner when Barack Obama teased Republican National Party Chairman Michael Steele for his famous inclination towards slightly studious mouthings of hip hop slang. 'Michael Steele is in the house. Or as he would say, 'in the heezy...'...'Whassup?!?' Humor involves a response to the unexpected, and the irony here is that while Michael Steele's approach to speaking English is perfectly predictable of the person he is, it's Obama's that is more worthy of comment [because he was raised by whites and did not grow up around blacks]"
"Obama's black American cadence, which played a considerable part in making America fall in love with him, and which he utilized in teasing Steele Saturday night, may not be funny like Steele's verbal bumbling, but it's just as unexpected. The top age at which most people can learn a new language perfectly, with no accent, is about 17. By then, especially, a person might master the vocabulary and grammar and idioms of a language perfectly, but always have somewhat of an accent (New York is full of Eastern European immigrants who arrived at 16 or so, speaking perfect but slightly accented English). The black English cadence is an accent (just as the mainstream English cadence is). Yet Obama did not grow up with it. At 16 and 17 he was in Hawaii; before that he had been in Indonesia. Surely he didn't pick up the cadences of Oakland in either locale. (Maybe today, with the reign of hiphop, he might have, since 'Ebonics' is increasingly a youth 'dialecta franca.' But in the mid-70s hiphop's worldwide breakout was years away.) Obama himself does not describe 'learning to speak like a black American' -- it was likely an unconscious process, part of coming to feel part of the culture in his late twenties as he settled in Chicago. Thus there is no claim here that Obama is a phony: people generally do not take on accents deliberately. Many of us have friends who moved to England as adults and have lived there for several years. They wind up with halfway English accents--but not on purpose. Or -- and this is what is interesting about Obama -- completely. Brits can still suss them out as Americans; we'd never think they were born in Britain. Obama's cadence, however, is more convincing than this. When he used to intone 'Yes, We Can,' it sounded as convincing as if Jesse Jackson said it (and Jackson's pique at Obama was likely motivated in part by knowing it). I knew various black people growing up who, embracing black identity late in high school or in college, started using a black English cadence like their new friends. And they always used that cadence in second-language fashion. You could tell they hadn't grown up with it, just as few of us could learn a new language and speak it with no accent whatsoever. Obama, at an advanced age, pulled it off better than most of us could. It's always struck me, and much more so than Michael Steele's puppy-with-big-paws slangy overzealousness (after all, this is an era of cuss words and nipples on television). It suggests at least that Obama is a gifted mimic." — John McWhorter, moderate-liberal Democratic pundit and former linguistics professor
McWhorter (who is overwhelmingly sub-Saharan, genetically speaking) has bemoaned the fact that has been unable to master A-A code-speak and envies those, like Obama, who can.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1770 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Fri 15 May 2009 19:47 Post subject:
It is interesting McWhorter mentioned friends who learned to "talk black". I have met these people too (including whites and Asians), usually this happens in high school.
I had the opposite, I learned to "talk white". haha Well I would say "standard". When I was a kid most of my friends from 4 or 5th grade on where white and they would make fun of men regarding my pronunciation of certain words. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents who were all from the South, but I lived in Ohio.
Now, I've been told (by older blacks) that I sound like a "white man". Whites don't say that, but I have seen their shock when I'm called in for an interview and they first see me after talking to me on the phone. A lot of times they look very very happy. My guess is they want to hire a minority for some quota but they don't want someone they think is "ghetto".
Asians from Asia are more blunt. My wife told me around the time she met me, or asked me, actually, "Why do you speak English so clearly? I can barely understand most black people; your English is very clear, more than most whites!".
Other Asians have been more blunt..."Why you don't talk like black American? Do most blacks grow up speaking English?" (the assumption by a Taiwanese friend is that black Americans have an accent because they go home and speak African languages (this makes sense because in China and Taiwan many people don't speak Mandarin as a first "language" so they have accents when they do speak it).
To be honest I might use some "black slang" when talking to black people my age, but I have lost the ability to "sound black" and find it hard to fake it convincingly... Most of my friends are not black and the ones who are speak like me or they are not American. So I also share McWhorter's anguish. hahaha
I think it is useful to be able to code-switch like Obama, but if you have to be stuck with one, it is more beneficial to sound "mainstream" (I say mainstream because I have met blacks who talk with a Southern white drawl, which I don't believe is beneficial outside their area either).
I have a stereotypical Mid-Atlantic accent, but for some words that sound more Southern (due to living in Texas and Virginia).
I don't know about his "overwhelming" black ancestry:
TO me he looks as black as Obama and as mixed as many South African Colourds. He did grow up with two black identified parents.
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