robin_anne_reid | *marking article on race and nerdiness*

marking article on race and nerdiness

I have to find time to learn these new online bookmarking programs--after the encyclopedia is done, that will be my new project! Until then, a quick link to mark a linguistics article gakked from The Language Log on "nerdiness" as a racialized category (superwhite or hyperwhite behavior). The link only goes to a summary, but I'll order a pdf file from Interlibrary Loan if my university's fulltext databases don't already link to it!. (Also wonder how gendered that term is--I remember some complaints about past memes on nerdiness or geekiness that skewed more toward math/science geekiness and not humanities geekiness, which emphasizes gendered group geekiness)

This has got to fit into the growing debates on constructions of race and racism in fandoms.....

ETA: Since I'll be reading this paper at a conference in England to an international audience, I've realized (thanks to the comments) I might need to give some background on the peculiar "American" (I put it in quotes because it's actually the U.S., but part of this imperial notion of ourselves as a nation has been claiming the whole continent) ideas of culture/race/language/self-perceptions, especially the "talking white" and "wiggers" debates:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.pitts/ogbu_theory_

http://www.socialwork.uiuc.edu/people/faculty/blackJanCarter.html

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/perry032/impossible/spring_reading.html

http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/pace/14-book%20report.htm

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/gentips/02/07white.html

http://astro.ocis.temple.edu/~ruby/aaa/matt.html

ETA the second: Thanks to

cryptoxin who gave me this link!

Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters by Ron Eglash, a 2002 piece.

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there was an article on nerdiness in the New York Times magazine section today, Sunday.

Cool--I'll have to get my friend who subscribes to send me a copy. Thanks!

The issue was discussed in the Sunday NY Times. Here's a link to itthe article online:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazine/29wwln-idealab-t.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1185750567-5asrxevK1q/obADZW2bXCA

Thanks!

I haven't read the articles yet... But I gotta say, I know multiple nerds of colour who would have more than a few issues with the idea that nerdiness is 'hyperwhite' behaviour, however dominated by whiteness many locations and products of geek culture may be.

*shrugs* I have to read the article as well--and that's not going to happen until after classes end--however, linguistic methodology is more descriptive than prescriptive--if she's arguing, as she may well be, that this reflects language/perception among the group whose language she's analyzing, that's not saying that there's a prescription (or that other groups cannot take on hyperwhiteness as well). Since there are multiple examples of blacks accusing other blacks of "talking white" (I heard this debate when I walk across the parking lot on my campus) and "wiggers" (white U.S. teenagers taking on vernacular learned from rap music--I had a whole class of mostly white kids who claimed they spoke African American Vernacular English based on listening to hip-hop--we fought all term about their claims--especially since they could not generate utterances in the vernacular!), I'm not sure that anything in the article will limit nerdiness to whites (but anything that focuses on whiteness as a racialized category can be useful). The pictures and examples I saw in the article also focused solely on males--but that doesn't stop there from being female nerds, as well as nerds of color.

But before I do any critiquing, I have to read the article--mainstream media are notorious for bad reporting on academic conclusions!

Check this one out!

http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/ethnic.dir/nerds.dir/nerd.htm

Wasn't Steve Erkle a nerd?

See my comment above--identifying hyperwhiteness as associated with language and behaviors isn't restricting it only to pale pinkish people (at least in my understanding of language issues--in the U.S. there is the phenomenon of "wiggers"--white teenagers speaking what they believe to be African American Vernacular English learned from hip hop), and blacks accusing other blacks of talking white (I hear that on my campus parking lot). I imagine that Steve Erkle would be accused by many of "acting/talking white," which sort of supports what might be her idea (I haven't read the article yet, and the mainstream media is fairly bad at reporting academic arguments).

American racial politics make absolutely no sense to me.

Got a great link from another commenter you might enjoy taking a look at: http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/ethnic.dir/nerds.dir/nerd.htm (Black Geeks).

American racial politics....well, it's hard to compare across cultures, and the complex mixture of economics and irrationality in any oppressive hierarchy makes little "rational" sense, but I do have the sense that there is some extra layer of something in U.S. racial discourse (perhaps it's that extreme irony of the rhetoric of *freedom* and *democracy* that we tout that came into existence, Toni Morrison argues, only because there was an enslaved group to help "define" those concepts). If I were to recommend one book you might enjoy, it's Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in which she concisely and beautifully explores the literary-historical explorations of race the United States (arguing that "whitness" was defined only in contrast to "blackness"). And being by Morrison, the prose is a joy to read.

Noted

She links to the PDF of the article on her CV (http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/bucholtz/cv.html) (scroll down to publications).

It's an interesting article. It's based on fieldwork done in 1995-6, and the broader cultural status of nerds has changed significantly over the last decade. I wonder if there's been any corresponding changes in the patterns and dynamics that she describes.

Thanks--I hadn't seen that.

*nods* Problem with academic work is that it takes so long to get into print--and linguistic data gathering can add years to the process. I'm sure things have changed--that is also the nature of academic work.

If a final argument could ever be made, people wouldn't still be fighting about Shakespeare and Chaucer!

Suggestion for further reading:

Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters (http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/ethnic.dir/nerds.dir/nerd.htm) by Ron Eglash

Also of interest, viz. the comment below from

fjm, this post (http://www.robmacdougall.org/archives/2006/03/superman_i_secret_or.php) -- excerpt:

I’m also curious about the importance of Jewish identity to this story. Jones and Chabon remind us, if we need reminding, that most of the key figures in the origins of the superhero are Jewish. I sometimes wonder how much all of geek culture is a discourse on Jewishness in America. Not just the superhero thing, which is pretty obvious—nebbishy immigrants transforming into Nordic supermen to fight crooks and Nazis. I mean the whole cultural edifice of nerddom, from Amazing Stories to The Matrix. “A man is not a man until he owns land, Duddy.” The suspiciously Wagnerian epics of Tolkien and Lucas. Jewish-American Henry Winkler in Italian-American juvie-face as the Fonz. “The insult that made a man out of Mac.” The whole geek-jock “just you wait until our 25th high school reunion” baggage that so many skinny (and fat) bespectacled kids carry around in their psyches. Is it all a secularized, de-ethnicized mastication of Philip Roth?

[Edit: I’ve been chastised, in comments below, for tossing J.R.R. Tolkien into that melting pot of American Jewish geekery, a fate he might have found more horrifying than Mount Doom. Edit Edit: And then I was corrected for implying that Tolkien would have minded. Obviously, Tolkien was neither American nor Jewish, and my half-baked theories about geek culture probably need some more baking before they can accomodate him, and I should stick to my own subject area. In the meantime, I could revise that sentence to say “the epics of Asimov and Lucas,” though Asimov’s epics were really less Wagnerian than… what should I say… Thucidydean? Gibbonian?]

ooo--awesome! I'm going to have to send link to a friend who runs the IAFA division on communities and cultures and see if we cannot encourage him to come present! Because this is great! Thank you *so* much!

I'll have to wait until I am less braindead (graded a batch of online summer writing assignments today and worked on essay for Mythcon) to read what fjm is saying!

I posted this response elsewhere:

How *utterly* racist and obliviating.

Nerdiness is *not* hyperwhiteness. It's origin is among the Jewish
scientists who emigrated to America. The role models for an entire
generation of nerds were the nuclear emigrees and Werner von Braun.
The precision of speech descends from the "English as a second
language" phenomenon.

Oh, that artcle made my blood boil. It's typically American in seeing
only two real "races".

Were you able to read the whole article? I haven't yet? I took it to be yes, focused on the United States, and on racialized perceptions of language (there is the issue in the U.S. of blacks accusing other blacks of talking "white"--I heard that accusation made in the parking lot of my campus!)--and of 'wiggers'--white suburban teenagers parroting hip-hop language--I once had white students in a class claim that they spoke African-American vernacular English based on music--since they couldn't generate original utterances in it, I did not accept their claim)--and as part of whiteness as a racialized category in this country--i.e. descriptive, not prescriptive. But I hadn't read it yet, just the abstract. She's done some intresting work from what I saw when I skimmed her c.v. to get the article.

And in the usual imperialistic way, while I'm quite sure that the origins, as you say, were in European Jewish immigrants, the contemporary sense of the behaviors could still be "anglo" because of the complicated histories of Jewish immigrants in the U.S. and the power of the melting pot ideology.

Thanks for giving me the historical tip though--I may ask permission to quote you!

Ken MacLeod reckons it's the rocket scientists generally rather than the nuclear scientists, so that "nerdiness" may actually descend from fascism.

::shudder::

That...makes a frightening amount of sense.

*shudders as well*

Just in case you didn't see my addition, one of the commenters gave me this link to a more recent article on Black Geeks and Asian hipsters:

http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/ethnic.dir/nerds.dir/nerd.htm

I want to invite er nag er encourage him to come to the conference!

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marking article on race and nerdiness

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