A July 29th New York Times article about some research by linguist Mary Bucholtz on nerds in California high schools has been bouncing around the internet lately. The thesis of the research, as presented by the article is that nerds are distinguished from non-nerds as “hyperwhite,” meaning that unlike cooler students, they don’t appropriate elements of black culture. Dirk Deppey linked it on Journalista, and offered this critique:
[N]erdiness is also an absence of redneck culture, Jewish culture, Hispanic culture, Native-American culture, old-money culture and any of hundreds of other kinds of culture. Likewise, — though I’m sure this is something of a stretch for cultural-studies types — one shouldn’t discount the possibility that nerd culture is pro-something, rather than anti-black culture, or that it may in fact have nothing whatsoever to do with race. And come on, statements like “a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having” are, if anything, antithetical to practical nerdishness: Just ask the Japanese. (Isn’t Quentin Tarantino’s worship of 1970s blacksploitation films part of what makes him a nerd?) Still, don’t let any of this stop you from seeing life exclusively through a simple black/white dichotomy, Ms. Bucholtz!
The next day, he linked to this post by Jason Tocci, which approvingly quoted the above critique.
What both Deppey and Tocci, and to a certain extent the original article, are missing is that Burcholtz is a linguist. Her work is about language use and how it reflects culture. Their focus is on media studies (specifically comics in Deppey’s case). A big part of the problem, of course, is that the article in question comes through the popular media–and not even the popular science media. The Times article came from the Style section, which is hardly the best place to get news about scientific research. Fortunately, the actual study she published can be found with about five minutes of Googling. It’s entitled “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness.” It was originally published in in 2001 in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. You can read the complete article here.
Now, the article is written for an audience of linguists, so it throws around a lot of terminology that won’t be familiar to people who haven’t had at least some undergraduate level linguistics (and probably a little bit of specifically sociolingustics). So I’m going to use my intro-level understanding of linguistics and slightly higher than intro level understanding of sociolingustics to walk through what she’s actually saying. Because even though she’s talking about language, something we all use every day, linguistics and anthropology are sciences and while we certainly don’t have to agree with her findings, dismissing them without understanding them is unfair.
The first thing to understand about the article is that it refers exclusively to high school nerds. So adults who have a knee-jerk reaction saying “that’s not me!” can take a step back and consider it from that perspective. In fact, her research is limited to one high school in California, and never pretends otherwise. The article is less about nerds as a whole than it is a case study of one group of people who are “racially marked” in spite of adhering to racial norms. This concept of “markedness” is critical to understanding what Burkholtz is saying. In short, this concept says that certain features are “marked” in society and others are “unmarked.” In white mainstream society, whiteness is an unmarked feature–it’s considered the norm and deviations from it are remarked on. White people in white-dominated places don’t think of themselves as having a race at all. This is also true of dialect. People who speak mainstream (or standard) English don’t think of themselves as speaking in a dialect. Of course, they are. Everybody speaks in a dialect. It’s just that Standard English is unmarked.
These are purely social constructions. Objectively, there’s no difference between Standard English and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of which is a dialect and which is not–they’re simply different. In fact, Standard English doesn’t really exist as a spoken language–it’s an abstraction in our minds. We don’t speak the way we write, but we have a prescriptive vision of the pure kind of spoken English, English without an accent. In mainstream society this unmarked dialect is strongly associated with the unmarked race–white. There are white people who speak in ways that are marked–the redneck culture that Deppey mentioned is one of these. Although these people are white, their form of whiteness is marked. They speak with something less than Standard English, therefore their whiteness is poisoned. They are incompletely white.
It’s also important to remember here that “black” and “white” are also pure abstractions, socially constructed. They are not limited to color of skin, but to significant linguistic and cultural factors. In the same way that black students who are seen to achieve academically can be marked as trying to be “white,” white students can be marked as somehow outside the unmarked norm.
This is all background that Bucholtz cites at the beginning of her paper if you want to follow the paper trail on this stuff, you can look at her references. Suffice it to say that up till now there’s not a lot here that I didn’t read in sociolinguistics textbooks in college. If you want a good intro to these and other concepts and how they impact rights, I recommend Rosina Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent. She does a good job of laying out the results of years of linguistic research and why they matter.
One final piece of linguistic jargon that is important to understanding Bucholtz’s thesis is “register.” This simply means a way of speaking that is specific to a given context. For example, a person testifying in court is likely to use a formal or hyperformal register, depending on their level of comfort. A person speaking with friends uses a different, less formal register. There’s a variety of features that linguists look to to determine register–word choice, syntax, level of ellipses. A full discussion of that is beyond this post, but suffice it to say that linguists are very good at figuring out what register people are using.
The novel phenomenon that Bucholtz is looking at is that some people have a marked racial identity in spite of the fact that they adhere to the writing-influenced norms of Standard English. In fact, they have a marked racial identity because of their perceived over-adherence to these norms. This is the opposite of what we usually see–white people with a marked identity because they don’t adhere to mainstream norms. The group she’s talking about are high-school aged nerds.
She studied this by going to a large urban high school with a lot of diversity. In spite of the variety of races represented, race was generally seen as a European American/African American dichotomy by the students. Note that this is a research finding, not something that Bucholtz brought into the research. Although the European American students were more aware of their whiteness than people in nearly all-white schools (like the one I attended in Boise, ID), European American norms were still the unmarked racial identity. This form of identity can only exist as a reaction to black identity–unmarked standards are only ever really formed in response to the marked standards. But ironically, the unmarked majority took a large quantity of their slang and other cultural features from the marked African American minority. This created an odd balancing act. White students who took too much of African American culture–for example those who were too into hip-hop, were marked in the traditional way, as somehow not quite white. Yet the definitions of cool were intrinsically linked with African American identity. In fact, it’s been argued that the very concept of cool is borrowed from African American culture–even the word itself originated from the version of AAVE spoken by jazz musicians the first time that that dialect emerged from the South and was exposed to a mainstream audience.
But students marked as nerds, both by other students and by themselves, are also seen as outside the mainstream, in spite of the fact that they don’t use dialect from outside Standard English. In fact, they speak in a formal, hyperformal, or academic register even when talking amongst themselves–something that cool students never did. They speak in a way derived from writing, pronouncing words as they are written rather than as they are spoken in Standard English. Bucholtz labels this Hyperstandard English–a form of English that adheres to the norms of Standard English so closely that it becomes marked. They refused to use slang–when asked about current slang terms, they responded in an academic way and humorously offered literal definitions. In one case, a nerd did use a slang term, but it was marked with a hesitation and a false start, and she modified the term (wack) so that it fit the patterns of Standard English rather than AAVE (wacked). Because of the racial dimension of their marking, Bucholtz declared them “Hyperwhite”–adhering to the white norms in such a way that they become marked for it.
The point isn’t really, as Deppey takes it, that nerds are defined as a reaction to black culture. The point is that they are defined as a deviation from the unmarked white culture–but in the opposite way of what people usually are. This would be interesting to study, but I imagine that in places where the primary marked group is not black but, for example, rednecks, you would find an unmarked majority that samples elements of that identity and a group of hyperstandard nerds who reject it entirely. Note also that this definition does not preclude nerds from being members of other races, but it does mean that nerds of other races are marked as such in part because of their adherence to white norms. She points to the example of Asians, a nerd stereotype. She discusses how Asians are considered, in mainstream culture, to be the “almost white” race–this is a racial ideology that dates back hundreds of years.
Now, none of this is to say that Bucholtz’s argument can’t be argued against. But if people are going to argue against it, they should argue what she’s actually saying, rather than arguing with what they imagine she’s saying.
If you are a nerd reading this and you still don’t think it describes you or the nerds you know, I recommend reading the article itself, particularly the actual descriptions of nerd behavior. I didn’t think that her research would have described the kinds of nerd I remember being in high school and am today, but reading it I did recognize a lot of myself and my friends.
EDIT: In one of his comments to his post Tocci responds to the actual article as well, and acknowledges the more complicated version of racial identity that I’m trying to get at here. This was actually posted before I wrote this, but I managed to skip over it somehow, as is abundantly clear by my posting the link two comments down from him doing the same thing. Oops.
del.icio.us