You write pretty extensively about how race and ethnicity intersect with nerd identity. How are some of these stereotypes alive today?
The concept of the "greasy grind" once referred largely to immigrant kids who studied really hard in high school, and then got into elite colleges. The connotation of that at the time was "Jewish." Today the term "nerd" refers to the same idea, stripped of the ethnic associations. People don't think "Jewish" anymore when they think "nerd," necessarily. But if you look at the most popular prototypes of how nerds look -- "Revenge of the Nerds" -- and you look at old anti-Semitic cartoons, it's surprising how much they look the same: a sort of gangly, bespectacled person who is smart, and is good at figures, but isn't good at social interaction, and is really unathletic. Like Jews, Asians were thought of as harmless but insidious in the 19th century. It wasn't until after the 1965 immigration act that the Asian American whiz kid became a stereotype.
What's the relationship between hipsters and nerds?
A lot of the fashion accessories that we've come to associate with hipsters refer nostalgically to old prototypes of what nerds are supposed to look like. I first remember seeing it in the early '90s, when I was in high school. Kids were starting to wear big, bulky glasses, and it was understood that they weren't actually nerds; they were affecting nerdiness in quotation marks, so that you knew they were really un-nerdy. By using nerdiness as a fun way to develop part of their personality, they're doing precisely what nerds are not able to do, which is master social interaction, and master how they present themselves.
Pure, unironic nerdiness has come to seem very authentic.
I've talked to lots of people who've had the experience of going on a first date and getting the "I was such a nerd in high school" line. It's come to mean, "I'm not afraid of telling you exactly who I am." The nerd is thought to have a level of authenticity that no other subculture can have, because the nerd is incapable of presenting himself in a false way.
I was talking to someone recently -- a former nerd -- who found the movie "Superbad" completely excruciating. To him, the way the jocks berated and beat up the nerdy kids was so accurate it was painful. It's something he was never going to have enough distance to laugh at.
Yeah, if you've actually had the experience of being towel-whipped, then you don't romanticize it.
The idea of nerds is really cool now; people say they like nerds. I wonder if it might be slightly easier for actual nerds in junior high now, because some TV shows are teaching kids that nerds are people you can empathize with, who can change, who might become attractive. I wonder if the Seth Cohen character on "The OC," as silly as that character might have been, actually prevented some bleeding in junior high corridors. We'll never know, in the same way we'll never know if "Will & Grace" prevented gay bashing. But it's possible.
Who's the nerd among the presidential candidates?
If I had to reduce our three presidential candidates to high school types, I would say John McCain is clearly the jock, beloved by the administration of the school. Hillary Clinton is one of the mathlete girls, who you know is going to Wellesley or Harvard or Yale. Barack Obama is the black kid on the debate team who cancels out the racial stereotypes about black kids and the stereotypes about nerds by being both. I think Hillary's the nerd.
Where do you stand in relation to all this material now, having written this book? As an expert on this topic, you could be said to be the king of the nerds.
When I was selling this book, my editor asked me, "Are you a nerd?" I was like, "I don't know, I certainly was as a kid, but now..." My agent interrupted me and said, "He's a nerd." It's the funniest question to have to keep answering, because for the first time in my life some advantage adheres to me if I say yes. I'm probably the one person on planet Earth who might have to affect nerdiness as part of their professional life.
About the writer
Eryn Loeb is a staff writer at Nextbook.
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