Joe Bidens Obama moment...

[William Salmon]

I think part of the hubbub over Biden's "clean" comment might be related
to the fact that he has made others that could be interpreted as
insensitive, such as the Indian-American/Dunkin Donuts comment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIT3jUrNTX0



Quoting Brenda Lester <alphatwin2002 at YAHOO.COM>:

> I'm from Georgia, and a common compliment there is, "He looks good,
> smells good." That means he "cleans up real good," which is also a
> compliment. These are regional expressions, and southern people know
> that.  I'm sure Biden did not mean clean, as in not dirty. A better
> word would be polished or refined.  And this "white way"--what
> happened to standard English? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a very
> eloquent, articulate speaker. I never heard any debate on his
> speeches being white-speak.
>
>
>
>
>
> Dennis Baron <debaron at UIUC.EDU> wrote:
>  There's a new post on the Web of Language --
>
> Joe Biden’s Obama moment, or, I love it when you talk white to me.
> When Joe Biden characterized Barack Obama to the New York Observer as
> “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate,” he
> revealed the kind of linguistic prejudice that too often passes for
> acceptable in white America. Biden made this remark about his Senate
> colleague in an interview in which he disparaged his other rivals for
> the Democratic presidential nomination as having a position on Iraq
> that is “nothing but disaster” (Hillary Clinton) and not knowing
> “what the heck he’s talking about” (John Edwards). Calling Obama
> well-spoken as well as “bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”
> didn’t seem so bad in comparison. But it was the Obama moment, not
> the other insults, that threatened to derail Biden’s candidacy,
> because it revealed an insensitivity both subtler and in some ways
> more pernicious than Virginia Senator George Allen’s use of macaca,
> an overt slur which contributed to Allen’s defeat in the last
> election. ... Sen. Biden and many other mainstream Americans all too
> frequently assume as well that the right way is the white way....
>
> Read the rest at the Web of Language
>
>
>
> DB
>
>
> Dennis Baron
> Professor of English and Linguistics
> Department of English
> University of Illinois
> 608 S. Wright St.
> Urbana, IL 61801
>
> office: 217-244-0568
> fax: 217-333-4321
>
> www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron
>
> read the Web of Language:
> www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
>
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~Will Salmon

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