John McWhorter at the New Republic goes beyond the now boilerplate liberal excitement over Barack Obama’s race. It’s great that Obama is black, but what really gets McWhorter excited is that he sounds black.
Barack Obama’s inaugural address was the first in a long time to resound powerfully enough to be worthy of marble. However, it was the first in the 220-year history of the custom in another way: its seasoning of black cadence. This was even more exhilarating in that the cadence played an integral part in the power of the oration.
In the process of explaining his rapture over Obama’s intonation, McWhorter gives insight into the reason so many voters found themselves transfixed by Obama.
It is certainly part of why Obama was elected. Imagine John Kerry or even either Clinton trying to get elected intoning “Yes, we can!” What made that seem prophetic, or even plausible, from Obama was that it was couched in a Black English intonation – partly church, maybe even a dash of street (a cousin of mine likes that Obama “has a bit of the ghetto in him”). This aspect of Obama’s oratory got to as many whites as blacks. “He’s just …, he’s just, oh, he’s just …!” white Obama fans would often exclaim as the Obamenon set in, grasping at the mot juste. Many of them had basically been to their first black church service. He was just … well, black.
I’ve been saying that his blackness was what got him elected for quite a while. I guess it’s not racist to point that out if you think it is a good thing. If you happen to think electing someone based on the darker color of his skin is a bad thing, then you must be a racist.
McWhorter wraps up this piece of Obama puffery by noting that Obama’s “black speak” is affected, rightly pointing out that he was raised, not by an urban black family, but by a white mother and her parents in Hawaii and Indonesia. To McWhorter, this is not a reason to be skeptical of the rehearsed “street cred” that Obama intones, but to admire his ability to be “deftly bidialectal,” thereby reaching a mixed audience.
So Obama turns his “ghetto” on and off to appeal to different types of voters, and the liberals are all the more in awe of his ability to unify. Funny…I see a politician with blind ambition and a phony accent.
It would appear I’m not the only one.
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