Right, we’re going to go full circle in this newsletter, and I want you to shout from the back if you can see where I’m going early doors.

So, in a statement that was apparently taken out of context, the then pre Presidential Joe Biden once said of his fellow candidate Barack Obama:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook man”.

Hmmm and urghhh and mainly because it speaks so clearly to the bee I have in my elegant bonnet today. You see, I am just so tired of being called eloquent and articulate when I haven’t been particularly eloquent or because it is stating the bleedin’ obvious.

It feels like someone doth protest too much whenever, after hearing a black or brown person speak on a topic they are perfectly qualified (often uniquely qualified to speak on), the response is ‘oh, wow, that was so eloquently put’ or ‘you are so articulate’. Urgh.

I mean, come on, I didn’t go to school, college (English Lit and Philosophy anyone?) and then University to study English Literature for nought. I should expect to come out of that able to speak reasonably competently in my field and well beyond it.

This is not new irritation, anger and annoyance; in fact, it feels as old as the hills. The shock and awe with which a brown woman who can string a sentence together is met is an unacceptable micro-aggression and one that is meted out time and time again.

Every time a white man speaks in complete grammatically correct sentences, I mock wonder whether he gets praised and patronised in front of his colleagues for being so articulate.

And this makes me really wonder. When we praise black and brown women for being eloquent or articulate, what is it we are trying to say?

Are we saying that her words were poetic, well-crafted, or that they conveyed a spirit of something beyond words in words? Or are we saying that we were momentarily flummoxed by something we are not programmed to expect? A black or brown woman doing her job and then talking about her expertise and us being able to understand every last word.

And this brings me full circle because as much as I genuinely enjoyed the image of a young black woman reading poetry at the recent inauguration of President Biden, as much as that visual did my heart good, what I didn’t enjoy so much was what felt like an outpouring of amazement entirely at odds with the fact that a Harvard graduate who had been the Los Angeles Poet Laureate, then the National Youth Poet Laureate had crafted and then read her own poem.

And, yes, I know this sounds sour. But in the heart of this praise is a truth that Gorman has confounded us, that even in her field of genius, she has exceeded our expectations. And all that tells me is that where our expectations should be high as kites, they are somehow not, because she also got that whole ‘what a queen’, what a star’ response, and I am just so convinced that Robert Frost never received that kind of praise for his poetry.

Literally not once.

Never.

Ok, on that road less travelled, I will stop and smile graciously and wish you a great week ahead.