From “Blacks, whites hear Obama differently”, at Politico:
“Black English, especially the cadence, is becoming America’s youth lingua franca, especially since the mainstreaming of hip-hop. Its sound conveys warmth, authenticity and a touch of seductive danger not only to blacks but many whites, especially ones below about 50,” McWhorter said. “Obama’s tapping into that cadence helped win him the election. Imagine John Kerry or Hillary Clinton saying, ‘Yes, we can!’ It would have sounded phony — only in what I call a ‘black-cent’ can it sound prophetic and arousing.”
(…)Beyond speech, blacks have picked up certain of Obama’s mannerisms, particularly his walk, that signal authenticity. Bush had his cowboy strut, and Obama has a swagger — a rhythmic lope that says cool and confident and undeniably black. It was most noticeable on his first post-election trip to the White House, some said.
“The swagger was out of control, dragging the left foot, it was like, ‘Barack, you have got to calm down,’” said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor who teaches courses in politics and black studies. “The swagger thing just got worse and worse during the campaign. … I am sure David Axelrod told him to stop swaggering. … I can’t imagine that anyone is telling him to do that.”
(…)
“The swagger goes a long way for Barack, a long way,” Harris-Lacewell said.
PS:
Do any of those determined to smear me as a “white supremacist” all over the web — and beyond — quote African-American writers approvingly as often as I do on my blog?
If necessary, I could scan my archives and come up with a multitude of such posts on my blog over the last nine years.
Can they do the same on their sites? Nope. Maybe once a year, they quote Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s it. Big deal.
Because today, just talking about race in public makes you a “racist” — and my delusional critics don’t have the balls that I do. What can you say? They’re liberals.
They’ve gone from sticking up for real “commies” to going after imaginary “racists.”
Everyone is a bigot in one way or another. Liberals just pretend they aren’t. And yet liberals are among the worst racists, as every thinking person knows:
“We don’t hate anybody. We don’t — I mean, the racism in this country, if you ask me, I know many people in this audience — let me deal with this head on. You know what the cliche is, a conservative: racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen of America, if you were paying attention, I know you were, the racism in our culture was exclusively and fully on display in the Democrat primary last year.”
Everybody outside the elites knows that, but nobody dares say it — save Rush.
For the media, the racism of your average American white person is so self-evident that it’s difficult even to explain – but for everyone else, the exact opposite is true, and self-evidently so the instant a voice proclaims, “The emperor has no clothes!”
The same is true right down the entire list of liberal beliefs – in big government, in socialized health-care, in bailouts, in welfare for unworking breeders, in Blame-America-Firstism, in open borders, and on and on. The power of Reagan, like the power of Rush, is the ability to make common Americans realize that their innermost feelings are right, and that everybody they see talking at them on TV all day is wrong.
