Mick Hartley

An interesting piece by John McWhorter (via A&L Daily) argues that some of Obama's appeal is due to his ability to speak both with and without that special Black English intonation:

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.

And yet what makes Obama's linguistic repertory especially resonant as an American phenomenon is that he speaks Black English as a second language. Growing up with a white mother, he did not acquire it on her knee, nor does one come away from Hawaii and Indonesia steeped in the cadences of Jay-Z. Black English is, for Obama, part of the identity he constructed as a young adult. In line with how seamlessly constructed that identity is, he's a great mimic. Not all black people who adopt Black English in their late teens or afterward pull it off as well as Obama; they tend to discharge it with an "accent," so to speak, that a native speaker can detect.

This is surely part of why Obama can speak with no hint of Black English's sound when he wants to. I first heard his voice when I tuned into his famous 2004 Democratic Convention address on the radio and didn't know it was him yet, and at first thought I was listening to a white speaker. If the only way he could speak was in some degree of black cadence, he would not have been elected. In being so deftly bidialectal, Obama can speak to all of America in a way that neither a John Edwards nor a Jesse Jackson ever could. What's interesting is that his black style–wielded sparingly, to be sure–is useful in reaching quite a few whites.

So: The son of an African immigrant picks up a sonority of speaking from the descendants of slaves brought here from Africa centuries before–and then uses it to help seduce a nation full of descendants of slaveholders into making him their master. Linguistically as in so many ways, Obama embodies the extent to which we are all more "fellow citizens"–as he opened his oration–than we might think.