This book takes up the mantle of exposing the nuances and variability of the historically, culturally, and linguistically excluded language of middle-class African Americans. Tracey L. Weldon is a sociolinguist that specializes in African American language varieties while working as a Professor and Interim Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education at the University of South Carolina, located in Columbia, South Carolina, where she was born and raised. With areas of specialization in quantitative sociolinguistics, language variation, and AAE/Gullah, Weldon's book incorporates all elements of her specialization and cites and summarizes various studies that she performed over her research career. Since Labov's seminal work on African American English (AAE), Language in the inner city (1973), the focus of sociolinguistics research in AAE has been on working-class speakers rather than those in the middle-class, who were written off as linguistic ‘lames’. The goal of Middle-class African American English is to offer a broad overview of the usage and perception of AAE from the vantage point of middle-class African American speakers to understand the varieties that exist in that demographic. Though this book has weaknesses in providing seemingly circumstantial and potentially regionally restricted conclusions in its analyses (which she explicitly acknowledges), it also exposes many of the complexities that are within the Black middle-class community regarding its relationship to AAE.

The book's central argument is to ‘examine the use of AAE by middle-class African American speakers and explore attitudes about and perceptions of such uses’ (21), while focusing ‘largely [on] macro-social dynamics of race and class as they intersect with language variation' and drawing ‘on social constructionist models and perspectives, where appropriate as a combinatory approach’ (24). Her chapter on ‘“Talking Black” as Public Performance’ features the linguistic agility and oratorical talents of African American public speakers. Other works pursue the celebration of public speakers in African American middle class (see Articulate while black, by H. Samy Alim & Geneva Smitherman, 2012), but this work is unique in that it highlights specifically how these speakers navigate ‘the linguistic push-pull’ and the construction of both ‘race-based and class-based identities’ on the public stage while looking at the role that vernacular and other AAE features (grammatical, phonological, lexical, and rhetorical) play through quantitative analytical methods. While encouraging other linguists who speak vernacular varieties, Weldon's autoethnographic account of her relationship with AAE language and double consciousness showcases her unique middle-class experiences. This account analyzes her speech ‘through the eyes of others’ with a self-study and a risk and reward framework to analyze from the risk perspective of Mainstream American English listeners and the reward perspective of the African American speech community. It is in this chapter and other studies included that she introduces QR technology so that readers can hear authentic audio excerpts of the language described. Overall, the book is unique in that it showcases a broad overview and analysis of AAE usage and perceptions of the middle class that have been largely ignored in the wider literature.