Book Review: Your Average Nigga: Performing Race Literacy and Masculinity by Vershawn Ashanti Young

The title of Vershawn A. Young’s book Your Average Nigga Performing Race Literacy and Masculinity implies that the book is about the challenges of constructing a Black masculine identity. While that theme is present, what actually unfolds is a beautifully crafted text, informed by the work of E. Patrick Johnson, Michael Awkward, and W.E.B. Dubois, that addresses the struggles of performing race by way of negotiating the use of Black English Vernacular (BEV) and White English Vernacular (WEV). Young challenges the notion that Black success is hinged upon the ability to ‘‘speak white’’ and argues that this belief instead creates complicated identity strug- gles for many African–Americans. He argues the vast differences between Black and white languages is a hyperbole that forces some Black people, particularly those from the working class, into a grid-lock where they feel pressured to either give up their cultural dialects in order to be successful, or risk remaining in the underclass. Secondly, he argues that when the racial differences between Blacks and whites are also exaggerated it leaves these same Black people torn between trying to either prove that they are authentically Black or that they can successfully perform whiteness. Within these performance struggles there are also battles with gender, class, and sexuality. In the opening pages of the book Young paints a vivid picture of this complicated struggle by juxtaposing the different racial performances he gives in the Black barbershop and the white academy. Within the barbershop Young believes that the barbers and other patrons assume that he is gay because of his ‘‘literacy habits.’’ As a result he constantly struggles to prove both his Blackness and his sexuality. He likens his experience to that of Shelly Eversley in her book The Real Negro: ‘‘So in order to get along on the (white) campus and in the barbershop, we must alter not the color of our skin but the ways we perform race in each location. These racial performances are most often carried out through language, the way we communicate’’ xiii).

These polarized racial performances are informed by ‘‘code-switching,’’ which promotes speaking BEV at home and WEV at school. This behavior has become a major tool advocated by scholars and teachers to help Black children maintain their cultural dialects and make use of standard English to successfully navigate through school and work. Even though Young alludes to his use of code-switching in the Black barbershop, he actually disagrees with it because it creates a large racial burden and is ‘‘racially biased, requiring Blacks to separate the codes that bespeak their identities from those they use at school’’ (7). Instead what he suggests is the use of ‘‘code-meshing,’’ a term he’s coined in which both dialects are blended together. Young believes that code-meshing will allow working-class Black students to find a safe space in school without having to abandon portions of their identity or culture. Your Average Nigga is divided into two parts that are framed around Young’s experiences growing up in the projects of Chicago and his experiences in higher education. Truly an interdisciplinary text, in each section he draws from a number of disciplines, including Literacy Studies, Performance Studies, English, and History to critically analyze his own experiences while also constructing his argument against code-switching in favor of code-meshing.

Part One, ‘‘Home,’’ is comprised of three chapters and an interlude. Young employs a ‘‘pseudo-ethnographic’’ lens to describe his childhood experiences (21). He first interrogates the racial burdens he’s forced to bear in order to ‘‘pass’’ and compares his experiences with the characters from Nella Larson’s Passing and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. What’s unique about his experience though is that, ‘‘passing today, however, no longer mandates that you look white. It requires instead that you be black but act white, erasing the requirement of racial concealment and stressing racial performance’’ (45). Unlike Clare Kendry and the Ex-colored man, Young is visibly Black, and he struggles to avoid being discovered as a ‘‘ghetto black’’ (45). The burden manifested from these dichotomous roles he must play explains his disapproval of code-switching. In the latter half of Part One, he explores the connections between performing race and performing gender. Specifically he examines the ways in which language usage is conflated with race and sexuality for Black men. Black males that use WEV and do well in school are susceptible to harsher scrutiny than white males because both their authentic Blackness and maleness are questioned. Though Young problematizes this paradigm, he never deconstructs the heterosexist norms that define this ‘‘authentic’’ Black masculinity.

In Part Two of Your Average Nigga, Young finally centers his critique of codes-switching within the existing literature on linguistics and literacy as it weaves in his personal experiences as a college professor. He builds a case for code-meshing by identifying the strengths and limitations of work done by Kermit Campbell, Lisa Delpit, and Keith Gilyard; each of whom provide different approaches to the challenges of negotiating BEV and WEV. The methods used to promote code-switching are equally as problematic as the concept itself for Young because he argues that there is no ‘‘standard’’ for Standard English. While he challenges the limited definition of Standard English and WEV, it’s equally unclear what linguistic attributes constitute BEV. Because of Young’s emphasis on the limitations of code-switching, his arguments in favor of code-meshing fail to parse the nuances of BEV and under develop the concept of code-meshing.

Despite minor short-comings, Your Average Nigga is a brilliantly constructed book that is as equally captivating as it is intellectually stimulating. The text itself embodies the notion of code-meshing as Young intertwines urban colloquialisms with academic jargon. What’s especially appealing about Your Average Nigga is that it can be used in a number of disciplines from Linguistics to American Studies because of the complex lens in which Young explores literacy and identity.