*marking article on race and nerdiness*

[robin_anne_reid]

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.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

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".

[robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com]

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!

[fjm.livejournal.com]

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

::shudder::

[robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com]

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!