Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

206 Part 3: Language and Variation
the United States. The majority of this discourse has focused on Barack
Obama, the nation’s fi rst African–American president, and his incredibly
‘gifted’ speaking abilities. Recently, I received a phone call from a journalist
writing for one of the more progressive internet news websites, asking
if I would comment on the ‘growing trend’ of Black parents and educators
wanting their children, not to ‘be like Mike’, but rather to ‘talk like Barack’,
that is ‘to speak standard English’. After speaking with the journalist for
only a few minutes, she demonstrated a clear awareness that Barack Obama
was a skilled speaker and it was very clear that she was well-intentioned
and genuinely concerned about the educational plight of African–American
students.
However, the journalist was unaware of several things. One, it is questionable
whether or not this was even a ‘growing trend’. In fact, in my own
work I have found that most parents want their children to be fl uent in
multiple language varieties, including ‘Black Language’ and ‘standard
English’ [see also Smitherman (1990) for multilingualism in Black
American communities]. Two, she must have been unaware that she used
the word ‘articulate’ to describe Barack Obama about a dozen times in the
half-hour interview, and that it was often accompanied by other adjectives
such as ‘good’ and ‘upstanding’. Three, she fi nally recognized that she
held a strong desire and hope that ‘Barack Obama’s public speaking abilities
[would] infl uence African Americans to move away from African
American English’ (personal communication, 9 April 2009). Rather than
seeking a linguist to endorse her own views, I suggested to her that she
might consider that members of the Black community that I study certainly
do respect President Obama for his mastery of ‘standard English’,
but he is more often admired as a linguistic role model for his ability to
seamlessly shift in and out of different ways of speaking, rather than for
abandoning a language variety used in many Black American communities
as an identity resource and a symbol of solidarity. Needless to say, that
story never made it to print.
Other well-intentioned observers might ask the following set of questions:
So, what’s wrong with all of this? What’s wrong with calling someone
‘articulate’? What’s wrong with wanting Black children to move away
from ‘African American English’ when their language is socially and economically
handicapping them? A critical linguist might ask a different set
of questions: Why is it that the adjective ‘articulate’ is used to most often
to refer to Black speakers? By the same token, how come skilled White
speakers are not as frequently referred to as ‘articulate’? What does this
pattern of usage reveal about our underlying beliefs as a society about the
way Black Americans speak? Why did Vice President Biden’s comments
about Barack Obama (‘He’s the fi rst mainstream African American who
is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy’, http://www.