Navigation

Return to the front page.

Return to the overview for this issue of CCC.

Access a full text PDF of this article. (Note: PDFs are available through NCTE, or JSTOR for issues prior to Volume 48. Site subscription may be required.)

Delicious Bookmark this entry on Delicious

CiteULike Bookmark this entry on CiteULike.

Print this entry.

[need to do a plaintext style sheet for entries]

Then below here, we'll add the lower navbar stuff from the original version, inc. site search, tag search, categories, issue bar, etc.)

Vershawn Ashanti Young. Your Average Nigga.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. "Your Average Nigga." CCC. 55.4 (2004): 693-715.

Abstract:

"Your Average Nigga" contends that just as exaggerating the differences between black and white language leaves some black speakers, especially those from the ghetto, at an impasse, so exaggerating and reifying the differences between the races leaves blacks in the impossible position of either having to try to be white or forever struggling to prove they're black enough. In this essay I recount how I negotiated my own black ghetto-to-middle class identity conflict as I facilitated classroom interactions with a black male student from the ghetto.

Works Cited
Bonvillian, Nancy. Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993.
Campbell, Kermit. "'Real Niggaz's Don't Die': African American Students Speaking Themselves into Their Writing." Writing in Multicultural Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. MLA, New York, 1997. 67-78.
---. "The Signifying Monkey Revisited: Vernacular Discourse and African American Personal Narratives." Journal of Advanced Composition 14.2 (1994): 463-73.
Canagarajah, A. Suresh. "Safe Houses in the Contact Zone: Coping Strategies of African-American Students in the Academy." College Composition and Communication 48 (1997): 173-96.
Delpit, Lisa. Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. The Press, New York, 1995.
Fordham, Signithia. Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
Fox, Thomas. "Repositioning the Profession: Teaching Writing to African American Students." Journal of Advanced Composition 12.2 (1992): 291-303.
Gilyard, Keith. Race, Rhetoric, and Composition. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.
---. Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1991.
Hale-Benson, Janice E. Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles. Rev. Ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.
Harley, Kay, and Sally Cannon. "Failure: The Student's or the Assessment's?" Journal of Basic Writing 15.1 (1996): 70-87.
Harper, Phillip Brian. Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
Holmes, David G. "Fighting Back by Writing Black: Beyond Racially Reductive Composition Theory." Race, Rhetoric, and Composition. Ed. Keith Gilyard. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. 53-66.
Kotlowitz, Alex. There Are No Children Here: A Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Smith, Erec, Jennifer Cohen, Paula Mathieu, James Sosnoski, Bridget Harris Tsemo, and Vershawn Ashanti Young. "CultureWise: Narrative as Research, Research as Narrative." Works and Days 33/34, 35/36, vol. 17 and 18 (1999-2000): 425-43.
Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977.
Wardhaugh, Ronald. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. "Your Average Nigga: Language, Literacy, and the Rhetoric of Blackness." Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2003.
____________
Tags (?)

Works Citing