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List Price: $19.95 | | Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr
Salesrank: 425292
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Editorial Review:
In Your Average Nigga, Vershawn Ashanti Young disputes the belief that speaking Standard English and giving up Black English Vernacular helps black students succeed academically. Young argues that this assumption not only exaggerates the differences between two compatible varieties of English but forces black males to choose between an education and their masculinity, by choosing to act either white or black. As one would expect from a scholar who is subject to the very circumstances he studies, Young shares his own experiences as he exposes the factors that make black racial identity irreconcilable with literacy for blacks, especially black males
Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity (African American Life Series) (African American Life Series) Reviews:
Excellent Writing Style and Good Study of Language 
2008-04-12 - Well, I'm a PhD students in performance studies and English. I had to read Vershawn Young's book last semester in a graduate course on language, culture, and performance. I had to do a presentation that involved in-depth interpretative reading. After I had just read the preface I was very much impressed with his candor and awesome writing style -- so much so that I immediately stopped reading and looked up his email address to tell him so !!!
He was very nice and we had a nice email conversation. He even helped me with my presentation, saying that while it's important to read his book as auto-ethnography, the method the field sees it in, he says it's an autocritography...a personal study of what makes a scholar and the ideas he's interested in. I had almost missed that in the introduction.
Anyway, I was privileged to meet him. So few authors engage others in their ideas. What I liked most about the book and the thing that was most different is that the scholarly parts are mixed in with the stories, so they become a real part of the narrative. It's not like other books where you can flip to the introduction and conclusion of each chapter and get the point without reading any other parts. I had to actually READ this book. And his excellent writing style made every minute worthwhile, which didn't take me long at all. Three days over a busy weekend.
I also had a personal reaction to the book, being a black person. I found myself wanting to speak with him over a cup of coffee or a beer ---not strictly academically, but more as friend and colleague who shares
some intellectual and personal interests by nature of our ethnicity.
I have friends who are an academic couple I met in grad school who are
come from a background very similar to Young's. And I was able to understand them better, as i'm from a higher class bracket, though we all share a similar experience. I believe our mutual sense of racial performance comes from opposite ends of a continuum.
I think Young's work and my response to it are a phenomena of the Black
Intelligencia --- probably discussed and debated among peers
frequently, but rarely laid bare in print before the world. I think that is the best feature of this book. My own research has nothing whatsoever to do with this but I dare say these conversations are vital to my abiltiy to perform professionally.
I think most serious readers who understand the experience he's coming from or who wants to understand, will get his arguments about language and black students, and why they (or professionals) shouldn't be asked to code switch but code mesh. I also think folks will get his idea about the burden of racial performance, which is greater for black men. We always have to prove who we are to whites and other blacks. Just think about OBAMA! I will keep enjoying his work.
If you are curious, read this stimulating, intellectual novelistic book!
Disappointing 
2008-03-15 - I'm a communication studies scholar, and picked up this book because I'm intrigued by the area of "performance studies" and wanted to see an example of this sort of approach in action.
As an example of performance studies and scholarship in general, the book disappointed me on a number of levels. This had less to do with the ideas (some of which had spme merit, others of which struck me as half-baked, to put it generously) than it did with the way these ideas were presented.
I had expected (perhaps naively and unfairly) to gain some general insights into "performance" of race, gender, and sexual identity. I understood from the get-go that the author drew on many personal experiences to illustrate these issues, which was fine by me. I'm all for finding new, interesting, accessible, and provocative ways of doing scholarship. I do think that terms such as "autoethnography," etc. are a bit dopey, but the idea of mixing experience with scholarship can be interesting.
What I hadn't banked on, given my cursory flip through the book before diving in, was just how utterly author-centric the book was. It often reads more like a more garden-variety autobiography (with a few footnotes and references to hip scholars scattered about) than a provocative new mode of scholarship. As I got into the book a bit more, always on the lookout for some move beyond the personal, I realized I wasn't going to get that. I couldn't help feeling that I was learning not about how race, gender, and sexual identity are performed, but rather about the author's own personal psychodramas and agendas, which only shed the occasional bit of light on the larger issues the book claims to take up.
Even that would be okay if the writing itself were enjoyable, but despite the promise of a backcover blurb that the work contained "dazzling prose," the writing itself was often no less turgid than more typical academic prose. Frequent use of "nigga," "faggot," and "Momma," don't, by themselves, make for powerful, punchy (or even interesting) prose.
All this is perhaps a bit unfair, given that the book seems to be the author's doctoral dissertation cleaned up a bit for general publication. It's an apprentice work, and reads like it. It might be asking too much for more (at least of the author--the question remains why the publisher would choose to devote resources to publishing a rather amateurish work).
But ultimately, my disappointment with the book is that it is decidedly ungenerous. Teaching, whether done in the classroom or through scholarship (of standard or more avant garde varieties) depends on the willingness of the teacher to share insights in a way that gets students/readers to understand their own lives and world around them better. This particular work is so self-involved and introspective that it nearly defies the reader to empathize with the narrator/author (a distinction that is particularly problematic in this particular work, but that's a whole other matter). Despite the author's superficial self-critiques at points, the overall feel of the book (at least for this reader) was one of self-justification. That mode doesn't generally lead to good teaching.
In a fit of morbid curiosity, I looked up the author on Ratemyprofessor.com, a site where students comment on their teachers. These ratings and comments are infamously subjective and are often based on those few students who felt passionate enough (either positively or negatively) to bother posting, not on the teacher's general reception by students. Having said that, I was startled by how closely some of the comments mirrored this general sense the book gave me. The frequent citations of the author's perceived self-involvement and need for validation by students were in character with the overall mood of the book.
But, again, this is perhaps not entirely fair given that the author is presumably a fairly new teacher, at least at this level. Again, we come back to the idea of apprenticeship. The author seems to be someone who needs to hone his thinking and his craft quite a bit more. That's fine. We can simply hope that, for the sake of the author, this process continues.
But for those of us who are doing our own apprenticeship in the field of performance studies and/or in the area of unconventional modes of scholarly discourse, reading such an amateurish work is not terribly helpful.
Great Book! 
2007-08-08 - "Your Average Nigga" is not about being average, but dealing with a society that views people of African descent as below average. Dr. Young unashamedly tells his own experiences of navigating through a warped society that judges African Americans on preconceived ideas based on historical inaccuracy of race, dialect, economics, and gender performance. And, in his attempt to rationalize the irrational he was almost a victim to self-hatred. I identify with his story because it speaks true to my own journey of discovery in attempting to find my voice in a society that is built to destroy a man of color that fails to fully assimilate. I have found you never reach this so-called level of authenticity, and no matter what you acheive your motives and abilities are constantly questioned. Dr. Young truly explores this experience in his writing about Iowa and the University of Iowa. His "white" speak was not enough to avoid race and gender discrimination. What I love most about this book is that Dr. Young challenges us all to evaluate our behavior based on race, gender, economics, and sexuality, which in turn, helps us all to embrace the differences for it's those differences that make us all unique
