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Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. Authors: H. Samt Alim and Geneva Smitherman Oxford University Press, 2012 Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 978-0-19-981298-1
Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., written by H. Sarny Alim and Geneva Smitherman, copiously and informatively address the racial politics of language in the United States. Employing their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, these authors brilliantly provide an indispensible perspective on the relationship between language and race in America. Alim and Smitherman, utilizes a sociolinguistic methodology in their circumspection and analysis of President Barack Obama's language use and speeches to insightfully expose and question U.S. conceptions about language, race, education, politics and power. They express the lack of interest and inability of the United States majority group to understand African American culture.
In this book, Aim and Smitherman impressively anatomizes the politics of language as embedded in the American politics of race. The book contains six chapters, covered in 205 pages. The authors begins the book by providing an introduction to the event that took place when the president said to a restaurant server, "Nah, we straight". In chapter one, Nah, We Straight: Black Language and America's First Black President, the authors discuss President Obama's extraordinary ability to speak several different forms of the same language, and his effective styleshifting...