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Further Thoughts on Obama’s 1995 Video
Jack Cashill / American Thinker
The passage from Dreams from My Father that Obama reads in his recently unearthed 1995 book presentation video contains the following lines, “I looked to corroborate this nightmare vision. I gathered up books from the library — Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois (sic).”
What caught my ear were two things, one consequential, one superficial, both revealing. Starting with the superficial, the pronunciation of “Du Bois” is something of a shibboleth on the left, meaning a word whose pronunciation is used to “differentiate members of ingroups from those of outgroups.”
A black Communist, W.E.B. Du Bois himself wrote in a letter to a newspaper, “The pronunciation of my name is Due Boyss, with the accent on the last syllable.” The pronunciation was well known on the left for the confusion it caused. In 1964, the Communist Party USA sponsored a national youth organization, the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America. As the story goes, the FBI, upon hearing of these clubs, confused them with the Boys Clubs of America and put the latter under surveillance. This was something of a running joke in leftist circles.
In the 1995 video, Obama pronounced “Du Bois” the way Blanche DuBois did in Streetcar Named Desire, as the French would, Due Bwah. In Dreams, he spelled it that way too. I think he made this error because he did not actually read Du Bois or talk about Du Bois but rather imported the reference — and the anger implicit in it — from his muse, the terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers. Ayers did read DuBois. “W.E.B. DuBois’ greatest book was called John Brown,” Ayers said in a published interview in 2012. “Nobody reads it, but it was a great book.”
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