Word: africanizing
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...currently best-selling audio Bible, Inspired by ... the Bible Experience, has an all-star cast including Angela Bassett, Cuba Gooding Jr., Samuel L. Jackson and Forest Whitaker - all African American. Meanwhile, Jones' only real competition for the role of God - at least until Denzel Washington gets a bit older - is Morgan Freeman. Jones is the Old Testament God, fierce and forbidding. Freeman is the New Testament version, all wise and all knowing, to be sure, but more approachable. He has done it twice in movies, has been the VOG in commercials for Listerine and Visa cards, among other products...
...Jeremy Irons. The reasons aren't hard to speculate about. The roots of this development go back at least to the 1930s and Paul Robeson's singing "Ol' Man River" in Showboat. The therapeutic notion that suffering confers dignity and authority has spread just as the suffering of African Americans over generations has become universally acknowledged. Above all, black American ministers have replaced British politicians, at least in perception, as the world's most eloquent public users of the English language. Our homegrown Martin Luther King Jr. has knocked Winston Churchill off his perch as the ideal...
What's most inspiring about this development is that it can't be faked. There is no element of affirmative action here. Sidney Poitier won't do. The point is not to be black but to sound black. And unlike the integration and near domination of African Americans in professional sports, this is not even a matter of genuine talent breaking down the floodgates. Plenty of white or white-sounding actors could say "THIS [pause] is CNN" as well as Jones. Most people who have heard that phrase a hundred times don't know whose voice it is and - unless...
...Obama is one of the greatest public speakers now practicing that art, he probably couldn't get hired as the anonymous voice-over spokesman for a brand of cereal because he doesn't sound black enough. Nevertheless, he is a beneficiary of this development. When God turned into an African American, it became less unthinkable that the President might be African American as well...
...recognize the excellence in this extraordinary African American elected to the highest office of the land,” she said. “The day comes with a lot of hopes and feelings and sweat and the blood of millions of people...