Sardonic Sistah Says

Hi, group.  My name is Freedom.  I work in a library.  I like to read books but every once in a while… I getta book…and its hard, ya know?  It started off when I was in school.  Ya know?.  As a literature majory you have to read 5-6 books a week on top of other things for other classes.  Its hard to get through books like Colson Whitehead’s “John Henry Days” or Hardy’s “Tess of D’Urbevilles”.  But then, somebody told me that I could get the book on tape.  They said, “Go ahead and get it gurl.   It’s just like reading; ain’t nobody gonna know…”

So I gotta it.  And I loved it. 

Then when I got out of school I kept doing it.  I thought, what’s the harm?  Its just one book, ya know?  I’d check the tapes out of the library and listen to them when I went for long runs and now I download them from audible.com. 

 I got daughter’s hooked, too.  She has listened to “Sense and Sensibilities” on tape and on the drive to look at colleges we listened to “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”.  She has all of BBC’s theatrical reading of “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” under her bed. 

And I wanna stop, ya know.  But it’s hard.  A couple of months ago I downloaded “Shalimar the Clown” to listen to on MP3 while I cleaned around the house, ya know, but then I felt so bad, so dirty.  I thought I can read this book.  I should read this book, ya know.  But I just wanted to listen to it and hear Aasif Mandvi read because his voice sounds so good and soothing.  I know I should read it myself.  But I can’t get this monkey off my back.  If I know there is an audio version I want to listen to it and sometimes I listen to it over and over again. 

I know I need help, that’s why I’m here.  I need to stop listening and start reading more.  I just wanna be able to have two or three books under my belt in a shorter time, ya know.  Its not like I don’t read!  I still read.  Not every book is on audio, so I still read some books that aren’t on audio.  But if a book is on it and I wanna read it but I’m already reading something else then I do it.  I have audio sets in the glove compartment of my car; I have them hidden behind the books on my bookcases.   I know its wrong, I feel so bad afterwards and good at the same time.  Its like I did it.  I listened to “Razor’s Edge” and finished ”The Journey of Man” at the same time.  

I don’t think I do it without the audio books.  I don’t think I can read as much or accomplish as much if I don’t have someone else’s voice in my head doing the narration.  I know I gotta stop, but I can’t… I just can’t…. I can’t…. I can’t

(breaking down in uncontrollable sobs)

O Lawdy Jesus help sinners like me. 

J likes to watch the TV show Beauty and the Geek. For some reason he’s convinced that the guys aren’t geeks although they snort when they laugh and a few come pocket-protector ready. Together we watched seasons 1-3 back to back and it wasn’t until then that I noticed something was missing.

There wasn’t a black nerd.

There have been at least two African American beauties but not one black geek has competed on the program for a chance at money, a needed makeover and a hot chick to hang around with if only for the duration of the competition. Most of the men are white guys with a couple of Asian males here and there yet I’ve never spotted a black male of any hue come on and Carlton up the screen.

No one has noticed. Not even the Soul Patrol from the Black Voices “Entertainment” boards who comment on almost every reality show. They decry when the sisters get the boot early from the dating shows but haven’t said anything about the lack of African American males on Beauty and the Geek. And its not that they haven’t seen the show, because I have seen posts on it. But then I also didn’t note their absence until I watched the marathon.

African Americans, especially African American males, are generally thought of as the opposite of geeks or nerds. We have the hip, relaxed way of talking, the edgy way of dressing and, supposedly, all of us have rhythm. Through our creativity we have given the world jazz, blues, rock, and hip hop. We are well represented in basketball, football and baseball. So by extension of shared heritage and melanin we are all seen as being, well, the epitome of cool.

It’s probably why African American culture has been appropriated and aped so much by the predominant white culture. During slavery, when whites saw blacks dancing in the slave quarters (who ironically were mimicking and mocking the way whites danced) they copied their style, sooted up their faces and took the show on the road. Bustles on the back of dresses were created to help mimic the backsides of black women. In 1930s and 40s Harlem whites perused black nightclubs to listen to and be inspired by black performers. In the 1950s some radio stations refused to play Elvis because he sounded a lot like the black singers he mimicked. A lot of what is thought of as American culture has been shaped by the African American subculture.

Linguist Mary Bucholtz notes that the “cool white” kids use some African American slang. In Benjamin Nugent’s article “Who’s a Nerd Anyway?”, he writes of how Bucholtz concludes that nerdiness is “a matter of racially tinged behavior” and that how people who act a certain way are “hyperwhite”. For the school nerds emphasis is placed on standard English (not dropping consonants or speaking in slang) and being witty (using obscure literary or scientific references or wordplay). They prided themselves in being apart from the hegemony of the slang speaking white kids. When appearing on NPR’s Tell Me More with Michel Martin, Bucholtz insisted that her paper wasn’t playing into the stereotype of black students being less studious or as racism among the two groups.

“My goal in doing this research is to raise awareness of nerds as an alternative to coolness and not nerds as inevitably aligned with whiteness against blackness,” Bucholtz told Martin. “I wouldn’t want this to be understood as African American youth are not oriented to academic culture.” Bucholtz also said that its not academics that denotes nerdiness but adherence to youth culture. Black kids who hung out with predominantly whites were not seen as nerds, nor were a subset of kids who had different sexual orientations. What marked the nerds apart from everyone else was the way they set themselves apart from their peers. Not adhering to youth culture is seen as be uniquely white, she said.

So what is nerdiness in Black America? What do African American think of as nerds? We define nerds the same way as white Americans: a person who is socially inept, culturally unaware, knowledgeable, perhaps overly obsessive about one particular subject (usually something the majority of people don’t care about) and corny.

As defined by James Hannaham from his article The Rise of the Black Nerd, “They’re neither co-opted conservatives nor keep- it-real black nationalists. Their politics are questioning, not exclusive. Rejected or misunderstood by blacks, whites, and nearly everyone else, their view of race matters balances the sins of America’s past with hope for an internationalist future.”

Author Kathy Y Wilson says of black nerds: “It’s blackness flipped inside out. …In the galaxy of black nerdiness, racial identity collides at the intersection of class, religion and education. Black nerds — often called Afrodemics — are blamed for “whitewashing” by studying at prestigious colleges and universities.”

Unlike white America nerdiness takes on a whole other context for us. For a white person to take on the mantle of “nerd” and set themselves apart from the majority its seen as their prerogative but for a black person to do it, it’s tantamount to treason within the black community. As a group that has had their language, culture and religion taken from us we have had to create other ways of becoming and staying unified. The organizations that we have created, especially when climbing the social ladder have been instituted to help keep us in touch and to strengthen the community. We speak one way while in the workplace and another when with our friends and family. To not follow the paradigm and could perilously put us outside of our community.

But then there are many of us who have followed the beat of our own drummer and have still been claimed (or reclaimed when we made it rich). Neil de Grasse Tyson, Larry Wilmore, and Colson Whitehead are definitely nerds. Although they are excellent in their fields (astrophysics, comedy and literature) many blacks don’t know who they are. They may talk about things we are interested in but they don’t engage us in a way that keeps us interested.

So perhaps for the next season of Beauty and the Geek producers might want to check out the Black Nerds Network and recruit some black male nerds from there. In checking out the site I don’t think they’d be interested. The whole point of the show is to change the men into “regular guys” but I don’t think the black nerds would go for it. They’re too cool for that.