William Rodney Herring

Took my Three Area Exam yesterday, and I opened with the following statement, which plays off a column my friend Greg sent me on Sunday.

I want to begin by talking about a recent event, which is relevant to my topic, and which connects my dissertation to a larger political interest.

Last Wednesday, January 31, Joseph Biden, announced his presidential candidacy and immediately hit a hurdle when he called Barack Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Now, of course he apologized when he discovered he had unintentionally offended the black community. But it’s not clear he knew what he was apologizing for: for instance, he explained to Jon Stewart later in the week that he was trying to compliment Obama.

So in last Sunday’s New York Times, Lynette Clemetson explained the offense for him and for anyone who didn’t get it in her column “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well.” One line summarizes her argument:

When whites use the word [articulate] in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment.

While I don’t know that it’s “amazement” that characterizes such remarks about articulacy—and I hope it isn’t “bewilderment”—I think it certainly signals an encounter with the unexpected. Which is to say, being articulate is only remarkable if one doesn’t expect it from a person.

This is in keeping with typical linguistic criticism, in which we only seem to call attention to usages which deviate from the presumed standard. Of course the irony here is that Joe Biden didn’t think he was issuing criticism. He was in fact complimenting Obama for deviating from the standard: it’s just that, as Clemetson accurately observes, Biden presumed the standard for African Americans was inarticulacy.

But Clemetson’s column isn’t relevant just because linguistic comments about speech continue to reveal (unintended and—when made apparent—embarrassing) chauvinist attitudes. Does her analysis itself not conceal its own chauvinism?

The problem, from her standpoint, is not so much that we presume a standard, but rather that we apply and voice our applications of the standard. Indeed, Clemetson offers this “pointer”:

Do not use [articulate] as the primary attribute of note for a black person if you would not use it for a similarly talented, skilled or eloquent white person.

In other words, for Clemetson, the challenge is to assume the same standard for black people that we assume for white people. Indeed, she accepts that the standard itself does exist and that it’s more applicable to class than it is to race. Near the end of her piece, Clemetson writes:

With the ballooning size of the black middle and upper class, qualities in blacks like intelligence, eloquence — the mere ability to string sentences together with tenses intact — must at some point become as unremarkable to whites as they are to blacks.

Here we see that middle and upper class blacks, like middle and upper class whites, ought to be presumed articulate. The implication is that the lower and working classes—black or white—can be presumed inarticulate—and further, that that’s okay.

The point of all this is: If we still find racist attitudes conditioning the things we say about each other, at least we can call those attitudes out and agree that it’s unfortunate they exist. By doing so, we (properly) hope to eliminate those attitudes.

Classist attitudes, on the other hand, are hard even to detect because they’re oftentimes implicit. And because they proceed as if it’s okay to assume that poor Americans are inarticulate.

And yet whether or not we accept the statement (as voiceable), insofar as we acknowledge the fact—of a correlation between income and language skills—as truthful, we will see that it’s not classism but classes that we must eliminate. And recognizing the value of eliminating inequality, we further need to ask what a discussion about articulacy and its domains will help us to accomplish.

<!-- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/weekinreview/04clemetson.html?ei=5070&en=f262b5c89dda21ee&ex=1171256400&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print-->