Shawdy, my leaders talk black

This blog post is a shout-out to the new class of young black male leaders that defy the stereotype (that excludes Kwame Kilpatrick) and morph black politics from one of victimhood to a politics of possibility. This is a shout-out to those leaders who are confident enough to be themselves and use language that they would use in comfortable company. This is, in fact, a shout-out to the shout-out.

During his nearly prime time speech, Deval Patrick shouted out a number a people. No one blinked. Hillary, eventually gave a few herself. Some might call this a simple term going mainstream. But I think its a bit complex. As more black leaders become serious players in the game, the more they have probably conceded to "the mainstream" and the more they get to influence the mainstream. Language, as always, plays a central role.

African-American vernacular is distinct in two ways from other American dialects: grammatically and lexically. Slang is the lexical component. For AAV lexical items to be widely accepted, on a political level, says something of the pressure that this new class is having on political discourse (on a basic and meta level).

I think this is an example, too, of how something can be integrated in the whole while retaining its identity. It doesn't have to scream that it is x. It will be x.

So, true, Obama might not spend all day talking about black issues, but I'm wiling to wager that we'd see some mudcloth in the oval office.