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The intersections of issues of race, identity and language are at a pivotal moment in the modern US, with the rapidly increasing percentage of the population identifying as more than one race, and accompanying social challenges to traditional black/white binary. In this zeitgeist, young people with parents of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds exist in a space where they may form and perform racial identity through a process of psychological, sociological, and linguistic choices. The US’s first black and biracial president, Barack Obama is a masterful code-switcher between Mainstream US English (MUSE) and African American Language (AAL), serving as a powerful representation of the fluidity of multiple identities and their effects on ideologies about language and race. This dissertation investigates the relationship between racial identity and linguistic performance by examining aspects of the linguistic …