But, Doesn’t he talk scary?

[kpete]

Tonight’s manufactured crisis from Drudge, Hannity and The Daily Caller almost escaped my attention. Until they started protesting his accent. Noting that it was something he “almost never adopts in public” (as if speaking at a University in 2007 wasn’t “public”) The insinuations here are that Obama is pandering, is fake-black, and/or, even worse, fake-white.

My mother is English and my father is from the Caribbean. Both have very distinct accents. Hearing them go from speaking to us to their parents or friends and hearing that transition in cadence was always a source of joy for me. Their changing accents held so many stories, so many different experiences, that for a child it helped me begin to understand their journeys and the depth of life’s potential.

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In the America we hope for, this and many other things the Republicans have said (most recently, Scott Brown’s insistence that Elizabeth Warren is too…well, you know…to be Native American) would disqualify them from the political process. But until that country comes, Obama must navigate his blackness carefully, women must compromise their femininity, and the American diasporas must endure the dirty looks. And the flagrantly racist legislation. And, occasionally, the bullets.

All this makes me wonder what white people in America, especially the ones who will be voting this year, are really thinking when they listen to me speak. It makes me livid. And it makes me lonely

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MORE:
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[hrmjustin]

1. Juan Williams says it is nothing.

they are desperate

[FirstLight]

2. I am like that as well

I have family from the deep south and after a week of being around them or less i start to get' twangy'...and I was raised in Oakland, so i have a different cadence when i speak to different friends...it's is not that I 'consciously' change my tone for the people I am with...they bring it out of me! and it *is* a beautiful thing, to be in tune with your friends and people you are with to speak WITH them in comfort...not to speak TO them and consider oneself an outsider

[brewens]

3. Show the contrast of a younger Shrub vs President Shrub. I think the clip

of him in Fahrenheit 9/11 when he was campaigning for his dad is a good example. He come across as exactly what he was, a smartassed preppy boy. Then later he adopts the down home accent to play the bumpkins and get himself elected Governor and then President.

[Warpy]

4. Hey all white folks aren't alike, either

and a lot of us come from families where the at home speech was very different from the public stuff. People tell me I have a very distinct Irish lilt when I talk, something they don't notice quite as much here where Spanish is often spoken at home. But the brogue in my house could be quite thick when I was growing up.

I don't find the difference in Obama's speech before a black audience either alarming or peculiar. In a way, he was home and his speech changed accordingly.

Nor can I fault the content of that speech. People who have spent their lives all the way down on the bottom often don't have skills those of us born higher up on the totem pole take for granted. It's up to us as a country to help pull them up, not keep them pushed down.

If this is the October Surprise, it's a most unsurprising one that betrays more about the ingrained bigotries of the Republican Party than it does about Obama, Democrats, or anything else.

[Gal Friday]

5. Matty, Sean, Tucker just Rearranging the Deck Chairs