INTERVIEWED BY TELEPHONE, JULY 28, 2012
I want to read an excerpt of a poem you wrote called “shiny” from Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, the book you based on your dissertation.
as dark as i am and tryin’ to pass
somebody needs to kick my black ass
for using proper english all the time
when the rest o’ my family’s spittin’ rhyme
dressin’ all preppy, talkin’ all white,
somebody tell me this ain’t right
my skin so black folks think maybe it’s blue;
who am i foolin’, Two Eyes? Cain’t be you
I wash and scrub and cosmetically bleach
but this doggone pigment just won’t leach
so tryin’ to be white ain’t working at all,
since the only attention I get is in the mall
when heads turn to see the nigga with the silver dollar tongue
wondering, who dat talking deep from the diaphragm and lung?
(YOUNG, 2007, P. 38)
What was going on within your own identity as a young black man to create such deep, painful, and complex work? Why would you want to be white?
I grew up spending most of my life actually wanting to be white. I think that a lot of black people want to be white. They may deny it, but I think that many of them do, especially when we think about the skin-lightening creams, when we think about the hair-straightening products, and we think about the market for the colored eye contact lenses, which were really big in the ’80s and ’90s among black people as well. There is a deep psychological desire in black culture that wants to be white. Now, I think that the reason why black people want to be white is not necessarily because, first and foremost, they think that white people are better looking or more beautiful, although I think that it becomes a performance of whiteness for black people to try to aid whiteness optically and aesthetically, but rather I think that we internalize from a very early age that white people are the privileged people in our culture and in our society. They do not come across on TV and in representations in the movies as having the same degree and intense problems that African Americans face. And they are not represent[ed as] being treated in the same way, in the same degraded, insensitive, highly skeptical manner as black people. They have a range of freedom that black people do not have. What I mean by a range of freedom [is] I believe and see and think that black people as a whole understand that white people are given the benefit of the doubt, whereas black people are viewed with deep skepticism. And so it is more of a psychological response. Most people think that because black people are allowed to go to the same schools as whites that we don’t live in an era of segregation. Right now, that we have it made. That everything is okay. They say, “Look at the black reporter on TV. Or look at yourself as a black author.”
Yes, we as black people have a measure of opportunities that we now can access, but we can’t negate the hundreds of years that it took to even get to this moment and the deep imprint that it has made on us culturally. That is the first thing. The second thing is opportunities are nice, but then the psychological trauma that we have to deal with on a daily basis in order to keep those benefits is enormous. I argue, and some people may disagree with me, that we have to act like white people in order to keep those same opportunities that people say we now have just because we are citizens. We don’t have them just because we are citizens. White people have them just because they’re citizens. Black people are only allowed to take advantage of these opportunities to the extent that we are able to downplay our blackness and take up what is considered to be white culture.
Yes, and I think that when you say in the first stanza of your poem “as dark as i am and tryin’ to pass / somebody needs to kick my black ass / for using proper english all the time / when the rest o’ my family’s spittin’ rhyme / dressin’ all preppy, talkin’ all white, / somebody tell me this ain’t right,” it is as if there is an internal struggle or even a paradox between recognizing that you are black and reaching for that “whiteness” in order to feel like you are able to compete in a white world or setting and then being frustrated about making that huge concession to your person.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Exactly!
The paradoxes in the poem you wrote depict the challenges transracial adoptees face, I think, [in] living in different worlds simultaneously but needing to be responsible for nurturing their own identity. How did you reconcile these paradoxes within yourself? And as it relates to your poem, why should someone “kick your black ass”?
[Laugh] You know what? It is because I was duped. I wanted to believe that if I did all of the things that were prescribed for me to do, which I did not see as being codified as white at the time, that I would be successful. So I keep trying to do those things—if you just get a college education; if you just get a master’s degree; if you just get a Ph.D.; if you just don’t talk back; if you just talk at a low “hush” at a restaurant; if you just don’t wear baggy pants, et cetera. Those kinds of things: if I just didn’t do the wrong things and did all the right things . . . I would have the American dream. The poem that I wrote is saying basically that is a myth for black people. Some black people don’t get it until they have an experience like “Skip” Gates [the Harvard professor arrested by police after he forced open the jammed front door of his own home].
He is the chairperson in his department at Harvard. And then he gets stopped by the police at his front door. Some people don’t get it until they have their “Skip Gates” moment. It is a shame that it takes them so long. But that was a “kick in his black ass.” See what I am saying?
Yes.
He got kicked in the ass at that moment. The reason why you can say that he did is because he said, “You don’t know who I am” to the police. And then he said he was going to make a documentary about black racial profiling. That is what the line in my poem means.
In 2007 Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity was published. I remember thinking what an explosive title for a book. I thought the “N-word” had been buried, not to be resurrected. Why did you choose to use the word nigga in the title of your book, and what messages did you want your readers to retain from reading this book?
I chose the word because I knew that it would get some attention. And also it spoke in one word what the book was about. It was about both my identification and my disidentification with being a black man. But also it spoke volumes about what it means to be a black man in this society. And even though I am a black man with a Ph.D., to some people I am still just an average nigger, not just with the a. A nigger with an a is making it soft and palatable, even though it still isn’t palatable. To me, I walk down the street and I am still eyed with suspicion, with a racialized lens.
Rhonda, you can’t ever bury a word. We don’t have control over language to that extent. Some people may think that we do. We do not. Language is not something that is easily domesticated or controlled, regardless of the fact that the NAACP had a ceremony in 2006 or so to bury the word nigger, which I think was utterly ridiculous. It seems like it was a cartoon—it was so ridiculous that you would have a mass ceremony of people giving eulogies and prayers and extending a funeral ritual for a word. But the book Your Average Nigga has still done well despite the fact that the word was attempted to be buried at a certain time and people have had a lot of negative things to say about my choice of using that title. The book is doing well because more people understand the message I am expressing, once they start reading it, than those who don’t.
Now the subtitle, Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, what does that cover?
It covers the range of enactments in speech, in dress, in the way we behave, the way that we interact with other people. Basically it is the range of enactments that black people have to go through to be successful in America. I call it the burden of racial performance that black people are required, not only by whites but by other blacks as well, to prove through their behaviors, their speech, and their actions the kind of black person that they are. Really, there are only two kinds you can be. In the words of comedian Chris Rock, you can either be a black person, which is a respectable, bourgeois, middle-class black person, or you can be a nigger. As Chris Rock says in his show, “I love black people, but I hate niggas.”
So . . . when a black person walks into a room, always in the other person’s mind is the question “What kind of black person is this in front of me?” They are looking for clues in your speech, in your demeanor, in your behavior, and in everything that you do—it is like they are hyper attentive to your ways of being in order to say, “Okay, this is a real black person. I can trust them. I’ll let them work here. Or, nope: this is a nigger, look at the spelling of their name: Shaniqua or Daquandre.” We get discriminated against based on our actions. So that is what the subtitle was trying to suggest in performing race. And in performing literacy, just what is the prescribed means for increasing our class status? A mind-set: “Okay, black people, you guys have no excuse. You can go to school and get an education like everybody else.” I wanted to pay attention to the ways in which school perpetuated a structural racism through literacy, the way in which it sort of stigmatizes and oppresses blackness in a space where it claims it is opening up opportunities for black people. Of course, since I am a man, masculinity and how masculinity is performed is really important.
I can’t imagine the added pressure a gay man must experience trying to perform blackness and masculinity in both a black and white world.
That is interesting that you mention that. The book that I am writing now is asking the question about whether or not our gay black brothers have a more difficult time. I am not so certain that they do, because one of the theories that I have been playing around with is that when you think about American culture, you recognize that we are still living in a patriarchal culture, where white men dominate. If you think about [it,] black men [are] required to be men on the basis of their gender or biological sex designation, but in this white patriarchal society they’re not allowed to play the role of men in mainstream culture. In other words black men don’t wield the same kind of power. They don’t have the same kind of opportunities as white men do. So in that way they resemble women overall. This is not just me saying this. E. Franklin Frazier [the famous African American sociologist] made this comment. I am actually quoting him when he said black men resemble women in the personality that they have to play in order to be successful in America. And also sociologist Robert Park, back in 1929, said the same thing. He said the black man, or the Negro, was the lady of the races.
So in some ways I think that white culture—and this is not every white person but it is navigating in our cultures here in America—sort of has less fear of black gay men than it does of straight black men. And I think that the straight black man may have a more difficult time in other words because I think that part of the domesticating that goes on requires men to downplay their masculinity. So if they are more feminine, they are less threatening.
You moved from the projects of Chicago to the halls of education and had to navigate in both black and white worlds; you also moved in an economically disadvantaged world and an economically accessible one. You may not have been transracially adopted, but there is a correlation between your experience and that of many transracial adoptees. Tell me about your reality being raised in Chicago. How did you survive—and dream?
First of all, Rhonda, let me tell you that most, if not all—I don’t know all—but most black people who are successful and who come from a background like mine probably more than likely had along the way a white surrogate parent. It’s just the way our culture is. Most successful black people can point to one, two, or three close intimate relationships with a white mentor that helped them get to where they are. So all along in my childhood, my white teachers took an interest in me because I think I was different from my contemporaries, from my peers. My mother was educated, and she took school very seriously, but we lived in the projects. All of my siblings did well in school. I already had a different kind of way of speaking and behaving and thinking about the world compared to some of my peers. And so my all white teachers—I can only remember having two black teachers out of ten years of elementary school (including pre-K and K)—they took an interest in me, and some of them took a real personal interest in me, driving me in their cars to places, giving me personal advice, and allowing me to call them on the phone.
I have not thought about this before you asked your question, when you said that “although you have not been transracially adopted”—adoption is a formality. Of course I think the people that are transracially adopted have a deeper experience than the one that I am claiming to have now and that I’ve claimed that other blacks who are successful have. But we are in some ways adopted into a “play family” of whites. I would be interested to hear what white people think about this, but I will venture to say that in my experience many liberal whites who are interested in a successful African American feel that it is part of their responsibility to develop instant relationships with blacks and to shepherd them into the mainstream or provide access, to protect them, in a sense. I often see this, even in my own white friends and colleagues and so forth. While in part it is an excellent thing to have these kinds of relationships, the problem is, and there is a problem, they often continue to have a paternal relationship with black people as opposed to allowing black people to come of age. You know what I am saying? They, these black people, are always pets to a certain extent, and it becomes a problem. Even though the white people that I am referring to want to provide these opportunities, somewhere in the back of their mind and in their subconscious, they don’t see them as equals. If you’re always having the responsibility of shepherding somebody, that person will never be equal to you. And so I think that it is a double-edged sword. I think that it is a great thing, and I think that it has been wonderful in my experience, but I also think that it has consequences. I believe that is why I experienced so many problems with whites who I had intimate relationships with—by intimate I don’t mean sexual, I mean close relationships with—because they saw themselves in a paternal role, even though they were my friends or whatever, and then, when I exhibited my equality with them by having the right to say and do the things that they were saying and doing, they became offended, I think because they did not see that as my role or they didn’t expect me to exhibit the same kinds of characteristics and attitudes and dispositions as they had.
While I have not heard the term pets used before in referring to the paternal relationship whites have with black adults in a formal or informal adoption setting, I do see (and have experienced) patterns of paternalistic/unequal relationships between white adoptive parents/adoption professionals and adult adoptees of color. When I have experienced what you talk about as an adult within the adoption arena, it feels like I’m being patted on the head, and there is a usually a “caring tone” the person uses when they tell me essentially that they know what is best for me as an adoptee—and they barely know my name. The good news is that discussion on this issue is starting to take place in the transracial adoption community because it is a reality.
Having said all that, how were you perceived by the community you grew up with in the projects?
I think it varied. Some of them saw me as an oddity.
Was this community predominately black?
Yes. It was all black. I don’t remember a white person or a Hispanic person in the two-mile radius of where I lived.
I was perceived as an oddity for a while. Rhonda, I never changed. I was always me. I knew that I wanted something out of life. I wanted to be successful. I just had dreams. I always strived to achieve greatness and success, and so once they saw that and saw the difference between me and them, and the fact that my success was coming at an early age of sixteen or seventeen, they began to have great respect for me, and it has not diminished to this day.
You earned your B.S., M.A., M.Ed., and Ph.D. degrees within an intense and compressed period of time. During this stage of higher education, how did your identity develop? Did you feel smart, valued as a person and as a black man, specifically? Was your own rhythm and experience reflected in the curriculum you were taught and in your college experience? If not, how did you compensate?
I felt like I was becoming the Vershawn that I had always been. In terms of my identity, I would not have felt complete or full if I did not have a Ph.D. I knew when I was in high school that I was going to get a Ph.D. There was no doubt about it. I felt like that was my trajectory, just like people go from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. That’s just what we do when you get older. That’s how we socialize people into our world: you are a teenager, you are an adult. To be the black man that I knew myself to be, I needed to get a Ph.D. And I have two master’s degrees. You don’t need two master’s degrees to get a Ph.D. But I didn’t feel restricted in my own mind in any way. I felt great! When I say that, I am not saying it in a superfluous way. No, I mean that like Alexander the Great. I felt like a great person. I felt accomplished. I felt like I could do things. I used to have flying dreams. That’s how school made me feel, and by getting these degrees I felt like I was Superman. I have a very high self-concept and very high self-esteem. I am not overblown. I am not arrogant. I don’t say no to myself. I let other people say no. I am not afraid to ask questions or try new things.
It came from my childhood. I think that it came a lot from my mother, who allowed me a certain kind of space. Now don’t get me wrong: my mother was complicated. She tried to restrict me, too, because she was afraid that as I moved into the white world that I would be harmed. Though she also knew that the only way for me to be successful was to provide me with educational opportunities, and she supported those. I grew up in a large family. I have eight siblings. Being number 8—I have a younger sister, and she is number 9—I had to fight for myself or get beat up, so to speak. I saw that, too, when you knew how to get things done, things went better for you. And then I just learned. Like I said, it meant so much to me, to my self-identity, to be educated as I am.
One of the most eye-opening and raw experiences I think for many black and biracial transracial adoptees, like myself, who have been raised with a color-blind mind-set, is that we eventually step out into a harsh and indifferent society without our white parents or siblings to validate us. That color-blind bubble that we grew up in [was] filled with a hefty dose of white privilege bursts. The unfortunate part is that for too many of us, we don’t have a playbook on how to deal with walking on a street, sitting in a restaurant, serving on a board, or being stopped by a police officer while black or brown. What are the rules that you abide by? What are the rules for, particularly black males, being stopped by the police? Given that you are quite educated, are you now exempt from some of these rules?
I think that my education, my middle-class identity, my sense of culture and understanding—all of that works for me to insulate me sometimes, not all of the times, from the routine surveillance and oppression that other black men face. Because I am somewhat domesticated in my blackness by me being a professor—and other characteristics, like growing up with five sisters and Mom all the way to my curiosity in reading books—I come across as different from the black men that are most threatening. And I also know how to capitalize on that when I go into, for instance, restaurants. I ask questions insightfully and those I am talking to hear it in my speech. They see my mannerisms, and they hear a kind of college talk. And so it does insulate me in some ways. I realize that my bourgeois sensibilities and performance protect me.
However, I dislike the fact [that] some people think that all black men should be me, and [that] if they were, they wouldn’t be in as much trouble as they are in. That is ridiculous. Black people—women and men and children—should be allowed to be as varied as any other group of people. To put them all together into one role or one model is outrageous. I can’t stand it when other black middle-class or upperclass people like Bill Cosby come out criticizing underclass black people for doing this or that. Nobody comes out and criticizes whites on the basis of race for shooting up people in Columbine. They don’t say, “Oh, that is a white person and they need to get it together!” No!! In other words every human on the face of the earth is imperfect. Every racial group has people who commit crimes and do all sorts of things. And black people should not be scrutinized to such an extreme degree for behaviors that every racial group exhibits. So, no, I don’t think that they should all be like me. I think that racism should just stop!
Recently you published another book, From Bourgeois to Booji: Black Middle-Class Performances (2011), which looks at the progress of the black middle class . . . from the post–Jim Crow era to the present. What is the premise?
Let me define the difference between bourgeois and booji. Bourgeois describes our common perception of middle-class people. It is the French term that basically means middle class. Now there are degrees of “middle classness,” but I am not going to go into that. In general bourgeois means the middle-class sensibilities, attitudes, ways of living, and ways of thinking. Booji, on the other hand, is a black term that sort of means acting like you are middle class. Sometimes the word is used in a positive sense. For example: That person is very booji. But sometimes the word is used as an epithet to say that that person is acting like something that they are not, like they are acting white, so to speak. Or the word booji is used when the person is acting too snobbish, like they are looking down on people who are just like them.
The idea behind my book is—in E. Franklin Frazier’s study the Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States, there was a group that was not really discussed. In this [1957] study Frazier said that people who benefited from civil rights opportunities and from the civil rights bill that were underclass but because of affirmative action et cetera they were able to raise their class status—this was not the group he was studying.
And so my book actually is a book that looks at that particular group of people. Who are black people, who like myself were raised economically poor but took advantage of affirmative action opportunities and increased their class status? What is their perception [of] America, class identity, gender, affirmative action, et cetera?
Because I think that the middle class should not just be studied by sociologists or in sociological categories, it is really a book that looks at the black middle class from an arts and humanity perspective . . . how poets think about black middle-class people, playwrights, and visual artists. There are also essays on womanhood and manhood.
In your opinion, especially given your education and life experiences, how can white parents who adopt transracially help their children of color competently navigate in different worlds without eliminating the core of who they are?
White people who adopt transracially need to do some autoethnographic work. I think that of course they need to look at how they can benefit their kids that they have adopted, but I think that they also need to think about themselves. What does it mean to be a white person in this society, and what does it mean to be a white person raising black kids? I think that they would do themselves a great benefit by being open to the ugliness as well as the beauty and cultural and interracial interactions in relation to transracial adoption. They cannot ignore their white privilege and the ways that they will pass on some of that white privilege to their kids and some of their white privilege that won’t be passed on. It is difficult. Parenting is difficult no matter what race you are or what race your kids are, but it is even more difficult, I think, transracially. I am not saying that it shouldn’t be done—it’s just more difficult. Also I don’t think that white parents adopting kids of color should try to define what white is or try to define what black is for their kids. They should give their kids a range of opportunities to mix with different types of people in different types of groups with some freedoms.
My wife has two kids that are biracial, white and black. And I witnessed with them—and they are teenagers, one is thirteen and one is sixteen—a tremendous racial struggle, their difficulty with trying to define themselves as white or black. My wife is black, but they would say to me that I am so dark. I could have let that stuff get to me at first, but I had to nip it in the bud.
How exactly did you nip the situation in the bud?
I told them yes, that I was dark and they were light-skinned, and why did that matter? I couldn’t really get into a theoretical conversation with them at the time. But I did not want these categorical racial distinctions based on skin color being brought up in my house. I am the step-parent, but I was the person who was being pushed to the edge because I am dark.
Through my actions I hope I am showing my stepkids that it is not okay to make superficial distinctions about people. This is still sort of transracial, when I think about my experience. I try to have my stepkids around all types of different people: around my colleagues at the university level but also around people from the ’hood, around people who are white and people who are black. Also it is important for them to be in company where black and white people are together and not just separate, so they don’t think that they have to be this way with one group and that way with another group. These kinds of diverse interactions are tremendously important to me for my stepkids to have.
Dr. Young, thank you immensely for your time. I know that your schedule is full to the brim, and you have to head out to an appointment. Your words today have opened my mind further on the issues of race, identity, and adoption. It is much appreciated.