Here's John on Barack and black nerds. I obviously disagree. But it's fun to read about the fate of black nerds in TNR. I think some honesty is due in this debate--I've never fit squarely in the black nerd box, which may skew my perspective. It's true, I loved D&D, the Commodore 64, comics and Star Trek TNG. I also loved Galaxy Rangers, G.I. Joe and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. But so did most kids I knew. D&D and my interest in fantasy was the one thing that really marked me as different. None of my friends told me I was acting white for playing D&D, they just thought it was weird. But they thought it was equally weird that my parents didn't have a couch, that my house was basically covered in books, that my Dad ran a business out of his basement.
I never had the whole goth/mohawk/black trench coat thing working. I didn't really hear Led Zeppelin until I was well into my 20s. I loved football and basketball, was about as hobbled as most boys I knew when it came to girls, and a mediocre MC. Perhaps most importantly, I was terrible at school--I mean really bad. I almost failed the eleventh grade, and I dropped out of college as soon as I saw a viable out. Does all this mean I'm not really a black nerd? Or is it just that the rules are different if you're a black nerd in a black community.
I think different cultures have their rules and mores. I'd say the mores of the black community didn't all come natural to me--I was terrible at basketball, but I had to play because it was the official neighborhood sport. I was an awful dancer, but at a black party there is one person who will be ridiculed more than the guy who can't dance--the guy who doesn't dance at all. That last point is key. The thing I came to love about my community was that they didn't expect you to be a master, but they expected you to try, to fight--sometimes literally. If you saw ten dudes banking your homeboy, you had to help--not because you were Bruce Lee, but because that was your man, and you were expected to take the fall with him. Winning wasn't the point.
This is a rambling, rambling post. The point I'm making is about labels and how they're applied. I say that I was never a natural for the community mores, but I bet that's true--in varying ways--for half of all of us. Kenyatta dances like she comes from West Baltimore (or the West side of Chicago) but she can talk like anyone from the Oak Park of her youth. Me, I sound like where I'm from. I stopped bopping after my 30th--it didn't seem dignified. But I really don't have much else on the essentialism scale. And yet, for whatever reason, I've always been at home in Harlem, or--as Jay would say--on any Martin Luther.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
You not doing well in school doesn't sit right with me. It doesn't compute with what I know of you. The only thing I find more surprising is the fact that your parents didn't have a couch. That deserves a whole post. What did you do, sit on books?
TNC,
Personally I think nerd-dom transcends the grades you achieve in school, and to some extent the community in which you grow up. It involves having a passionate interest in a particular subject and pursuing it passionately sometimes to the detriment of everything else. Nerds are made not born.
I think when you said "The thing I came to love about my community was that they didn't expect you to be a master, but they expected you to try, to fight--sometimes literally" rings true for all of us who come from the other side of the tracks and aspire to something better. Hell Johnny Cash said as much in A Boy Named Sue when he sang "Son this world is rough and if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough." I think this rule is also universal. At some point in time everbody has to learn to fight, to try, and to not give up. What seperates a successfull fighter from an unsucessfull one is learning what and when to fight as opposed to being a bull in a china shop.
Thanks for the insight. Always a pleasure.
Gotta second Stacy on not having a couch. Wtf? That sounds like child abuse. I must know more!!!
Yeah, not having a couch definitely stands out as the weirdest thing in this post. You really do have to explain that one.
I stopped bopping after my 30th--it didn't seem dignified.
This is unfortunate.
One should resolve to bop harder after their 30th, regardless of your perceptions of dignity. Indeed, it is the freedom to reject conventional notions of dignity after 30 that's the sole sad advantage to getting old.
Myself, I'm gonna bop until I die, because bopping cannot be reserved for the young and stupid. I reject a world in which that's true.
Bop with me, TNC.
You fucking welchers. I can't believe you won't just buy the book. Is print that dead?
Hey it's on my list. The semester ends in two weeks and I'll have time to read again.
Print isn't dead but the habits of mind associated with good reading are rapidly dying out.
Dude, I HAVE the book, and I don't remember that. I guess I'll have to go back and look for it. Sheesh.
OK, let me make sure that I understand.
Loved football and basketball, but couldn't play worth a damn. Check.
Couldn't get a girl. Check.
Awful dancer. Check
Loved D&D, the Commodore 64, comics and Star Trek TNG. Check.
Preferred to live in your fantasy game world. Check.
T-NC, you may not have been a black nerd, but you certainly could have qualified as an honorary white nerd.
I think that it's rare to find a nerd who isn't smart (but they do exist), but it's not that uncommon to find one that didn't do well academically.
In my own case, I hated, hated, hated high school and it wasn't just the stupid cliques and all the other typical injustices that nerds feel: I hated the rote methodology of teaching.
I was also very stubborn when it came to the subjects I was interested in studying. If something interested me, such as physics, I didn't wait to get the information in class. I went to the library, checked out books, and learned that sucker on my own time and at my own pace.
But if something didn't interest me, I just couldn't be bothered to invest the time and the energy into it.
Even on the subjects I liked, this caused problems. I loved English, but wasn't much interested in following the specific reading list that my teachers laid out, not least because it wasn't unusual for me to have already read the books they wanted me to re-read, which I found infinitely boring and pointless.
In retrospect, I would have been better off if I'd been a bit less stubborn and a bit more willing to go along with the curriculum, but that's just the way I was and, as a result, I got out of high school with only a mediocre GPA (and that only because I finally relented in my Senior year).
Nor do I think that I'm that unusual. Four of the geekiest, smartest (and successful) guys I know never got beyond junior college (and one never even finished high school).
"You fucking welchers. I can't believe you won't just buy the book. Is print that dead?"
Ouch. I knew that one was coming as soon as I posted. It was on the list, but there were a few ahead of it. I will go purchase it right now as my penance.
Meh,
On the strength of Shani's comment, I'll do a post about not having a couch...
That there are not some
at least some
black men with no moves, no rhymes; no sense of rhythm.
Also, the deft putdown Coates scripts for the teaser paints him as an affable Falstaff, too clever to be a problem.
McWhorter's whole article seems to be coming from some other dimesion but this sentence struck me as especially bizarre -- does McWhorter think that a bully can't be clever?
The lack of black nerds is also why there are so few blacks involved in science and engineering (the domain of the nerds); why there are so few black golfers, middle distance runners, swimmers; what there are so few blacks in motor sports, and why a computer convnetion has about as many blacks as a Repulblican Party convention.
Many nerdy white males picked their pursuits to avoid jocks and since black culture is very much a jock culture, of course, they do not go together
I think JMac makes way too much over this "acting white" concept. But in all your talk of black nerds, I think you need to address the nerd/black/white intersections.
1) Consider this scenario,
"Hey guys, I wrote some poetry in my composition book, do you want to hear me deliver it?"
Without getting too much into epistemology about hip hop, for a lot of people that's essentially what rapping is.
A lot of folks will talk about rap like it was always this ever present monster - when back in the day when rap first started, everyone wasn't down, everyone wasn't convinced, when it wasn't cool.
And that was just at the listening level.
Imagine picking up a mic prior to Run DMC....
In the early 80's, Dude, you're a nerd.
By the late 80's, Dude, i'm your fan.
2) Wu Tang
If there's ever been a celebration of all that is black and stereo-typically nerdy
- comic books
- kung fu flicks
- HK flicks
- rap music..
Not only did these guys have rap names, they had additional code names/aka's.
Johnny Blaze!
Tony Starks!
In essence, what might be considered nerdy/corny amongst yt's, isn't necessarily the same amongst us.
"since black culture is very much a jock culture, of course"
Moreso than American culture as a whole? Really?
You fucking welchers. I can't believe you won't just buy the book. Is print that dead?
On the real though, your distributors are fucking up. They didn't have it at Borders the last two times I went. I guess I'll have to order it.
With regard to the topic at hand, I don't think that John's thinking realistically. People can think of Barack, at once, as cool and as a nerd. They can and will still turn around and make fun of black nerds. It might seem like a weird disconnect but that's just what it is. I mean, as universally respected as Biggie was and is, fat kids still got made fun of.
John seems to think that bullies are logically consistent. If they were, they probably wouldn't be bullies in the first place.
Peace
Most of the nerds that I've known have been poor-terrible academic performers. I'd go farther and say that the habits of nerd-dom (i.e. lots of gaming) preclude a nerd from performing well in school.
Good god, I caught all but one of your nerd references.
Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, who the **** was that?
I bought the Galaxy Rangers DVDs. Unlike Battle of the Planets, I was pleasently surprised at how well it held up.
Great insight TNC.
I gotta co-sign Andrew. I was the same way.
Considered "gifted", I skipped a grade in elementary school, loved computers, read a lot, liked sports but sucked at them, and was socially awkward as hell. I was definitely considered a nerd though my grades told a different story. I failed 8th grade, but because we were moving away after the school year, they pushed me forward.
Fact is, I hated hated hated school and couldn't be bothered attempting to learn things I had no interest in, but the stuff I wanted to learn I ate that shit up. Plus I got caught up with the bad kids doing bad shit so not only did half the school's population think I was a total nerd, but the other half was scared to death of me by association. Definitely an interesting dichotomy.
I felt high school was pointless and beneath me, was a general pain in the ass to my teachers and in some instances told them to their face that I just wasn't going to do certain assignments because they were silly and useless and that was when I actually showed up. I barely graduated and never set foot in a classroom ever again.
It's good to see that I'm not the only "nerd" to struggle in school. I guess everybody just learns their own way.
"Many nerdy white males picked their pursuits to avoid jocks..."
This makes it seem as though nerds realize they're nerds at a young age, and therefore decide to like computers, or cross country, or even NASCAR. This doesn't seem right to me.
Sorn,
You said, "It involves having a passionate interest in a particular subject and pursuing it passionately sometimes to the detriment of everything else." Actually, that is not the definition of a nerd, what you are describing is a geek.
A nerd is a general term for someone who is smart and works really hard at school. The nerd enjoys studying, and can usually be found studying while everyone else is partying. The nerd is very concerned about getting into a good college, and will work hard to get there. A nerd is not necessarily uncool (lots of nerds are also athletes and class officers), but usually is. Also, some nerds can use their nerdiness to their advantage like tutoring the cute girl in Physics class.
A geek is someone who has a passionate knowledge/interest in some particular subject (like you said). Now, this can be anything from Star Trek to Baseball statistics, from anime to heavy metal music, the geek will know everything about a particular subject. I know this guy who has memorized every line from the original Star Wars trilogy - that is a geek. Now, what complicates things is that some subjects that our society has deemed more geekier than others. For example, it is acceptable among the great mass of non-nerds to be geeky about sports, music, James Bond films, or certain other things, but it is absolutely geeky (and looked down upon) to know everything about Star Trek (any variation), computer engineering, Role Playing Games, etc. This was parodied in an Onion article from years ago about a Baseball geek who looked down upon a D&D geek.
A dork is someone who has little or poor social skills. They usually dress poorly, have bad table manners, tells bad jokes at inopportune times, picks his nose, and has trouble speaking to members of the opposite sex. The dork is the guy who can't score in a brothel. A dork is also the guy who writes a long post about nerds, geeks, and dorks.
And, some lucky few, like me, are nerds, geeks, and dorks all rolled into one. I call this "the trifecta."
Stacy,
Cross country running is a nerdy sport because you get to practice by yourself and do not depend on teammates. If you look at high schools with good cross country teams, they are the college prep schools. The same can really be said of golf. You need aspergers like concentraiton to be good at golf. Professional golfers can remember every swing of a round and usually keep records and have good attention to detail.
guys who end up as nerds realize that they were never going to be good athletes by fifth or sixth grade.
Ta
For males, black culture is more jock oriented than white culture. However, the reserve is true for women. Black males are overrepresented as college athletes and as professional athletes. However, as was mentioned in Hoop Dreams, many black athletes benefited from early maturity.
As you said yourself, you played baskerball because it is what blacks play. However, white nerds feel no need to play Lacrosse even if all of the white jocks are playing.
I think Andrew's right. There doesn't have to be a correlation between being a nerd and being "book smart". See, e.g. Heather Matarazzo's character in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" (Dawn Weiner) for an example of a nerd who does poorly in school.
Also, many gifted, but slightly quirky kids I knew back in the day, did poorly academically and sometimes dropped out of school because they were bored to tears with rote classroom instruction. See, for example, black kids like my nephew who can memorize entire catalogues of hip-hop songs overnight, but who have trouble remembering vocabulary words for an English quiz.
"Cross country running is a nerdy sport because you get to practice by yourself and do not depend on teammates."
No, trust me, I'm fully aware that cross-country is a nerdy sport. I'm not doubting that the things you mentioned, are in fact, nerdy. I'm just saying I don't think nerds recognize that they are nerdy, and are therefore attracted to these types of activities. Maybe a chicken or egg type dilemma. But who knows, this is probably a silly thing for me to dispute.
"However, white nerds feel no need to play Lacrosse even if all of the white jocks are playing."
Let it be known that most white male jocks do NOT play Lacrosse. That has more to do with status and geographic location.
Ragamuffin,
Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors was a cartoon in the late 1980's. It was based on a line of toys called "Wheeled Warriors." They were kind of like car versions of Mr. Potato Head. Where you can remove and replace various parts of the cars and add weapons and such. And to continue with our theme of blacks in fantasy. The good guys had white cars with a white driver, and the bad guys were in black vehicles with a green brainlike creature. Additionally, the good guy vehicles had weapons like guns or arms, while the bad guy weapons were like buzzsaws or things like that.
In the TV series, this was definately riding the coattails of the "Mad Max" movie series. You had Jayce, who was the leader with some special ring (I think he was a prince, or something). They were the good guys and fighting the evil green brain/plant creatures.
Now, if TNC was a REAL geek, we would have a frank discussion of who would win in a fight between the Thundercats and the Silverhawks.
"For males, black culture is more jock oriented than white culture."
This just strikes me as a generalization, that is basically unprovable. Leaving aside the fact that we're comparing a community of what, thirty, forty million people to one of about two hundred million, I think American culture as a whole is pretty sports-obsessed. There is a reason the Super Bowl is the biggest ad boondoggle of the year--and it isn't black kids. I've really noticed no difference between blacks and whites, in terms of sports obsession, or jock worship. The difference is in variety of interest, and home-life--but that has very little to do with being black, and everything to do with wealth.
OK, smartness and school success are not the same thing. But any excuse to use that line.
I agree with TNC, sports obsession is not more pronounced racially. It's pretty prevalent all through western culture. Almost every culture, in fact. I can't think of one modern culture that goes not have a sport fetish.
As another scholastically under performing nerd
(Got my BS in just under a decade)the issue is not nerdiness=good grades its good grades=linear thinking and externally motivated. Many nerds are motivated either internally or subculturally, and so dominant culture success can actually mean a loss of status in their chosen subculture, or can be seen internally as a capitulation to a crappy system.
Even now, my PhD brother, with less job security and similar wage, but more debt, calls me to ask how to do certain things, like negotiate mortgages and contracts, because he has learned from experience that if he goes in thinking lineraly, ad looking for external approval, the elliptical thinking and manipulative negotiator will skin him alive. Mike knows that he is suited for academia, but most environments are not like academia.
My kids just got a Thundercats DVD that had a Wheeled Warriors preview. My 7 year old son was interested.
I co-sign Fighting Words' definitions of nerds, geeks & dorks.
Being a nerd has pretty much nothing to do with school performance. I was having beers with a dude on friday that graduated from Cornell & goes to a top 20 law school & he was ragging on the nerds in his classes.
I don't know. For me, I just needed to go to school. I needed the structure. I just can't compute how a nerd could not do well in school.
But I do want to add that for nerds/geeks/dorks, there is a parallel universe from "normal" society. This is where the "nerdier" you are, the more highly regarded you are by your "nerdy" peers. I mean, in nerd culture, athletics are looked down upon, whereas knowing every Dr. Who or Red Dwarf episode is. Also, when I went to college, I tried to join the anime club. But I was looked down on by other anime club members because I was just a History and Political Science major and not one of the really nerdy majors like EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) or Molecular and Cellular Biology. I just could not win either way.
You nailed the critical point when you noted that "...different cultures have their rules and mores." And they also have slots (whatever they are called) for those who just don't quite fit in.
You note that, in the culture you grew up in, everybody was expected to try to dance, and to help out a neighbor in a fight. In the one I grew up in, everybody was expected to do well academically. As in, it was a non-selective high school (taking in anybody who lived in 3 neighboring small towns, and all the farms around them) where upwards of 98% of the graduating class was in college the next year. Including the kids who had been in the "non-academic" track -- yes, we had those back then. In short, virtually everybody would have qualified for "nerd" if the term had existed. But we still had cliques based on a variety of features.
Teenagers form groups. That's just how they behave. And those who don't quite fit, end up as a non-group group. If, by pure chance, that out group resembles a group elsewhere, you can get a term like "black nerd" -- but the point is not that you resemble that other group. It's just that you don't quite fit in; you're "weird". Which, I suspect, describes a huge fraction of your readers. Or Megan's, or Andrew's, or those of most other blogs.
First, I don't actually think "nerd" means the same thing as "geek", and I actually think we're talking more geek, while John McW is talking nerd. But never mind...
"T-NC, you may not have been a black nerd, but you certainly could have qualified as an honorary white nerd."
There's no honorary about it. He's a nerd, plain and simple, and welcome to all the secret pony rides in the back lot he can stand.
I'm an engineer. I've spent my professional career among nerds. They are predominantly white, it's true, but that's not what marks you as a nerd. And reading TNC, it's entirely clear that he is "one of us" in the same way that Brad DeLong, or John Rogers of KungFuMonkey is.
To cap it off, I no longer have a couch in my house either. Just lots of chairs, including Mom and Dad recliners. Damn. Soul mates.
This despite his affinity for writing posts that I have no idea what he's talking about. Who knows? He could be speaking Klingon. Now where's the Blackipedia?
As a card-carrying black nerd, I am mostly mystified by McWhorter.
I always get the sense that he doesn't actually know any black people -- at least not any who aren't also employed by conservative thinktanks.
We're always objects to him to be used for rhetorical points. That's why so little of anything he says makes any sense and can be so easily dismissed. A little time outside an office would do him a world of good.
thanks for reppin the westside of chicago, TNC.
i hear a lot talk about the southside, but the west side gets comparatively little love.
McWhorter....I always get the sense that he doesn't actually know any black people -- at least not any who aren't also employed by conservative thinktanks.
You too! What pisses me off is that he gets paid to spout all this bullshit on all these different platforms as an "authority" on black people when he prolly hasn't been to an MLK blvd in 20 years. Sorry for being "lazy" but he's the black Bill Kristol. Both of them are pulling theories out of of a hat.
The only racial difference in "nerdiness" I've encountered are black nerds tend to have more of a religious or political bent, i.e. practicing Christian or Muslim, or ex-Panther. Their religion requires them to study regularly and in their environment those are the dominant institutions.
Did you ever really fight with ten people over one guy?
I was in that situation once, I had three people and one of them got into it with a group of about twenty skinheads. My friend turned to me and said "Let's go!" and he ran over there and jumped on top of them like Wolverine, and for five or seven seconds I felt really bad about not following him in. Then he sort of got devoured under all twenty of them and by the time they got done stomping on them they both had heads double normal size and Doc Martin waffle shaped bruises all over them.
Ten out of ten for style, but I'm still glad I didn't bother with that.
I haven't the first clue about growing up as a black nerd, but I do know quite a lot about growing up as a white nerd, and let me tell you, you get plenty of shit from the cool kids who already know at the back of their mind that you're smarter than they are. I never got called "white" (I am white), but I got called a whole lot of other things. At one point, I considered going down the path of hiding my passion for things and ideas in order to seem cool. Then I realized, fuck these people, in a few years I'm gonna be beyond them. And I sucked it up in my nerd-dom and now I own all those fuckers. So I don't know, it's certainly possible that it's much harder for a black nerd than a white nerd, but I spent a miserable 6 years with no friends to speak of and not getting laid. So I guess I just need it explained one more time, what is different about the experience of a black nerd than a white nerd like me?
"I was an awful dancer, but at a black party there is one person who will be ridiculed more than the guy who can't dance--the guy who doesn't dance at all. That last point is key. The thing I came to love about my community was that they didn't expect you to be a master, but they expected you to try, to fight--sometimes literally."
Sorry TNC, I was the non-dancer and the non-fight-helper. Where does that leave me?
Interesting post. As another brother who had a C-64, played D&D, and can't dance, I feel you.
It's kind of weird because brothers would try to break me down as a nerd, but I never thought of myself like that because I was a decent athlete but for whatever reason that was never enough to bridge the gap. It's like whatever the situation was, we all knew that I was moving on to something else and they were staying right where they were.
I have a couch, but that's only recently. I read as a kid something that said furniture is a luxury in that you don't need it to live and I think that's true. I don't see anything wrong with sitting on a mattress or special pillow or something. It's kind of "conditioning" that it's wrong, but middle-class people in many cultures don't really have couches and do fine. (I don't know if that was your situation, but still)
On academics and nerds I'd agree it's not unusual for "nerds" to poorly academically, but I'd have to say the majority did well in areas they care about. In cases where that's not true they're quite active in non-sports extracurriculars. (Debate, Forensics, Chess, math competitions, Yearbook, Quiz Bowl, AV Club, etc) I come from a very white world though so definitions might be different. I'm skeptical/uncomfortable with the ida that "blacks" are more "sports oriented." At least in Middle-America white students are obsessed with sports and also alcohol. As I had no interest in either I was basically gay as far as they were concerned.
Ragamuffin,
Then, would you prefer a debate about which is better, "Starblazers" or "Robotech?"
Of course, as we all know, a real geek would ask, "which Starblazers, series 1 'The Quest for Iscandar,' or series 2 'The Comet Empire?" Our geek would then ask, "which Robotech series: Macross, Robotech Masters, or the Invid series?"
The answers are (as everyone knows): The Quest for Iscandar and Macross.
And yes, of course the Thundercats would win. Comparing the Thundercats and Silverhawks is like comparing Public Enemy to New Edition - they are just not in the same league. Although, Silverhawks had a better theme song (there, I said it).