Does Race Play a Factor in 'Nerdiness'?

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CHERYL CORLEY, host:

Any group of American high school students can tell you the difference between cool kids and nerds. It might be clothes or classes or their seats in the school cafeteria. Well, one researcher concluded that an easy way to divide cool white kids from the nerdy ones was to listen for words and phrases co-opted from black kids.

That was the topic of an article on the latest New York Times Sunday magazine called "Who's the Nerd, Anyway?" Mary Bucholtz conducted the research at the base of the article. She's a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and joins us from the campus. Also with us is Ben Nugent. He wrote the story for the New York Times magazine, and his forthcoming book is "American Nerd: The Story of My People." And he's with us from NPR West. Welcome to the program.

Professor MARY BUCHOLTZ (Linguistics, University of California): Thanks very much.

Mr. BENJAMIN NUGENT (Author, "American Nerd: The Story of My People"): Thank you, Cheryl.

CORLEY: Mary, let's talk a bit about your research and what you drew from it about the relationship between black language and nerd language.

Prof. BUCHOLTZ: I was interested in the influence of African-American youth culture on European-American youth culture. And it quickly became apparent to me that there was at least one group of kids at the high school where I was doing my research that was not engaging in African-American youth culture at all. And these were the kids that ultimately identified themselves to me and were identified by others as nerds.

CORLEY: Well, in your research, you described nerd language as hyper white. So what did you mean by that?

Prof. BUCHOLTZ: Nerds do a lot of things to mark themselves and their identities. These are not failed cool kids. They are kids who are deliberately constructing their identities against the cool kids that they orient to in their social worlds. And they do this with language in a lot of different ways. They avoid slang, because slang is a big marker of youth culture.

They use hyper articulate pronunciation, which is not characteristic of most youth and their casual everyday conversations. And they will use hyper formal vocabulary, such as Greco-Latinate vocabulary items. All of these things make confound maybe like young university professors, much more than like high school students. CORLEY: They want to appear super smart.

Prof. BUCHOLTZ: That's right. That's a huge nerd value, is to appear intelligent and also funny and non-conformist. Those are basically the three elements of being a nerd.

CORLEY: Okay. Oh, Ben, how did you come across Mary Bucholtz' work?

Mr. NUGENT: I came across Mary Bucholtz's work because I was looking for different theories to explain where this category that we use in our vernacular language - nerd - comes from, if there's any scientific definition of nerdiness, what the different attempts to get about definition where.

And so some of those definitions had to do with technology. But the most interesting ones tended to have to do with racial markedness, with the way people talked and how it related to people's perceptions of how behavior was associated with different ethnic groups. Mary Bucholtz was one theorist that I really liked.

CORLEY: Well, how did her work - Professor Bucholtz's research about the racial language of nerds and cool kids - kind of reflect your own experience?

Mr. NUGENT: It reflected my own experience in that the high school she surveyed, I think, was more ethnically diverse than my high school. My high school is in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was a college town in a rural area. But we still got a lot of African-American vernacular English, both from the hip-hop kids who were often white but were not, I think, what you would call the coolest, most hegemonic crowd, because their use of African-American vernacular English was perceived as excessive.

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Ben, what words do you remember the cool white kids adapting from black culture when you were in school?

Mr. NUGENT: Well, sweat was a big one. Like that girl at CVS sweats. She's gonna hook us up with some cigarettes, which, you now, like - those are two big ones - sweat and hook up. And then, another one was the use of the word (bleep) as a derisive term for either a male or a female. That was, at least, perceived as borrowing from African-American vernacular English.

CORLEY: And it was equal opportunity word, you're saying?

Mr. NUGENT: Exactly. And I remember lacrosse players using it on their opponents a lot.

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Well, you are listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Cheryl Corley.

And we're talking about nerd culture and African-American language. And with us are professor of linguistics Mary Bucholtz and writer Ben Nugent.

Mary, you did your research at a high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. What was racial breakdown on the kids you studied?

Prof. BUCHOLTZ: At the time I was doing the research, there was no majority at the school, but the two largest groups were black and white - whites slightly outnumbering blacks. And pretty much that dominated the racial landscape of the school so that smaller ethnics groups kind of had to align themselves socially and politically with either whiteness or blackness, because those were the dominant options at the school.

I did talk to some black kids who had primarily non-black friendship groups and kids who said that they had been mocked or teased by other black kids for not conforming to African-American youth culture norms. But I wouldn't call them nerds, and they didn't call themselves nerds. For example, there might be a gender or sexual minority kids in that group, or might be kids that grew up in middle class homes and oriented to youth culture, but it was primarily white youth culture that they were dominating - predominantly orienting to. So these are different kinds of kids.

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Ben, were there black nerds at your school, and how did they talk?

Mr. NUGENT: I had a friend who I talk about in my book a lot named David, who is black, And he hung out with us, with the nerdy click, which is to say he hung out with a click that was mostly white. And he actually caught a lot of flack from some other black kids in the high school. I remember they used to call him Mr. Wannabe White Guy, and they would walk behind him in the halls and talk about him. And the way he used language and the people he chose to hang out with were definitely perceived by this one other click of black kids as traitorous somehow, or a failure to understand proper behavior.

CORLEY: Mary, are you concerned that your research and the New York Times magazine article reinforces stereotypes in any way? That the high academic achievement of nerds is sort of directly connected to their hyper-whiteness or something like that?

Prof. BUCHOLTZ: That's - that would be an unfortunate way of reading the research and the article. 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. That's really not what this is about, and I certainly wouldn't want this to be understood as African-American youths are not oriented to academic culture. I saw lots and lots of high-achieving black kids, white kids, Asian kids, Latino kids, but they were also oriented to youth culture. The distinctive thing about the white nerds I was looking at is that they were not oriented to youth culture. And I don't think that's uniquely white. But when anybody does it, it is understood as white.

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Well, Ben, there's a lot of pretending that goes on in high school social circles.

Mr. NUGENT: Yeah. Yeah.

CORLEY: And I was wondering, were some of the nerds pretending not to be interested in African-American youth culture, or were they just genuinely indifferent to it?

Mr. NUGENT: Speaking for myself at that time, I think I didn't trust myself to properly understand what Ice Cube was trying to say. And so distancing myself from it was probably a way of showing I'm not going to put myself in a position of being ridiculed. And I think that that has pluses and minuses. On the one hand, you don't try to perform something you've learned from TV. And on the other hand, you isolate yourself from kids who feel somehow connected to those images on TV.

And everybody's pretending in high school. Everybody's sort of cultivating a set of practices that they think says something about who they are. And it's -one of the tragedies of high school is that through these decisions you make, you always isolate yourself from someone, because everybody's so determined to put a badge on themselves and say that's who I am.

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Well, Mary, your paper "The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness" was published in 2001 and based on research that you did in the mid-1990s. Well, since that time, hip-hop culture has gone mainstream. There's been more influence from a growing number of Hispanics in our society. If you were doing this research now, do you think your conclusions might be different?

Prof. BUCHOLTZ: I think nerdiness endures across these cultural changes that we're seeing. But whiteness is changing. And I think that might be the interesting issue. I was doing research in the Bay Area at a time when the population was shifting to so-called majority-minority. And the white kids at the school were having to grapple with not being an unmarked category, with having to orient themselves to racial categories in a way that their parents never had to. And I see this happening more and more, not only in California, but around the country. So whiteness is changing, but I think nerdiness is going to stay with us for a while.

CORLEY: All right. Well, Mary Bucholtz is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. And Ben Nugent is a writer. His forthcoming book is "American Nerds: The Story of My People." Thank you both for joining us.

Prof. BUCHOLTZ: My pleasure.

Mr. NUGENT: Thank you.

CORLEY: And we would love to hear from you. Are you a nerd and proud of it? Well, our program today talked a lot about labels we sometimes place on ourselves and others. Tell us what experience you've had being typecast. Visit our blog at npr.org/tellmemore to tell us more. Share your stories and your thoughts on any of the topics you hear on our program. You can also call our comment line at 202-842-3522. Again, the number: 202-842-3522.

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CORLEY: And that's our program for today. I'm Cheryl Corley, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Let's talk more tomorrow.

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