113 thoughts on “Hyperwhite or Ultrabrown?”

1. I know that American culture, and American cultural history has largely been dominated by the binary opposition between “Black” and “White”. But I’m mystified as to how Dr. Bucholtz could spend 12 years of studying nerds in California and still think of nerd culture that way. Squareness is global and was appropriated a long time ago.

   how asians became white: I first noticed this effect 10 years ago, at a party where a friend of mine commented that the guests were all white. I responded by mentioning about a dozen Asians; oh, she said, that’s right, but you know what I mean. At a recent UCLA conference I attended, two speakers complained that everyone on the panel was white, without even realizing that one of the speakers was ethnically Chinese, and another was an Asian Indian with skin darker than that of many American blacks.

2. there are a certain group of people for whom simple narratives and models of the universe work well. some black american leaders were hostile toward tiger woods’ vocal acknowledgment and adherence to the 3/4 of his heritage which was non-black because they are worried that the black community will be weakened by ‘defection’ from multiracials. america pre-1965 was a black-white nation when it came to its racial narrative. the players knew how the game was played and everyone played their role to the max. white liberals know how to make the right moves and say the right things when the game is simple. when you add a rainbow though the model becomes more complex. and thinking is hard. sometimes propogandizing is easy.

3. True, but this is an academic working on this topic for a dozen years. So I’m surprised that (at least the popular summary) has her reducing nerds to hyper-white. Even if Asians are “the other white meat,” they’re not hyper-white. Immigrant squareness has more to do with home country culture than whiteness.

4. the game results in some peculiarities. for example, there is a tacit agreement in the american mainstream to simply treat latinos as if they are non-white (though about half list their race as white on the census). now, the thing is that i know some cubans and there is a lot of racism from ‘pure spanish’ self-conscious white cubans against afro-cubans and the mixed-race. but of course in their exchange with the rest of the world culturally fluent cubans know to trade in the fact that they are ‘non-white.’ so sometimes you get bizarre cases as when a black woman noted a few years ago that she just saw a white guy in front of her referring to a cuban american. of course that’s objectively true for many latinos, but it is just too complicated a model for most people to differentiate between the various groups and acknowledge that there might be differences.

5. If Dr. Bucholtz had wandered on to other parts of the campus, she would have seen that the science nerds are all acting ‘brown’. They wear spectacles and (ill-fitting) pants, eat from their lunch boxes or get whatever the cafeteria makes, shy away from contact with the opposite sex, and still believe that hard work and education will get them somewhere in life. Also, their best friend is likely to be called Anand.

6. True, but this is an academic working on this topic for a dozen years

   well, she is getting her papers past ‘peer’ review. perhaps it says something about the culture and peers in her discipline?

7. take a close look at her cv. linguistics is a social science, right? but i doubt she is the sort to be constricted by linear-hegemonic-patriarchal-constructs such as science 😉

8. were just as nerdy as an IITian or MITian around.

   This statement is acceptable? Man, the PC police here have huge blind spots.

9. Why is it unacceptable to point out that MIT and IIT have plenty of nerds? They’re proud of it. If you’ve spent any time around MIT, you’d know that. As for IIT, I’m working off of my friend’s accounts, but they were all proud IITans.

   I’m baffled here.

10. I think and hope both Rahul and Razib in 7 were being tongue-in-cheek

11. Let us not fall into the trap of using geek and nerd interchangeably, they are quite, quite different.

12. If you’ve spent any time around MIT, you’d know that. As for IIT, I’m working off of my friend’s accounts, but they were all proud IITans.

    the answer to this comment should be entertaining…

    i’m curious to know – i know everybody has this general idea of what a nerd is, but what are the subjective views of what constitutes a ‘nerd’?

13. If you’ve spent any time around MIT, you’d know that.

    Oooh, this made me chuckle!! The IIT part, too.

    😉

14. I think and hope both Rahul and Razib in 7 were being tongue-in-cheek

    re: #7, look, i understand why ennis is baffled. i had the same reaction. the woman is a prof at UCSB (though i do recall that is one of the less asian campuses). that being said, looking over her cv & her publications it pretty obvious she has a paradigm and empirical data isn’t going to budge. she’s not an empirical scientist, she’s a cultural mathematician, she has her axioms (e.g., white-black dichotomy, oppression, etc.) and derives truths which are ‘proven’ because of the axioms.

15. Amazing, she must think that science is the “white man’s magic”.

    But I’m mystified as to how Dr. Bucholtz could spend 12 years of studying nerds in California and still think of nerd culture that way. Squareness is global and was appropriated a long time ago.

    I’m not surprised by it at all. People who build careers based on the idea of pervasive institutional racism need a way to deride successful PoC as traitors who co-opted “white norms” to get ahead. I wonder if Prof. Vijay Prashad would find her work derivative of his ?

16. Hey guys, let’s not slam Bucholtz here. I haven’t read her work directly, so it’s very possible that she addresses the very issues I raise in the post. Puzzlement is polite, but acknowledges that there might be a variety of different answers. Let’s not jump to conclusions about what she’s like and how good her empirical chops are. Thanks.

17. but what are the subjective views of what constitutes a ‘nerd’?

    those who can tolerate the pain of the gom jabbar.

18. I was being semi-facetious when I made that comment. I wasn’t really offended, but it is sometimes amusing what people on this board find acceptable, and what they don’t.

    I was making a dig at the fundamental tenet of racial humor (which I don’t believe in), you are only allowed to poke fun if you’re it. Sure, MITians and IITians can make fun of their own nerdiness, but how dare you, especially where you contrast nerds with the cool folks?

19. I for one fully sympathize with the author of this article. It seems people are missing the point, the article is about the difficulty rejecting social norms.

20. here are UCSB demos: black 2.58% native american 0.74% asian american 16.23% caucasian 52.14% latino 17.86% international 1.43% not specified 9.01%

    source: http://www.collegetoolkit.com/Colleges/Overview/110705.aspx

21. So Razib, if one gets the gom jabbar reference, does that mean one is a nerd?

22. Ennis,

    I was initially surprised at your post because I thought that labelling folks as “nerds” was acceptable only in high school- and then to read that there are acdemicians devoted to studying nerds ! Then I clicked the link to the original article anfd pulled this up : “She has gone to high schools and colleges, mainly in California, and asked students from different crowds to think about the idea of nerdiness…”.

    Whew ! Confirms my belief that such labels are adolescent.

23. So Razib, if one gets the gom jabbar reference, does that mean one is a nerd?

    how should i know? i don’t have prescience…. (buddy, can you spare some spice?)

24. I was initially surprised at your post because I thought that labelling folks as “nerds” was acceptable only in high school- and then to read that there are acdemicians devoted to studying nerds

    It’s worth reading her post, there’s a whole nerd pride movement, include nerdcore rappers, etc. But yes, she’s interested in social labels, and these are often adolescent.

25. Also, can somebody please explain finally, definitively to me the difference between a geek and a nerd? Also, which of these terms is pejorative? And please don’t defer this for Abhi’s promised “Ask a Desi” columns.

    Confused, A Desi.

26. Ennis I love this post! These kinds of thoughtful ‘hey-wait-a-minute!’ commentaries are the reason I keep coming back to Sepia Mutiny.

27. i’m checking some of her pubs for “Asian.” here is some of what i found:

    http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/bucholtz/articles/MB_JLA2001.pdf

    This phenomenon is illustrated by the fact that, in U.S. culture generally, Asian Americans are ideologically positioned as the “model minority”—that is, the racialized group that most closely approaches “honorary” whiteness—in part because they are ideologically positioned as the nerdy minority, skilled in scientific and technical fields but utterly uncool.

    http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/bucholtz/articles/MB_LinS1999.pdf

    The ethnographic fieldwork from which the data are taken was carried out during the 1994–95 academic year at a California high school that I call Bay City High. The social group of nerd girls that is the focus of this discussion is a small, cohesive friendship group that comprises four central members – Fred, Bob, Kate, and Loden – and two peripheral members, Carrie and Ada. (Ada does not appear in the data that follow.) All the girls are European American except Ada, who is Asian American.

28. but what are the subjective views of what constitutes a ‘nerd’?

    My definition of a nerd is someone who follow their intellectual passions with little/no regard for social or financial returns. By that definition, most kids studying CS or EE are not nerds but rather financial pragmatists. Others would make some level of social dysfunction a necessary requirement but I do not.

29. rahul, all the terms are free form and subjective. what some would call geek others would call nerds. in any case, i’m a nerd. i’m not necessarily proud or ashamed, i am who i am 😉

30. btw, ennis – great picture. though the patterned shirt combined with the pin-striped trousers might actually be fashion-forward…

31. Here’s how you can figure out if you are a nerd, geek or dork, and what each term means. But for those who don’t want to try:

    A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

    A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.

    A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

    I think it’s missing some of the finer points, but I generally agree. BTW, I’m 78% Nerd.

32. i clicked through and skimmed the publications at the cv. she isn’t a statistical social scientist (e.g., no p-values or ANOVA). she seems to work in a sociolinguistic methodology, so she is focusing on the play of language within subcultures. that perhaps explains her lack of sensitivity to the quantitative presence of asian nerds in her ambient environment.

33. I don’t know much about geeks or nerds, but as I stated in this comment, I feel pretty deracinated (aka “white”) moving through the US, but I have the benefits of being ethnic when it counts, too. I get hassled at the airport, but I feel (perhaps naively) that all doors are open to me. I have the best of all worlds.

34. what is cool??

35. A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

    A nerd is a white male who is into some abstruse area of technology, wears 1950s style glasses, pocket protectors, shirts with funny patterns, trousers up to his chest, and is singularly unsuccessful with females.

    So nerds are an intrinsically gendered and ‘raced’ stereotype. That’s why you have to say ‘Asian nerd’ or ‘female nerd’.

36. So nerds are an intrinsically gendered and ‘raced’ stereotype. That’s why you have to say ‘Asian nerd’ or ‘female nerd’.

    wow, you should have told all those people in high school who referred to me as a ‘nerd’ with any adjective 😉 seriously, do we need to get into semantics wars?

37. without.

38. how should i know? i don’t have prescience…. (buddy, can you spare some spice?)

    Maybe you can get CHOAM to be more reasonable in their price of spice? Or you can run into the desert in your stillsuit and collect it yourself. Beware of the worm and don’t stand on top of a spice blow.

39. Razib, props for the earlier dig at the patriarchical-hegemonic-linear-science rejecting academic under question. I find the issue of race as being perceived in terms of self-identiity and culture fundamentally confused. I am proud of my very desi brownness and just because I happen to conjugate my verbs accurately does not add more cream in my coffee. Language and its usage is best understood in socio-economic or class-based terms and not in terms of race. So, by extension to the good professor’s agruments, Eminem is black?

    It remains true that a dark skinned person, no matter how white his speech may be, still faces common and petty instances of prejudice. Barack Obama, who speaks like anyone else from Harvard, says in Bernard-Henri Levy’s book American Vertigo, that he experienced everyday racism while trying to catch a cab in New York in the days before he was an all-star senator. That, is the problem of race. It depends solely on the color of his skin, not on his nerdiness.

40. I was initially surprised at your post because I thought that labelling folks as “nerds” was acceptable only in high school- and then to read that there are acdemicians devoted to studying nerds !

    I see your point but I think ‘nerd’ is a fluid, socially relevant concept that deserves some intervention of the academic sort. Its often a form of self-labeling…nerdcore has already been mentioned.

    re: ‘nerd’ vs. ‘geek’:

    My grade four teacher said that ‘nerds’ are geeks with brains. ie. both fall outside the boundaries of cool, but nerds are the clever ones with good grades in socially valued areas of knowledge (ie. literature, science, history math…)…geeks are into specialized knowledge — comic books, Tolkin, computer games. I don’t actually agree with this, but we were told by said teacher (a self-labeling nerd) that calling someone a geek is an insult and calling someone a nerd is a compliment. Go figure.

41. It remains true that a dark skinned person, no matter how white his speech may be, still faces common and petty instances of prejudice.

    “Common and petty”? I, and anyone else who has done work in critical race theory, would surely say “severe and systematic.” (And ‘white’ speech/behaviour can sometimes buy you extra whiteness points, but may also bring you closer to being perceived as a threat to white hegemony.)

42. At the risk of getting bashed for mentioning it, let’s consider also from which culture the nerdy white, desi, and African students might have picked up their, say, punctilious formal English.

    It’s not necessarily an “acting excessively white” thing. It could also be an imitation of what is perceived to be a more academic/formal/scholarly culture, which derives from impressions of a fictionalized Europe (esp. Britain) derived often from books.

    When people say “so and so talks like a book,” after all, who is the implied author of that book?

43. Also, in some cases, a perception of nerdiness can also protect a man of colour from being perceived as a real threat to certain important elements of the (white) social order. For example, the perceived sexual threat to white men’s domination of white women posed by the ‘yellow peril’ or ‘arab threat’ is potentially defused by the asexual/emasculated nerd, who seems to have marked himself as outside the arena of sexual competition. So the whiteness-nerdiness equasion is a complex one.

44. A nerd has to have some academic prowess. A geek doesn’t have to.

    What’s a typical desi nerd? See Bad-ass MC / Mathlete Kevin Gnapoor from the movie Mean Girls (In real life, Toronto’s own Rajiv Surendra).

    (I’ve always imagined real life Mutineer Razib as a little Gnapoor-ish. In the best possible sense, of course. True?)

45. Y’all should really read Bucholtz’s work before trashing it or before assuming that she doesn’t consider many of the issues you are concerned with (as you point out in 16, Ennis). You can’t rely on a blippy NYT description to present arguments in their full complexity; as much as you seem to care about the details, you don’t seem to have looked for them! First of all, her work is based on ethnographic research, which is a) a form of social scientific research [contra razib, who seems to have a very narrow idea of ‘science’], b) empirical, and c) local. I don’t think she claims to be uncovering what “nerd” (or for that matter “whiteness”) means globally, or even in all parts of the US or among all age groups. Her work is based on intense participant-observation in one high school (or at least the part that resulted in the 2001 paper mentioned in the NYT) in California; she gives a fairly detailed description of the school in the paper. One aspect of the school is how race figures into social groups, and she explains that in this particular school, the white students typically identify themselves in terms of a black-white binary, where Asians and others are deemed invisible by erasure (this is a common term in linguistic anthropology; it refers to a semiotic process whereby groups or practices are basically “disappeared” from a field of discourse):

    In spite of the school’s tremendous racial and ethnic diversity, resulting in the visibility of whiteness as a racial category, white students at Bay City High frequently operated according to an ideological dichotomy between African Americans and European Americans, the two largest racialized groups at the school.

    The comments people here have made about “nerd” as it plays out among different racial or ethnic groups points to some really, really interesting research yet to be done. But Bucholtz isn’t responsible for doing it, and she doesn’t get to decide how the media represents her work – which in this case may have been in unfortunately simplistic terms.

    Also, Razib? Sociolinguists are pretty much who put statistics into linguistics, looking at how linguistic variables are distributed across and within populations (including social categories like “gender” and “race”). This involves lots of p-values and ANOVAs (see, for instance). Sociolinguistics is now a broad field with a lot of different meanings though, and a lot of researchers are interested in the local salience and meaning of linguistic practice, rather than widespread patterns regarding social categories that haven’t been adequately deconstructed (i.e. “race” doesn’t mean the same thing to people everywhere or in every situation). Bucholtz is somewhat representative of people who feel that understanding locally-constructed social categories (social structures) is key to understanding what role language plays in human society. Your attempt to discredit her work based solely on a lack of numbers is ill-informed and cheap: numbers don’t make an analysis.

46. Well, if you wanna know nerds, ask Weird Al

47. Y’all should really read Bucholtz’s work before trashing it or before assuming that she doesn’t consider many of the issues you are concerned with (as you point out in 16, Ennis)

    You’re right, I should have been more careful. I have updated the post to include the beginning of your comment.

    Since you have read the work and I have not, does Bucholtz propose that her analysis of nerdiness as whiteness is general, or local and rooted in a particular high school? The article makes it seem as if she is making a broader claim, but it may be mis-stating her research.

48. One aspect of nerd-identity in the States seems to have been that of belonging to a smaller, non-mainstream peer-group at the junior high and high school level. Having done my schooling in Bangladesh though, I never experienced this — we all enjoyed studying, often forcing our principal to hire teachers for new subjects offered in the GCE curriculum. Almost my entire class, if they had been transplanted to the US, would have been considered nerds. So, without necessarily supporting Bucholtz’s thesis, it’s quite possible that the formative experiences of white nerds might generally be a little different from those of brown nerds. Even with ABD nerds, I suspect there’s a rather strong parental emphasis on academics that might not be quite as prevalent in the case of say, white nerds.

    Are there any studies (with quantitative, not anecdotal, data) on this?

    ObNerdComment: This comment was not prefaced by Irulan’s comment.

49. (I’ve always imagined real life Mutineer Razib as a little Gnapoor-ish. In the best possible sense, of course. True?)

    In real life, Razib is way sweeter than Kevin (who was hilarious). 🙂 More adorable, less um…slick and cocky obnoxious, if that makes sense (and if my memory of MG serves me…). But I see where you’re going with the comparison.

    Sorry, Razib. 😀

50. For example, the perceived sexual threat to white men’s domination of white women posed by the ‘yellow peril’ or ‘arab threat’ is potentially defused by the asexual/emasculated nerd, who seems to have marked himself as outside the arena of sexual competition.

    I agree. I would say, in fact, that the nerd is expected to have sublimated his sexual urge in his particular abstruse technical pursuit, and in any case, women are not expected to be interested in him. Besides which, rather like the hillbilly-hick, he stereotypically has buck teeth.