The Unreasonably Popular Black Nerd Conversation
John McWhorter sums up my position succinctly: “Calling attention to the fact that black nerds are often teased by black peers for “acting white” elicits predictable reactions, such as claims that the problem doesn’t exist.”
Yeah, the problem doesn’t exist. Just by virtue of the fact that black people are inherently cool. If there are nerds among us, they are anomalies, probably infected at birth by the same gene that makes white people smart, yet incredibly uncool.
Tongue in cheek, people. Stay with me.
I’ve been listening to the unelected Black Nerd spokesman, McWhorter (and sometimes, Stanley Crouch), bitch about this “black nerds slammed for actin white” problem for what seems like a decade. I didn’t even know that group needed representation. I picture a whiny coven of old men plotting revenge over the ass whoopin’s and ego bruising they received as children. Yeah. Children are cruel (ever read Lord of the Flies?). Get over it. Stop turning your humiliation into a book, just because you have the nerd cred, i.e. degrees and media access, with which to do so.
Now that Barack Obama’s on the scene, McWhorter says black nerdiness is “in”–as if it were ever “out.” If you grew up in a black neighborhood, “black” and “nerd” go together like no-name kicks, high water pants and coke bottle glasses. Like the cute girl with the pigtails who stayed behind after class to talk to the teacher. Like the kid who the principal always singled out for good behavior. Like every freshman class at Morehouse. Like the kids who lived in fear of the 3pm bell. And yes, like the kid who got jawned on for “actin’ white.”
Point is: this was a problem for a very specific group of black nerds. So it is intriguing that McWhorter can push the angle that because black nerds were smart, they got jawned on for actin’ white and then get media play like it somehow indicates a problem for black America. I mean, really?
I have another angle on McWhorter’s thesis. I came up in the prep school system and I distinctly remember thinking, about some of my peers, “I know we attend white schools but do you have to sound white, too?”
I never thought this about the few black kids who grew up on the UES or in the Village; I thought this about the kids who, like me, took trains, planes and automobiles home to working or middle class black neighborhoods but still managed to sound like the subculture who summered in East Hampton. I mean, really?
And sometimes, they pulled rank. I remember one private school senior speaking down about her Bronx family members in front of a small assembly of tony Manhattanites and me. Her facial expression, tone of voice–both implied, with some show of shocked disgust, that her cousins treated her different because she valued education and they did not, she valued “proper English”, but they did not. I cringed in my seat. “Ever think,” I wanted to say, “that you stand out among your family because y’all live in the South Bronx but you sound and act like a stereotypical Upper East Side JAP?”
I remember this incident though, because of the girl’s mother. She’d sought me out after the panel, perhaps because I was the only other black person there and was a few years older than her daughter. She was West Indian, like me, and spoke with a 24/7 Caribbean accent like my mum. So I code-switched and inflected my speech with a little Caribbean dialect, too. The woman’s eyes lit up and she said, “Come meet my daughter!”
Her daughter was less than thrilled. She didn’t need a mentor, which is what her mother was trying to force upon both of us in the parking lot of the school’s campus. The meeting ended awkwardly. I tried to get the mother to smile. Her daughter’s first-class education–the thing for which she had undoubtedly sacrificed–formed the chasm that now separated them. I understood that from my own life. But how difficult it must have been for the mother to at once, feel pride to watch her daughter speaking on a panel but then, listen to her child denigrate their family in front of strangers. Talk about an Imitation of Life moment.
McWhorter’s bully and my private school example represent two sides of the same coin. They speak from the same bleak landscape of low self worth in that they both equate “being educated” with the race to which they do not belong*. Now, why doesn’t McWhorter make that point?
* I write this, recognizing that race is socially, not biologically, real.
