http://www.slate.com/id/2241114/Code Black
Of course Obama talks differently to different groups. So do most politicians.
By Christopher Beam
Posted Monday, Jan. 11, 2010, at 6:33 PM ET
Harry Reid's comment that Barack Obama could get elected because he was a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," may not have been artfully put. But subtract the poor choice of words—Negro sounds more fuddy-duddy than racist—and the statement, reported in the book Game Change, is fairly uncontroversial. Not only is it undeniable that Obama's skin tone and way of speaking had something to do with his election.
Reid was praising Obama for one of the oldest political skills there is: the ability to adjust one's speech, and one's mannerisms, to different audiences.snip//
Anyone who wants to represent a state or a country composed of different ethnic groups needs to find ways to relate to each of them. In New Mexico, that might mean learning some rudimentary Spanish. In South Carolina, it's droppin' your G's. In Wisconsin, it's knowing your cheddar varietals. Some call it pandering. Others call it campaigning.
Not only is code-switching standard in U.S. politics, it's necessary. The last president who spoke in a flat, patrician, newscaster style was George H.W. Bush. Every president since then has spoken a mixture. Bill Clinton could turn on the Southern twang. George W. Bush could, too, with an evangelical flavor. Those who can't, suffer. John McCain, says John McWhorter, a linguist at the Manhattan Institute, lost in part because of the way he talks—stiff, nasal, unfolksy.
Future candidates will learn the hard way. "Mitt Romney will not go anywhere because he cannot be verbally warm," McWhorter says. "If Republicans have a great white hope—of any race—they have to be able to not sound like a Republican."
Within reason, of course. Change your accent too much, and you sound like a fake. When Barack Obama tells a cashier at Ben's Chili Bowl, "Nah, we straight," it doesn't sound put on—even thought it may be. When Michael Steele says he's going to "come to table with things that will surprise everyone—off the hook," he sounds nearly as out-of-touch as Harry Reid. And Reid, when he made his controversial comments, was engaging in his own kind of code-switching. It's hard to imagine him saying the same things in front of Obama himself—or any African-American—rather than two middle-aged white reporters.
As much as American politicians code-switch, however, they don't do it nearly as much as politicians in other countries. What in the United States is implicit—oh, Hillary's doing her cowgirl thang again—is explicit in countries like Canada, where politicians literally have to speak two different languages. Two of Canada's greatest politicians, Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau, were able to speak English as native English speakers and French as native French speakers—huge assets in a country where speakers of one language judge outsider politicians harshly. Likewise, politicians in Taiwan often employ the country's various languages—Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese—to make a political point. In a crowd with many different ethnicities, for example, a politician might switch among languages in order to symbolically smooth tensions.
American code-switching is relatively subtle. And Obama, ironically, is one of its more subtle practitioners. As Zadie Smith pointed out in her essay on Obama and language, his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention demonstrated his ability to pivot nimbly between cultures, sometimes in a single sentence: " 'We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.' Awesome God comes to you straight from the pews of a Georgia church; poking around feels more at home at a kitchen table in South Bend, Indiana." If Harry Reid noticed it then, he held his tongue.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
