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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Revenge of the postmodernist nerd narrative |
| 2007-07-31 |
| Tom Maguire, "Just One Minute" The NY Times magazine asks the age-old question: Who’s a Nerd, Anyway? Hmm - if you have been wondering who's a nerd for twelve years, your research might well be conducted with a bathroom mirror (works for me!). Rimshot! It gets better: ...Though Bucholtz uses the term “hyperwhite” to describe nerd language in particular, she claims that the “symbolic resources of an extreme whiteness” can be used elsewhere. After all, “trends in music, dance, fashion, sports and language in a variety of youth subcultures are often traceable to an African-American source,” but “unlike the styles of cool European American students, in nerdiness, African-American culture and language [do] not play even a covert role.” Certainly, “hyperwhite” seems a good word for the sartorial choices of paradigmatic nerds. She does have a point. Can you imagine a wanabee rapper with a pocket protector driving a Geek Squad VW Beetle? Had enough? I got plenty more where that came from: By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.” You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having. So young white nerds today are traitors to their whiteness by not pretending to be hip-hop gangstas? Could someone please just cap me with a nine right now? But quietly - people are sleeping... |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #11 Hoo Boy! |
| Posted by: Parabellum 2007-07-31 19:50 |
| #10 Yay me. It's just that I forced myself to read through the tripe, and not only does she bore me with her fermented white guilt/rage/insecurity/projection-- she dosent even begin to explore the glory that is nerddom! I should know, I are one. And I have the D&D library to prove it! (I think there is a huge overlap between nerd and geek.) |
| Posted by: N Guard 2007-07-31 18:41 |
| #9 NGuard wins the coveted "Snark of the Day" award! |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-07-31 14:32 |
| #8 LOL, N Guard! I, as the king of the nerds in my day, appreciate that one! |
| Posted by: BA 2007-07-31 14:08 |
| #7 Does anyone sense that she's projecting rather than analysing Ding! We have a winnah! The whole thing to me sounds like one part of post-grad grantsmanship writing mixed in with 3 parts of fermented white guilt, baked untill half done. Frost with a nice thick layer of projected rage, and sprinkled with shavings of intelectual insecurity. Serves one (neurotic twit). |
| Posted by: N Guard 2007-07-31 14:02 |
| #6 Does anyone sense that she's projecting rather than analysing. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2007-07-31 12:58 |
| #5 Angie Schultz, They're small dimensions. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2007-07-31 12:56 |
| #4 Angie, they lost me when they started putting the Bosons in the nucleus sideways. |
| Posted by: Abdominal Snowman 2007-07-31 12:10 |
| #3 What is a nerd? Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been working on the question for the last 12 years. Wonder what it's like to waste twelve years of your life? |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-07-31 11:56 |
| #2 From the article: As a linguist, Bucholtz understands nerdiness first and foremost as a way of using language. And this is why her entire analysis is bogus. As a physicist, I understand nerdiness first and foremost as a desire to know what makes stuff go boom, and how laser beams work, and that space actually has 27.5[1] dimensions. Linguist nerds thrill at knowing how to say "Kiss my ass, professor," in Sanskrit, !Kung, and Quechua. [1]Or whatever today's number is. I know a guy who quit physics when he heard that. Can you imagine?? (He couldn't.) |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2007-07-31 11:48 |
| #1 What a load. But typical of the NYT. The obsession is to call certain customs "derivative", assert that they come from another culture, provide a supposed "trace" that always ends up with the parent culture being one that is currently labelled as "oppressed". This allows the CURRENT members of the "oppressed" culture to claim credits and puff themselves up as being more influential than they are. Here, the idiot admits she can't trace it to any culture that's officially labelled "oppressed", but can't condemn it as part of the "oppressor" class, because she can't detect elements from it either. So she makes a stab and calls it "hyperwhite" because of the CLOTHES. Shithead. I'm part of the nerd culture, and clothes HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT, as if we were goddamn Beverly Hills airheads obsessed with FASHION. We were so wrapped up in the cool intricacies of electronic artifacts, we just fell into the habit of wearing what was handed to us by our "white" parents. We were into learning and made high grades, but given the Ghetto idea that high grades===Oreo cookie (black on the outside, white on the inside), we hardly got any black nerds: First one I ever saw was the Black kid in "Bloom County". We were ostracized by our white peers, but the black/hispanic kids at my school embraced me, probably because Nerds are TRANSPARENT. What you see is what you get, and our different drummer drummed a tune whose verses said that brains, not color, counted. It was OUR culture who created the tools that allowed people of ALL OTHER CULTURES to find each other and keep their cultures going. Hey bitch, when your computer goes on the fritz and ya can't do your work, let's hope the nerd you call to fix it didn't read your article and take insult. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2007-07-31 10:29 |
