An, essay appeared in the New York Times Magazine linking neediness to the rejection of African American culture. A woman out in California spent 12 year trying to pin down the common nerds and what makes them be. During a year of painstaking fieldwork she studied the nerd in their semi-natural environment, a large San Fransisco Bay High School. One time she asked female student(a "girl" to the layperson)to define the word blood and a shocking example of cultural rejection was uncovered. The student acted as if she was in the spelling bee by spelling the word B L O O D and then claimed that it was the substance flowing in her veins. When any normal person would know that it was the excepted word for friend.(I had never heard this definition, but as one with no culture, how would I have any knowledge of words or language?) Obviously she's was rejecting African American culture. It seems the conclusion was that nerds were "HyperWhite" and rejected the African American influence underpinning the "cool" white kids culture. The real kicker comes at the end:
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.
I don't really have the words to describe the above, other than I was under the impression that nerds were shunned for their lack of social graces, not due to consciously exercising their white privilege to reject the adoption of a non-culture stolen from the oppressed African American "youth".
You can't make this stuff up. Honestly this the kind of stuff you ought to be reading in the Onion. I don't know how this stuff doesn't get laughed out off into the trash heap where it belongs, but then again I hear things look different from the Ivory Tower and that perhaps in some corner of the new math you can take nothing from something and end up nerds....
P.S. Also, if ever you feel the need to show your solidarity with the downtrodden African American youth, just drop the g's from the ends of words. Remember no other dialects of the non-languate English do this, only the African American version does.
Hat Tips: TigerHawk and JustOneMinute