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CCC 61:1 / september 2009

Howard Tinberg

Review Essay

“Are You Going to Be a Problem?” Race as Performance

Your Average Nigga Performing Race Literacy and Masculinity Vershawn Ashanti YoungDetroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. 170 pp.

I’m not ghetto enough for the ghetto. Because I’m not a white boy, I’m not white enough for white folks.

—Young xvi

I can’t even hold up my experience as being somehow represen-tative of the black American experience . . . ; indeed, learning to

accept that particular truth—that I can embrace my brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak to, or for, all our

various struggles—is part of what this book is about. —Obama xvi

I’m struck by the startling contrast between two scenes, one recounted in Vershawn Ashanti Young’s Your Average Nigga Performing Race Literacy and Masculinity and the other from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. In one scene, Young has just given a lecture at the University of Iowa as part of a job application. After his talk, which Young refers to as “autobiographical” and which took the same title (and, presumably, the subject) as the book under review here, the department chair, whom Young describes as an image out of American Gothic, “overalls and all,” walks up to Young and asks, “If you come

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here, are you going to be a problem?” (125). Young, indeed, claims to have written this book to send the message to this chair and to others that “when it comes to matters of race, I don’t submit to the status quo just to make white folks or black folks comfortable” (137).

Now, switch to a second scene: we’re not in Iowa anymore, but, rather, Hawaii. Frank, a black poet and a family friend with an “ill kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old shaggy-maned lion,” advises the young Barry (as Barack was known then) as to how to behave when at college (76). “The real price of admission,” Frank warns, is “[l]eaving your race at the door. . . . Leav-ing your people behind” (97). “Stay awake,” he concludes. “It made me smile,” writes Obama as he reflects on this moment from the vantage point of many years (98). I juxtapose these scenes because I’m intrigued by the eerie parallels. Young African Americans, finding themselves in a place where their blackness is all too visible, are offered advice by a mentor of sorts on how to behave in foreign terrain. The fact that both will cross paths, as it were, in the Southside of Chicago intrigues me as well, although Obama will come to that work later in life as a community organizer, whereas Young was raised in the gritty Gov-ernor Henry Horner Homes housing projects. But what most resonates with me is the difference in response by the two young men. Young, who speaks candidly throughout his “autocritography” (drawing this term from Michael Awkward, signifying a thoroughly “self-reflexive, self-consciously academic act”), admits to, and relishes, “being a problem,” since such a role serves to maintain his complex sense of self (12). Obama, by contrast, appears almost a spectator to matters of race, leaving others to plumb the depths of that term. Even in retrospect, he is clearly writing from the island, as it were, insulated from the racial wars back on the mainland. Obama’s instincts are to affirm a “common destiny” among blacks. Young was raised in the thick of those wars. Young will eventually get the job at Iowa and, as of his writing, will have been employed there for four years. As members of the family follow his trail from the Chicago projects to the cornfields of Iowa, Young writes, “I believe I’m here to be a problem so that when they come to college, they won’t have to be” (137).

That somewhat hopeful, if conventional, note of faith belies the ground-breaking and problematic nature of this book, for while at first glance Your Average Nigga resembles personalized narratives from academics of color (I think here of Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps and Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self), which attempt to tell the story of personal development within the context of broader concerns of academic literacy, what makes this work different is its

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construction of performance as played out through the convergence of race, literacy and masculinity—and the express courage in the degree of exposure here. While this work, like others, navigates the difficult terrain between home and school, this memoir, if we wish to call it that, places the author in an alto-gether different place. Home is not where the heart is. And school is neither the root of all evil or panacea for all that ails us. Oh, and one more thing, and I don’t believe I’m understating this fact: Young demonstrates considerable courage in writing so frankly about not being masculine enough or about his “desire to be white” (1). It especially could not have been easy to tell stories in which his masculinity is questioned. Young repeats Ice Cube’s aphorism, “Real niggas ain’t faggots” and proceeds to describe his, Young’s, difficult relationship with his brother, who seems to subscribe to Ice Cube’s view (60):

When we were younger, he relentlessly called me a fag anywhere and everywhere, indoors, outdoors, in front of his friends, in front of mine, didn’t matter. “Get your faggot butt upstairs,” he’d say during those rare occasions when Momma would let us go outside to play or when we’d sneak out when she was at work. On other occasions, when I was jumping rope, playing hopscotch, or enjoying some other game said to be only for girls, he’d disown me when his friends would say, “Hey, man, ain’t that your little brother?” “Hell, no,” he’d respond. “Yes, I am,” I’d yell, pretending my heart didn’t sink each time from the rejec-tion. (57)

Later, as Young turns to books as a guide to the academic life, his brother will come to envy Young’s “gender difference” as well as the class status that comes with the professional life. Young’s brother would boast at family gatherings of his brother of “the family professor, a PhD . . . . the one who doesn’t have to work as hard as he does, driving a city bus on the graveyard shift, then going straight to work as a store manager just to make ends meet” (60). What Young cannot tell his brother is that the very work of a college professor puts “lin-guistic constraints that restrict our blackness and masculinity” (63). Even if he wanted to appear more “nigga,” Young simply cannot afford to do so, given the expectations as to how a professor—especially a black male professor—should speak and act in and out of the classroom. Note how gender, race, class and literacy become intertwined in this brief family narrative—enforcing a key point in Young’s work.

Young weaves all these strands together by way of a single metaphor: performance. At various points in the book, we see Young performing race in

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strikingly provocative ways. In graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for example, Young, having been given the “shake off ” when request-ing the opportunity given to white students to present a teaching dossier (this after refusing to teaching a required course on teaching writing), is finally given the chance after months of hassle (125). Instead of dutifully complying with the department’s expectations, Young plays what James Baldwin calls the “bad nigger” (quoted in Young 126):

While preparing my dossier of syllabi and assignments, a flash of resentment washed over me. From my mixed feelings of spite and optimism, I included an epigram on the title page, “You can’t take my joy, devil,” which I had lifted from a Kirk Franklin gospel song . . . How could I know that the director was Jewish? Nor could I anticipate she’s read every anti-Semitic statement Louis Farrakhan ever uttered into the word devil. If I had been, I might have chosen another, less volatile phrase. Needless to say she was furious. Her assistant cried. And I was barred from teaching writing. I was given literature classes . . . . (126)

As a reviewer (and, in the interest of fair disclosure, a Jew), I am astonished by the mostly unacknowledged layers of irony in this passage. A young graduate student wishes to teach writing but declines to take the course required, pre-sumably, to prepare students to do so. That same graduate student, in his zeal to provoke a response from his reader, seems unaware of the rhetorical situation (namely, the identity of his reader, the possible response by that reader, and the likely consequence produced by that response). Finally, Young’s trickster persona has yielded him the punishment of teaching literature, the prize plum sought after by most of his fellow graduate students. While recognizing the latter twist (a fellow student notes, “You did wrong, got caught, but still man-aged to steal away the goods” (126), Young seems not to get the irony pervading the episode. Indeed, Young even remains silent on the racial undertones in the phrase “steal away the goods.”

Therein lies a weakness in Young’s central premise: that race ought to be regarded as performance. While useful, and quite poignant, as a means of ex-pressing Young’s own complex identity—Young refers to the linguistic challenge as code “meshing” rather than “shifting” (7)—the metaphor of performance fails to establish its ground, rhetorically. Performance receives its grounding in the performer, whose principle concern is to occupy a specified role. While performers may clearly “play to the audience” (for good or ill), their performance is driven by factors other than a concern for the audience or the performer’s im-

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pact on that audience or even a self-conscious awareness of the motivations or purpose behind the performance. Perhaps it is unfair to make this comparison, but, after reading Young’s work, I came away yearning for another metaphor and another vision—notably, Obama’s search for a “common destiny.” Being a problem makes for stirring drama, but, we may well ask, to what end?

Works Cited

Gilyard, Keith. Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991.

Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers, 2004.

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, ILL.: NCTE, 1993.

Howard TinbergHoward Tinberg is Professor of English and founding director of the Writing Lab at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts. His teaching respon-sibilities include first-year composition, a survey of British literature from the nineteenth century to the present, a course on tutoring in a writing center, and an interdisciplinary (team-taught) honors seminar on Holocaust literature and history. He is the author of two books, Border Talk: Writing and Knowing at the Two-Year College and Writing with Consequence: What Writing Does in the Discipline; co-author, with J. P. Nadeau, of a forthcoming book, The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations; co-editor, with Patrick Sullivan, of What Is College-Level Writing?; and past editor of the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College. He is the 2004 recipient of the Carnegie/CASE Community College Professor of the Year and served as a Carnegie Scholar in 2005–2006.

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