The Whiteness of Nerds.pdf

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Mary BucholtzTEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

The W hiteness of Nerds:Superstandard English and RacialMarkedness

Anthropological research has shown that identities that are "not whiteenough" may be racially marked. Yet marking may also be the result of being"too white." California high school students who embrace one such whiteidentity, nerds, employ a superstandard language variety to reject the youthculture norm of coolness. These practices also ideologically position nerds ashyperwhite by distancing them from the African American underpinnings ofEuropean American youth culture.

A s the exp losion of the study of whiten ess throughout the past decadecontinues with little sign of abatement a corresponding set ofcritiques about the field's foundational assu m ption s has also beg unto em erge . Perhaps the most cogen t of these critiques is the concern that invie w ing wh iteness as a norm ative, hegem onic, and unm arked racial posi-tion, scholars ma y be u nw ittingly reifying a singular and static version ofwhiteness. It is not the concept of racial unm arkedn ess itself that creates theproblem but rather the common scholarly misperception that the un-marked status of w hiteness is imp ervious to history, culture, or other localcon ditions. O n the contrary, m arked ness theory, whic h can be traced backto its origins in linguistic theory (Trubetzkoy 1969), has been usefullyextended to a broader semiotic context to provide a model of culturalideo logie s, including racial ideologies.1Anthropology offers a perspective on markedness that is more sensitiveto the instability of racial marking, as demonstrated most recently and thor-oughly by the work of John Hartigan (1999). Through a close ethnographicJournal of Linguistic Anthropology ll(l):84-100. Copyright


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examination of the intraracial as well as interracial distinctions that shapewhiteness in Detroit, Hartigan shows that certain white identities, such as"hillbillies," are racially marked because their class orientation and culturalstyle separate them from the middle-class white norm. Crucially, interracialties between hillbillies and African Americans also contribute to the viewthat hillbillies display a "degraded form of whiteness" (Hartigan 1999:90).Thus while all whites are racially marked vis-a-vis blacks in inner-city De-troit insofar as their race is visible and salient, hillbillies are also raciallymarked vis-a-vis other whites insofar as their version of whiteness is bothrecognized and problematized as a racial subject position.Hartigan's work suggests that there may be other styles of wh iteness thatare racially marked due to their lack of compliance with local ideologies ofracial appropriateness. In particular, it raises the question of whether it ispossible for wh ite identities to be racially m arked not for transgressing racialboundaries but for maintaining such boundaries too assiduouslythat is,for being "too white." The present article addresses this question by offeringan example of a white identity that is nonnonnative, nonhegemonic, andhigh ly m arked in the local racial econom y. This identity, the nerd, is raciallymarked precisely because individuals refuse to engage in cultural practicesthat originate across racialized lines and instead construct their identities bycleaving closely to the symbolic resources of an extreme whiteness, espe-cially the resources of language.2Nerds are members of a stigmatized social category who are stereotypi-cally cast as intellectual overachievers and social underachievers. From theColumbine High School killers to Microsoft m onopolist Bill Gates, the labelnerd clearly has negative associations in Am erican culture (especially when,as in these cases, it is used to explain highly antisocial behaviors). It is also,as such examples su ggest, a cultural category that is both ideologically gen -dered (male) and racialized (white), although these dimensions are not al-ways contextually foregrounded. Despite such cultural images, to be a nerdis not an inevitable social death sentence but instead is often a purposefulchoice that allows those w ho embrace this identity to reject locally dom inantsocial norms. In U.S. high schools, where such norms usually center onparticipation in yo uth culture, nerds stand out for their resistance to currenttrends, and more generally for their rejection of coo lness as a desirable socialgoal3 As the basic value of youth culture, coolness may be defined as en-gagement with and participation in the trends and practices of youth cul-ture; it frequently involves a stance of affectlessness as well. In rejectingcoolness, students w ho consider them selves nerds signal their distance fromboth the practices and the stances of trendier youth. Instead, they embracethe values of nerdiness, primarily intelligence. But in so doing, especiallyin contexts of racial diversity, the oppositional identity of the nerd becomesas salient for its racialized position as for its subcultural orientation.

Youth Culture and Racial A ppro priationOne such context is Bay City High School, a large urban high school inthe San Francisco Bay Area where I conducted a year of fieldwork in


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1995-96.4 In spite of the school's tremendous racial and ethnic diversity,resulting in the visibility of whiteness as a racial category, white studentsat Bay City H igh frequently operated according to an ideological dichotomybetween African Americans and European Americans, the two largest ra-dalized groups at the school. This binary put many European Americanstudents into a double bind: on the one hand, they were often monitoredby their white peers for incursions of blackness into their cultural styles,bu t on the other hand, many of the practices of European American youthcultures, including linguistic practices, are borrow ed from African Americanteenagers. To remain both culturally and racially acceptable, white studentshad to maintain a delicate balance between embracing coolness and avoid-ing cultural practices that were radalized as black by their European Ameri-can peers.The black origins of m any elements of youth culture in the United Stateshave been well documented; trends in music, dance, fashion, sports, andlanguage in a variety of youth subcultures are often traceable to an AfricanAmerican source (e.g., Kiesling, this issue; Lhamon 1990; Rose 1994). Thisconnection is often obscured, however, for as increasing numbers of Euro-pean American teenagers embrace particular black cultural practices, thesepractices become detached from blacknessthey become deracialized, or ra-cially unmarked, at least in the eyes of the white youths who participate inthem. At the same time, such practices often lose their urban associationsand become normalized in suburban and rural settings as well (witness theexpansion of rap in the past decades). Even the concept of coolness itselfstems from African American traditions (Morgan 1998).As a result of their status as cultural innovators and trendsetters, blackstudents at Bay City H igh, as elsewhere around the country (Solomon 1988),were often viewed by their white counterparts as cool almost by definition.Yet for European American teenagers to adopt elements of African Ameri-can youth culture before the deracializing process was well under way w asto risk being marked by their peers as racially problematic; this was thesituation for many white hip-hop fans at the school. Conversely, for whiteteenagers to refuse to participate in youth culture in any form was likewiseproblem atic, not only culturally bu t racially. It may be said that appropriatewhiteness requires the appropriation of blackness, but only via those blackstyles that are becoming deracialized and hence no longer inevitably conferracial markedness on those who take them up.White nerds disrupted this ideological arrangement by refusing to strivefor coolness. The linguistic and other social practices that they engaged inindexed an uncool stance that was both culturally and racially marked: tobe uncool in the context of the white racial visibility at Bay City High wasto be radalized as hyperwhite, "too white." Consequently, the productionof nerdiness via the rejection of coolness and the overt display of intelligencewas often simultaneously (though not necessarily intentionally) the produc-tion of an extreme version of w hiteness. Unlike the styles of cool EuropeanAmerican students, in nerdiness African American culture and languagedid not play even a covert role. This is not to say that individuals who w erenot white never engaged in nerdy practices, but that when they did they


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could be culturally understood as aligned w ith whiteness. This ph enomenonis illustrated by the fact tha t in U.S. culture generally, Asian Am ericans areideologically positioned as the "model minority"that is, the racializedgroup that most closely approaches "honorary" whitenessin part becausethey are ideologically positioned as the nerdy minority, skilled in scientificand technical fields but utterly uncool (see Chun, this issue, for researchthat challenges this ideolog y). In general, then, white nerd s were identifyingnot against blackness but against trendy whiteness, yet any dissociationfrom white youth trends entailed a dissociation from the black culturalforms from which those trends largely derive.Membership in the nerd category, for purposes of this study, was notassigned by me but reported by students themselves, both nerds and non-nerds. Nerdiness is not an essence, of course, but a set of practices, engage-ments, and stances, and individuals oriented to nerdiness to a greater orlesser degree in their actions. Central to nerdy practice, as I have arguedelsewhere (Bucholtz 1998, 1999a), is a particular emphasis on language asa resource for the production of an intelligent and nonconformist identity.I focus on a linguistic practice that simultaneously indexed such identitiesand marked speakers as non-normatively white: the use of superstandardEnglish.

Language Ideology and Superstandard EnglishAs several contributions to this special issue point out, ideologies of raceare also ideologies of language, an unsurprising convergence given the long -standing association between ethnoradal and linguistic differentiation pro-moted both in early linguistic theorizing and in (other) nationalist projects(Bauman and Briggs 2000). The ide ology of racial markedness therefore h asas a corollary an ideology of linguistic markedness. In particular, the diffi-

culty (which afflicts only white people) in seeing whites as racialized ismatched by the difficulty (again, on ly for whites) in hearing white speakers'language as racialized: as specifically white rather than neutral or norma-tiveor standard. In such an arrangement, unmarked status confers powerby allowing whiteness to move through the social world ghost-like, unseenand unheard, evident only in its effects. Likewise, the notion of a linguistic"standard," which in the U.S. context is closely bound up with whiteness(lippi-Green 1997), implies both unmarkedness (standard as ordinary) andpow er (standard as regulative).Although there are numerous sociolinguistic treatments of Standard Eng-lish from a variety of perspectives (e.g., Crowley 1989; Milroy and M ilroy1999; Silverstein 1996), scholarly opinion is remarkably u nan imous. In nearlyevery discussion Standard English is located in opposition to nonstandardEnglish (and sometimes to other languages); many comm entators point ou tthat Standard English, as it is usually defined, is not spoken at all but is aparticular register of written language; and a number of authors note thatStandard English does not, properly speaking, exist but rather is a prescrip-tive ideal. Such analyses, valuable as they are for correcting misapprehen-sions about the nature of sociolinguistic variation, do not always carefully


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distinguish between the notion of an idealized prescriptive standard, usuallybased o n formal written language/ and the spoken vernacular believed m ostclosely to approximate it. This spoken Standard English, as a primarily in-formal or colloquial variety, differs from formal written Standard English(Carter 1999; Cheshire 1999) but is still granted ideological authority as "thestandard/' Thus spok en Standard English is positioned in relation not onlyto nonstandard English but also to what I call superstandard English.5 A lin-guistic superstandard is a variety that surpasses the prescriptive norm es-tablished by the standard. While available to some standard and nonstan-dard speakers as a special formaland often writtenregister, when usedas a social rather than situational variety the superstandard is restrictedneither to formal contexts nor to written language. For some speakers, thesuperstandard may be the everyday, "unmarked" variety for ordinary in-teraction.

Superstandard English contrasts linguistically with Standard English inits greater use of "supercorrecf' linguistic variables: lexical formality, care-fully articulated phonological forms, and prescriptively standard grammar.It may also go beyond traditional norms of prescriptive correctness, to thepoint of occasionally over-applying prescriptive rules and producing hy-percorrect forms. But the recognition of such difference is at least as ideo-logically as linguistically motivated. It is precisely because of the robustnessof the ideo logy of Standard English in the United States that those linguisticvarieties generally classified as nonstandardAfrican American VernacularEnglish foremost am ong them are regularly held up as divergent from thestandard despite considerable overlap in grammar, phon ology , and the lexi-con. By the same token, the superstandard need not deviate substantivelyfrom the colloquial standard in order to be considered distinctive; becauseit is marked with respect to Standard English forms, even relatively slightuse of supercorrection and hypercorrection can call attention to itself. Su-perstandard English is therefore a marked variety that may contrast ideo-logically both w ith the unm arked colloquial standard and w ith marked non-standard English. However, because it draws on the prescriptive standard,it also contributes to the linguistic ideologies that elevate one linguistic va-riety over others. How these varieties come to be associated with particularracial positions that is, how they becom e racialized stylesis likewise thework of ideology.

Ideologies of StyleJudith Irvine and Susan Gal (Irvine in press; Irvine and Gal 2000) havedelineated three semiotic processes through which language ideologies per-form cultural work: iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure. Iconization isthe counterpart of indexicality, a semiotic process described in detail byseveral linguistic anthropologists (e.g., Ochs 1990; Silverstein 1976). Indexi-cality involves the establishment of a connection between a linguistic form

and its social significance through the recognition of their repeated conjunc-tion; although mere is no inevitable tie between form and meaning, it even-tually comes to be seen as inevitable and hence ideological. In iconization.


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the ideological tie between form and social meaning is stronger still: thecharacteristics of a language are seen as a reflection of the essential charac-teristics of its users. The relationship is therefore not merely one of (per-ceived) juxtaposition, as in indexicality, but of (perceived) resemblance. Thesecond process that Irvine and Gal identify, fractal recursivity, also worksby analogy. A linguistic relationship thought to obtain in one kind of socialarrangement (e.g., situation-based register variation) may be replicated inother arrangements as well, at levels both more general (e.g., interspeakerdialect variation) and more specific (e.g., intraspeaker stylistic variation)than the initiating arrangement. Such reiteration of the same semiotic rela-tionship on different orders of magnitude, akin to fractal geometry, is whatis meant by fractal recursivity. Erasure, the third semiotic process employedin language ideologies, involves not reproduction but reduction; sociolin-guistic ph enomena that clash w ith, fail to conform to, or otherwise threatena given languag e ideology may be systematically ignored or denied, strickenfrom the ideological record.Because this fram ewo rk is semiotic and not exclusively linguistic, it m aybe expanded to include the interaction of nonlinguisu'c and linguistic ide-ologies as well as the process whereby the former give rise to the latter.That is, these semiotic processes are operative not only within languageideologies but also across ideological families, so that ideo logies of langu agemay be m apped onto corresponding ideologies of race, wh ich they support.The set of language ideologies that this article is concerned with surroundStandard English and its alternatives superstandard English and AfricanAmerican Vernacular English (AAVE); the set of racial ideologies at issueinvolves whiteness and its alternatives hyperwhiteness and blackness.Through iconization, the (ideologically arrived-at) characteristics of each lan-guage variety com e to typify (and not simply to index) the youth subculturethat uses (or is thought to use) it; through fractal recursivity this mappingis replicated on the racial level by linking language varieties to ratiatizedgroups; through erasure on e such set of ma pping s is taken as most "basic"and hence least recognizablein other words, these mappings are un-marked.6

Nerds and SlangIn their use of superstandard English to set themselves apart from cool

students, nerds at Bay City High showed an awareness of some of theseideological dimensions. One characteristic of superstandard English is itslack of current slang. By avoiding particular linguistic forms, speakers canseparate themselves from the social category indexically associated withsuch forms; thus the absence of slang in nerds' speech symbolically dis-tanced them from their cooler peers. W hen I asked nerdy students to discusscurrent slang, which other students usually found the most enjoyable partof the interviews I conducted, most expressed dismay at the task and pro-fessed unfam iliaiity with the terms (one of the rare instances wh en the nerd yteenagers I spok e to were willing to adm it to ignorance). They also removedthemselves from the slang terms they did know in various ways, such as


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providing literal, nonslang definitions for the slang terms I presented tothem on slips of paper (Example 1) or offering nonslang terms that conveythe same meaning (Example 2).In Example 1, Bob, Conqueror of the Universe, announces to her friendsthe slang word (blood), an affiliative address term, which is printed on theslip of paper she has selected:71. Bob: [bl:ed]. B-L.O-O .D. The wo rd is [ b U d ] . . . . That's the stuff wh ich isinside of your veins. Th afs the stuff thatI don't know . I haven'tgotten to that chapter ye t.

Bob turns the task of defining slang terms into a quasi-academ ic activity byhu m oro usly invok ing the format of a spelling bee (state the wo rd, spell it,restate it). This acad em ic orientation contin ues in her formal, literal defini-tion of the term and her allusion to on e of her textbooks w here the answercan be found. Through such strategies Bob repeatedly distances herselffrom the use of slang w hile simultaneou sly inv oking d iscourse genres andtopics associated w ith intelligence.Where Bob emphasizes her unfamiliarity with this slang term (even asshe reveals her awareness of it through a marked, "black," pronunciation,as discussed below), Erich asserts that the absence of slang in his lexicon isa matter of preference. As with other people, I asked Erich to comment onwhich of the printed slang terms he uses. In response, Erich rejects slangas a whole while making dear that some of the activities that the wordsrefer to are relevant to his life:

2. Erich: The idea beh ind the term fits but the term itself doesn 't- isn't thew ay I prefer it to be. li k e "kick back." I just prefer something- som enormal term Like "to re lax ."... Som ething like that.Erich's vie w of slang invo lves a process of iconization that brings youthfultrendiness into the pragmatic orbit of such lexical items. Just as slang istrendy (not "normal"), so too are its speakers. Erich avoids slang not be-cause of its referential meaning but because of the semiotic meaning thaticonization a ssign s to it.Of course, students who described themselves as nerds did use someslang, particularly older terms. But these items were often marked in someway in their speech, as when Claire explained why she does not like manypeople:

3. Claire: When it seems to me that people are really young


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elsewhere in her turn (such as emotional response sand the full articulation ofjust seems) and the standardized form of the slang term itself, which moreusually occurred as ivadc In adding a Standard English past participialmarker to a word popularized by African American students, then, Clairereveals that she is not quite as cool as her use of the term might imply. (Atthe time of the study, Claire was deliberately trying to become cooler,mainly by smoking marijuana, while retaining her commitment to nerdyideals like intelligence.) W hat is more, her standardization of African Am eri-can Vernacular English grammar is not racially neutral through fractal re-cursivity, the two variants Claire chooses between are linked to racial cate-gories. Hence the supercorrect wacked is not only more standard but alsowhiter than the original term.The Phonology of Superstandard English

The recursivity seen in Example 3 participates in a widespread racializedlanguage ideology. Among European American students at Bay City HighSchool, a three-way ideo logical div ision of English corresponded to similarlyideologically based social divisions: most students of color were thought tospeak nonstandard English, most white students were thought to speakcolloquial Standard English, and nerds, who did not always incorporatecolloquial forms into their speech, were heard to speak an exaggeratedlyformal version of Standard English; that is, superstandard English. Super-standard English, unlike Standard English, was a marked linguistic varietyamong European American students at Bay City High School Evoking theregisters of scholarship and science, nerds' use of superstandard Englishproduced a very different kind of identity than did the colloquial StandardEnglish used by cooler students. And as noted above, because of the ideo-logical force of Standard English, eve n the slightest use of marked linguisticforms could be sufficient to produce a semiotic distinction. Thus, in nerds'speech, colloquial forms were juxtaposed with superstandard varieties (aviolation of Ervin-Tripp's [1973] "co-occurrence rules"). As with most lin-guistic variables, the use of superstandard features was not categorical.

One linguistic strategy that nerds used to make their speech distinctivewas to imbue it with a measured quality, which lent a certain grauitas totheir words, particularly as a result of resistance to phonological processescharacteristic of colloquial speech, such as consonant-duster simplificationand the phonological reduction of unstressed vowels. Claire's pronunciationin Example 3 above illustrates the former pattern; Example 4 exemplifiesthe latter. In 4a, Erich describes his difficulties with another student in theschool's computer club; in 4b he talks about construction problems in hisneighborhood.

4a. He made up all these rules that he sort o- we sort of voted on and I didn'tvote on them [0 cm ] because I wasn't there that day, and 1 have to abide bythem [Ocm].4b. They're go ing to [goirj tu] have to [haev tu] change- do se off st reet s...


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Erich's careful pronu nciation in these examples is all the more remarkablegive n that the items in Exam ple 4 occur in linguistic contexts that favor theph ono logical reduction of these wor ds to 'em, goiri or gonna, and hafta. Thelack of stress on both token s of them in 4a, the nasal of on preceding the firsttoken , and the gram maticalized function of going (to) and have (to) in 4b allpro m ote red uced phono logical forms, but Erich resists the effects of lingu is-tic environment on his speech.This precisely enunciated speech style has semiotic connections to literacy:nerdy teenagers frequently used something akin to "reading style" (Labov1972) even in their spontaneous conversations.8 Indeed, nerdy students oc-casionally employed pronunciations based on spelling rather than speech,such as [folk] forfolk and [horj lo ng ] for Hong Kong, as we ll as noncustomarypronunciations of words they encountered in their extensive reading buthad not heard uttered aloud: for example, Loden pronounced her pseudo-nym as [ladn] rather than the more usual [lodn]; the name came from aclass assignment. Here again iconization is at work. Nerds' careful speechstyle approximates in the spoken channel the linguistic forms as they wouldbe written (this is especially clear in the use of spelling pronunciation).This iconic link between careful speech and reading, moreover, forms thebasis of a secondary link between careful speech and intelligence, via the(ideological) indexical association of advanced literacy, extensive education,and high intelligence. And intelligence in turn was associated, at least bynerds, with independent thought a refusal to go along with the crowdwhether in fashion or in phonology. The iconicity between resistingphonological pressure and resisting peer pressure is a shortcut through thechain of semiotic links already established. Erich invokes this association inExam ple 5, in which he explains w hy he trunks the term sophisticated appliesto himself and his best friend, Micah:

5. Erich: We're not sophisticated in a bad sense , w e just have uh much-we're m uch m ore ad va nc ed (.) in terms of uh (.) (xxx) in terms ofthe our- our ways of perceiving things, at least (.) myself andMicah. We don't think-1 don'tthink of anything in a no:rmal way:, like uh and Idon't-1 use much m ore, I don't know how to describe it. I don't useall the abbreviations for words? l ike most peopleabbreviate- cut off half the w ords? For no particularreason?And Idon't do that, hhh Uhuh they they they they cut off the "g" on the end of "tripping"[tripirj: ] (and end,) N apostrophe. It makes itmakes no sense to me.

Erich connects sophistication, in its po sitive (i.e., nontrend y) sense, both to"advanced " and unconv ention al perspectives and to careful pronunciation.From the more elevated po sition that sophistication affords, the colloquialstyle of yo uth culture (and of U.S. culture more w idely) sim ply "m akes nosense." Here again Erich displays his rather clinical knowledge of slangeven as he distances himself from it. His fastidious pronunciation of theslang w ord tripping,with a full superstandard [n], is the linguistic equ ivalent of


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holding a particularly distasteful scientific specimen between thumb andforefinger for inspection before it is discarded. This blending of casual an dformal language allows Erich to display knowledge witho ut embracing theidentity usually associated with such know ledge. Aw are of my interest inlanguage, Erich takes a researcherly analytic stance toward his ow n linguis-tic style.

Superstandard Gramm ar and LexisRelated to the phonological formality of nerdy speech is its lexical for-mality. Nerds often choseformal-registerpolysyllabic variants of Greco-Lat-inate origin over more colloquial Germanic monosyllables, a longstanding

stylistic distinction based on ideologies in the history of the English lan-guage. But where in Standard English these lexical items are associated withdifferent registers, in superstandard English they w ere used across registers.Such lexical items therefore had the indexical effect of making speakerssound smart or learned. In Examples 6a and 6b, Erich discusses how he isdifferent from other students at Bay City High:6a. I just can't stand people who have all the outward signs of being anextremely stupid person.6b. My observation is that other people think we're kind of foolish and crazyfor the way we do things.

Erich's choice of the Latinate intensifier extremely and the nom inalized formobservation invests his discourse w ith a formal, literate tone; additionally, asin Exam ple 5 both examples invoke a stance of scientific objectivity and de-tached empiricism, here achieved through such collocations as all the out-ward signs and My observation is. In Example 7 Claire takes a similar stance inresponding to a question from me about wh at term she uses for male high -school studen ts:

7. Claire: I-I-I tend to-to refer to (.) the whole QumY chromosome (.) as a guy.Claire's lexical choices are formal: tend, refer. And in invoking the register ofbiology (the whole (.) urn Y chromosome (.)) she participates in the same nerdpractice of scientific d iscourse already exemplified by Erich. The deliberate-ness of Claire's choice is suggested by the brief pauses that bracket andhighlight the term. Like Erich, Claire understands our interaction to be ashared intellectual enterprise, and she repeatedly dem onstrates her abilityto engage in the scientific d iscourse of research. Where he r use of slang inExample 3 above showed a similar linguistic self-awareness, th e effect ofthis awareness is quite different in each case. The hesitancy in the earlier ex-ample is not in evidence here. Instead, the pauses preceding and followingthe phrase Y chromosome operate like quotation marks, not only em phasiz-ing the term bu t also displaying Claire's consciousness of its markedness.Her u tterance thus also illustrates the process of erasure: in highlighting heruse of superstandard lexis, she implies the existence of an unmarked(standard) norm. It is at such moments that nerdiness moves from practice


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to performance, a m ov e that is partly explicable in light of Claire's identitychange-in-progess.Undoub tedly, m y role as a researcher triggered this analytic style in somestudents, and in fact all the teenagers I interviewed engaged in style-shiftingto so m e degree, as compared with their interactions with their friends. Ho w-ever, although all the teenagers I interviewed adjusted their speech to thesituation, only those who engaged in other nerdy practices, and oftenadopted the nerd label as w ell, used superstandard English. Moreover, suchteenagers em ployed this style ev en in interaction w ith their friends, a prac-tice that I witnessed among no other teenagers.

Hy perw hiteness and the Rejection of C oolBy distancing themselves from their cool white peers, nerds at Bay CityHigh School created an even greater distance between themselves and theircool black peers. Although nerds did not necessarily understand their lin-guistic and other social practices in particularly racialized terms, these prac-tices could take on racialized meaning in the context of the ideological black-white dichotomy that shaped whiteness for European American studentsat Bay City High. Nerdy teenagers' deliberate avoidance of slang, for ex-

ample, indexically displayed their remoteness from the trends not only ofwhite youth culture but of black you th culture as well, since African Ameri-can slang was a primary source of European American slang. While thiswas not necessarily an intended consequence, Example 1 provides evidencethat nerds defined them selves in opposition to both coolness and blackness.Bob first utters the word blood (a term used by many African Americanbo ys at Bay City H igh) with stereotyped African American Vernacular Eng-lish phonology and exaggerated intonation: [bled]. Her marking of AAVEspeakers in this example expresses the ideological distance between heridentity and that of African American youth. Her return to her normal pro-nunciation in the second utterance of this word ([blAd]) coincides with herattempt to provide a nonslang definition for the term. With this switch,coolness and blackness are recursively linked to each other and separatedfrom the world of nerds.

Likewise, if the use of superstandard English worked to separate nerdyteenagers from their trendy w hite counterparts w ho generally spoke a morecolloquial variety of Standard English, it also enforced a division betweenwhite nerds and most black students at Bay City High, who tended to useAAVE as their primary linguistic variety. The colloquial Standard Englishfavored by cool white teenagers elided to some extent the structural differ-ences between itself and AAVE (thereby allowing them a greater linguisticclaim to coolness). Superstandard English, however, reinforced this racial-ized linguistic divide by exaggerating and highlighting the semiotic ele-ments of Standard English that distinguish it from nonstandard forms ofAfrican American English.Nerdy performances of intellectual ability also produced racialized dif-ference, as suggested by Signithia Fordham's (1996) ethnographic study ofacademically successful students in a black high school. Fordham notes that


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som e high-achieving African Am erican students were accused by their blackpeers of "acting white" precisely because of their intellectual performance.This charge w as often accompanied by the pejorative epithet brainiac, a termtha t as Fordham makes dear, is racialized as black in much the same waythat the analogous but not synonymous term nerd is racialized as white(1996:361, n. 2). At its most negative, the term brainiac refers to an AfricanAmerican whose display of intellectual ability indicates a capitulation toEuropean American cultural values. To avoid being labeled brainiacs, blackstudents in Fordham's study often hid or downplayed their academic ac-complishments and demonstrated their engagement with the concerns ofAfrican American youth culture. By contrast, nerdy white teenagers at BayQty High presented themselves as fully engaged in academic endeavorsand other intellectual work and showed their indifference toward the youthculture that surrounded them.9 Such practices constituted a counter-hegemonic erasure of the devaluation of academic achievement, but theyalso erased recognition of accomplished black (and white) students whochose not to openly display their abilities.Through the use of superstandard English and the semiou'c work it per-formed, nerds at Bay City High were classifiable not simply as white butas hyperwhite. As the most extreme form of whiteness, nerds might beexpected to be the bestthat is, most unmarkedexample of that racialcategory. But it was precisely the hyperwhiteness of nerds that marked themas atypically white. In U.S. culture generally, the ideological norm of white-ness needs blackness to operate, not on ly to establish an Other against w hichto m easure itself, but to provide cultural forms for whiteness to appropriateand re-racialize. As groundbreaking scholarship in other disciplines hasshown (e.g., Lott 1993; Roediger 1991; Rogin 1996), whiteness is separatedfrom blackness in ideology but inextricable from it in practice. White nerdsat Bay City High violated this practice by refusing to appropriate AfricanAmerican cultural and linguistic forms.Besides expressing their distance from African Americans symbolicallyand implicitly through linguistic and other social practices, som e nerdy stu-dents also explicitly stated this ideology of identity. Thus Christine in Ex-ample 8 prov ides an overt statement that African American students are atbest useful to know, but on ly as protection against other African Am ericans(see also Bucholtz 1999):

8. Christine: Well I know them.I know (.) I know some people.Which helps to alleviate situations sometimes.Such sentim ents insert a racialized subtext in to the linguistic practices andideolog ies that separated nerds from African Am erican yo uth langu age andculture. Ne rd s' dism issal of black cultural practices often led them to dis-count the possibility of friendship w ith black students. In this sen se, nerdyteenagers' social freedom in rejecting normative youth identities was


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constra ined by their acceptance of norm ative, ideologically rooted views oftheir African Am erican schoolmates.The adoption of a cultural identity that could be read as hyperwhite didnot guarantee, however, that nerds promoted what were viewed as "white"interests. During the time I was conducting fieldwork, a great deal of po-litical debate in Bay City centered on the dismantling of affirmative actionin California's higher education system. Erich was among the Bay City HighSchool students who organized large-scale protests against these measures;meanwhile, many European American students who drew heavily uponAfrican American youth language and culture did not participate. Thewholehearted, or even halfhearted, appropriation of black cultural formsdid not ensure that trend-conscious white teenagers would also adopt apolitical perspective that was sensitive to African American concerns. Bythe same token, the rejection of the identity associated with trendy whiteyouth as it emerged from and reworked African Am erican cultural practicesdid not necessarily entail that nerds were similarly disengaged from thepolitics of race. In challenging dom inant ideologies of youth culture, nerdsboth reinscribed and revised prevailing models of whiteness.

ConclusionWhite nerds inhabited an ambiguous racial position at Bay City High:they were the whitest group but not the prototypical representatives ofwhiteness. It is likewise difficult to disambiguate nerds' relationship to whitedomination. In refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which whiteyouth cultures are founded, nerds may be viewed as traitors to whiteness.But engaging in nerdy practices may itself be a form of white privilege,since these practices were not as readily available to teenagers of color and

the consequences of their use more severe. The use of superstandard Englishis thus both a rejection of the cool white local norm and an investment ina wider institutional and cultural norm . This ambivalence toward normativepractice is evident in Erich's discourse: he uses "normal" language ratherthan slang, but he does not "think of anything in a normal way." In thefirst use, he aligns himself with "norm alness" and against trendiness; in thesecond use, he disaligns himself from both "normalness" and trendiness.These two valences of normal are akin to the two valences of whiteness innerd identity: nerds at Bay City High were not normal because they weretoo normal, not (unmarkedly) white because they were too white.In other words, the linguistic and other social practices by which nerdswere culturally marked with respect to other, cooler, white students, alsocaused them to be racially marked with respect to both blacks and whites.While the semiotic processes of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasureallowed nerds to challenge local ideologies based on subcultural identity,these same processes also imposed a set of racial ideologies on both nerdsand their cooler counterparts, black and white. Thus although the markedhyperwhiteness of nerds undermines the racial project of whiteness as anormative and unmarked construct, it may also shore up racial ideologiesof difference and division.


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The W hiteness of Nerds 97

NotesAcknowledgments. I am grateful to Karen Brodkin, John Clark, AlessandroDuranti, Sara Trechter, and two anonym ous reviewers for comments and sugges-

tions. All remaining weaknesses are my own responsibility.1. For an upda ting of this model, see the introduction to this issue.2. Although, as I discuss below, nerds and similar identities exist in other racial-ized groups, in this article my focus is solely on white nerds. Some of the speakers Idiscuss identify as Jewish to varying degrees, bu t while many Jews und erstandthemselves to be racially m arked by their ethnicity (Modan, this issue), hence "no tquite white," these teenagers d id not discuss their ethnicity in similar terms. It ap -pears that in the Bay City High School context ethnicity w as less salient than a racial-ized cultural style. However, Brodkin (1998:31) points to the pattern, early in thetwentieth century, of Jewish academic achievement in higher education, "a settingwhere disparagem ent of intellectual pursuits and the gentleman C were badges ofdistinction." Hence there may be a historical white ideology linking Jewishness andnerdiness, although such an ideology was not operative at Bay City High, exceptthrough ironic exploitation by Jews themselves.3. While it may be a rgued that nerds participate in their own version of youth cul-ture rather than rejecting it altogether, the practices associated w ith nerdiness arenot primarily associated with youth nor do they perform an age-based identity inthe same way as the practices associated with (dominant) youth culture.

4. All names and identifying information have been changed. Speakers chosetheir own pseudonyms.5. I use the terms superstandard and supercorrect to distinguish between true hy-percorrect language use (that is, use that violates a rule of descriptive grammar) andstrict adherence to prescriptive grammatical rules accompanied by the use of otherformal language features. As discussed below, however, hypercorrection is oftenpart of superstandard English.6. This kind of erasurein which a powerful group is rendered less available toscrutinyis not discussed by Irvine and G al, who focus on cases of erasure in whichless powerful groups are marginalized. The ideological erasure of subordinatedgroups also occured at Bay City High, as for example in the racial ideology of ablack-white binary, which erased the presence of Asian Americans, Latinos, andother students.7. Transcription conventions are as follows: a period indicates falling intonation;a question mark indicatesrising ntonation; a comma indicates fall-rise intonation ; ahyphen indicates a self-interruption that breaks the intonation unit; a dash indicatesa self-interruption that breaks a w ord; between words, a hyphen indicates rap idspeech; a (.) indicates a pause of less than one-tenth of a second; ellipsis indicates de-leted text; (xxx) indicates unintelligible speech; hhh indicates laughter; angledbrackets indicate transcriber comments or turn s that are not the focus of analysis;and phonetic transcription appears in square brackets.8. The resistance to assimilation processes does not, of course, have a single socialmeaning. In other contexts, researchers have found that some gay men m ay also usecareful articulation (Campbell-Kibler et al. in press; Walters cited in Barrett1997:192) without any apparen t association w ith bookishness. In fact, it is quite un-likely that careful articulation has only a single meaning even for nerds .9. It is important to note, however, that contrary to the claims of conservativecommentators like John McWhorter (2000), African American students do not showany less enthusiasm for schooland in fact may show morethan EuropeanAmericans (see Voelkl 1997).


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