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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   27860 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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I know people here talk about serious issues, and this really isn't one of them. But there is one thing I've noticed recently in the DEI craze is the erasure of the real black nerd. I went to a (formerly lol) almost all white high school, and there were black nerds there. They were in band, ran cross country, loved anime, played Magic, and took AP classes.

Here are some examples:

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1037911107/jerry-lawson-video-game-fairchild-channel-f-black-engineer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Pondsmith

You can see it in shows like Stranger Things which represent them in their natural state in the 1980s. I work with a few now. There's one I work with now who is a network engineer who absolutely loves solving networking issues. He used to work at Cisco and absolutely is obsessed with networking.

However, these are usually Gen X and Millennials. I haven't seen a true black nerd Gen Z at any company I have interacted with recently. I'm serious when I say this: what happened to the black nerd?

Band is still a lot blacker than average, I think there’s a cultural thing about African Americans liking marching band like activities with stepping in formation to music.

I don’t know a lot of African American youths, I don’t know what they’re like. I would guess that nerd culture fell apart for the same reasons as every other adolescent/very young adult ‘doing things’ culture fell apart, with the exception of the most redneck coded(as many teenaged hog trappers as there ever were).

The Deep South is a lot blacker than the rest of the country. It’s also a lot more fixated on football. I think the marching band stuff is downstream of that tradition more than any characteristic of the activity.

Source: band kid in South Carolina.

I dunno, looking at DCI corps beyond the deep south, they seem to have a decent black component - far more than you'd naively expect from just the corps' nominal catchment areas, like Blue Devils in Concord CA (3% black), SCV (2% black), The Academy [Tempe, AZ (6% black)], etc.

DCI is extra strange. My college band had a couple members who’d done it, but with corps that were nowhere near us. Not sure how much of their headcount is explained by catchment.

DCI is the only thing that ever made me sad I was a woodwind player.

Fair, but stepping is also a black thing. Mass coordinated dance is a black thing. It’s probably something that came from southern culture at some level- most black things are, for obvious reasons- but in my area the high schools known for their bands are the black ghetto schools, not the hick town schools.

Mass coordinated dance is a black thing.

Quite a few cultures have it. Irish step dancing comes immediately to mind, for instance. Or the humble square dance.

You can see it in shows like Stranger Things which represent them in their natural state in the 1980s.

You can use fiction as a reference for a culture was like in a certain time ... but only fiction created during that time AND if you know something about the agenda of the creators, the pressures that went into making the show, the constraints and demands of the medium, etc. Usually the way you use fiction to learn about a culture at a certain time, is by looking at what the creators inserted as background that they expected the audience to be familiar with, and what kind of message they thought their audience would be receptive to hearing. So the Cosby show doesn't tell you what a default black family is like. It tells you that the audience was receptive to a story about the default black family being like that. And it tells you something about what the typical American family was like, or what it aspired to be like.

I actually thought he was pretty representative of a black nerd from when I was in high school a decade and a half later. It really wasn’t that uncommon for white nerds to have a non white person in their nerd crew. Nerds were always pretty accepting in my experience, regardless of what libs say about communities like Magic or DnD.

In concurrence with @BahRamYou, I think what you're observing is the atrophy of the nerd culture that we grew up with. Many of the quintessential nerd hobbies are just things that people do now. Sure, maybe it's more nerdy to be really into one game than another, but the vast majority of young men play some sort of video game, so it doesn't really stand out to be really into one of them. The band nerds might still be kind of a specific thing, but when I see the local university's marching band, they don't really strike me as a particularly nebbish group. There are still socially awkward kids, of course, but they don't really seem like they have the comparative advantage in things like gaming, computers, anime, and so on. Maybe there's some other nerd subculture that replaced it that we're too out of touch to appreciate? I don't know.

I’m the same. I don’t consider most of those activities “nerdy” anymore, as they’re so common that I almost feel like calling being into sci-fi or anime or gaming or even fantasy dice games nerdy is a bit much. Especially when the stuff in question is mainstream. It’s almost a stolen valor thing where kids when I was young had to kind of hide their interest in those things only for later generations to claim it even though the stuff is absolutely mainstream and they only like the mainstream parts of the subject.

They're common, but still nerdy -- it's explicitly a subculture that's into them, even if it's a big one. I simply don't see how nerddom has been destroyed, I just believe we're dealing with a dark-matter-parallel-universe thing where Motte users are profoundly and disproportionately male, tech-adjacent, and West-Coastal.

Despite a thousand attempts to erase or abolish the fact, nerdery leans male, and in general the women into it (as well as the men) are... a little out there, typically pretty 'alt', unlikely to be the "popular girls." I expect talking about your interest in Dungeons and Dragons to be a net-negative on Tinder, for example. And what is mainstream is defined by what the hot girls think is cool to be into, sorry.

Gaming is a different story, but it depends on the game. Sports games are as mainstream as sports. Complex CRPGs are still wildly nerdy. Some popular games are in the middle, like Assassins Creed (leans mainstream) and The Witcher (leans nerdy). Minecraft is a kid's game now.

Go talk to the frat boys and the sorority sisters about "fantasy dice games", and if they're into it, I'll concede the point.

I was recently with a friend how the local SF/F fandom scene organizing the local cons etc seems like a bunch of rapidly aging Gen-Xers permanently stuck in the 90s, and one thing I observed was that kids these days don’t seem to get into the general ‘fandom’ but instead have a large number of individual fandoms around specific properties, ie Harry Potter fandom and Disco Elysium fandom and Cyberpunk fandom and what have you. Some overlap of course but less of an overarching idea of a whole genre with a history and unifying factors apart from the specific common series or other work.

I noticed in the last couple of years both the erasure of Urkels and the erasure of classically beautiful black women from the media (not sure about that, but I definitely feel that there are less beautiful black women overall in media even if the total number increases). I guess they were honorary whites in a way, so it didn't fit the narrative.

Don't know about the real world - but I think that it is just that the culture war destroyed even the smallest enclaves in which the nerdy boys could flourish.

(not sure about that, but I definitely feel that there are less beautiful black women overall in media even if the total number increases)

I’m pretty sure it’s real, 4chan /tv/ has been complaining about that for years.

I've noticed weird changes in the way that it's framed, actually?

Consider this story from 2017. (This is 'black' in the sense of Aboriginal, which has never made sense to me, since that is a completely different ethnic, racial, and cultural group to black Africans.) Along similar lines, here's more on this so-called 'blerd' movement.

This is strange partly because it erases a history - as you say, there have always been black nerds, who seem to have mixed with other nerds in very normal and boring ways. Instead the idea of being a nerd who is also black is being shifted or ignored by identity entrepreneurs who see opportunity in claiming the label for themselves.

I know a few. Most have African or Caribbean immigrant parents who did their best to insulate them from stereotypical Black culture, up to and including homeschooling. They are granted certain opportunities denied to their White and Asian peers as far as scholarships, affirmative action, and such are concerned, but apart from that have similar educational and career outcomes.

Yugi-oh appears to significantly over-index for black folks, at least when compared to MtG.

Similarly fighting games (Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, etc.) seem to have a much higher percentage of black fans than video games as a whole, and I'm sure their are other genres/subgenres where this is the case. I haven't seen many black grand strategy fans (or as fans of other autism simulators generally like Factorio), though that may have more to do with the PC/console split skewing white for PC gamers.

The fastest American alive vibes with it on the track. Noah Lyles is probably a pretty good example of a black nerd in general. Per his Wiki:

Lyles has posted on X that he has asthma, allergies, dyslexia, ADD, anxiety, and depression.[62]

He is also an anime fan, and has been seen carrying Yu-Gi-Oh cards during competitions.

He's just also blazingly fast and engaged to a Jamaican sprinter, so he doesn't really fit the '80s stereotypes!

Nice hat...

How weird. That's not the link I dropped in! Fixed to a functional one now though.

Considering the gratuitous Egyptian theming in the former, is this somehow facilitated by Hotepism? (Egypt-related power fantasies slot better into the African-American cultural narrative?)

Strong doubt.

Compare the wild popularity of Dragon Ball, which has nothing to do with Egypt.

Are Hoteps actually…common? Outside of hand-wringing news columns feeding off the latest Ye controversies.

Are Hoteps actually…common? Outside of hand-wringing news columns feeding off the latest Ye controversies.

I threw darts and ate beef jerky with one in Lexington Kentucky in 2019, so they definitely exist.

I think you might be underestimating the impact a niche movement can have on the memespace of a larger culture. Two Korean girls I know independently got married to Turkish guys (as a result of processes that can be rounded to "I heard somewhere that Turks are our kin, so I will go to Turkey and find one", starting out not knowing a single one), even though the Macro-Altaic hypothesis was by all accounts just a cute linguistic theory that has long since fallen out of fashion. Among African-Americans, I would wager there are more now who have Arabic first names while not being Muslims than Nation of Islam had members at its peak.

I mean, I didn't learn that Jamal was an Arabic name until later in life- I thought it was a black name that came from wherever 'Shaniqua' and 'Devontarius' did until doing some research on early Islam. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's lots of African Americans using Arabic names and simply not knowing about their origins- honestly some of them probably think the Arabs copied the names from them.

Dragon ball is a Hispanic thing, though. I don’t think blacks are into it relative to the baseline.

I don’t know about hoteps specifically, but there are a lot of African Americans with pseudo historical views about black greatness. Wouldn’t be surprising if hoteps were common.

My sister loves Dragonball, and has several impressively sized DBZ tattoos in normally visible places. She has a job which involves regularly interacting with black communities across the country. The tattoos are literally the first thing that comes up in any introductions, and they are apparently instrumental in quickly gaining approval and credibility with any and all black men under the age of 35.

She tells me a story about stopping to get gas somewhere in Georgia, when she suddenly hears someone shout from across the street: "IS THAT VEGETA!? ON YOUR LEG?!" She shouts back "yeah man," and three black guys working in a car shop across the street start popping off, they all drop whatever they're doing and walk across the street and have a 20 minute conversation about their favorite DBZ fights.

It's true that an entire generation of Hispanic kids grew up on DBZ, but they're not the only ones!

I’m not sure, submitting this for research purposes:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ormQQG2UhtQ

Blacks love DBZ and Naruto. Latinos love DBZ and Evangelion.

And what do white people like?

DBZ and One Piece?

Ok, challenge question: Indians?

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It's probably just the hyper-successful advertisement anime? I was into Yugioh, but I was also into DBZ and other such shows and their tie-in products.

Seems like a lot of black American nerds are also deep in the same medium.

Probably also a generational thing: lots more older hwhite nerds as a proportion.

I think "nerds," as a specific subgroup, have lost their identity. For one thing, basically eveyone uses computers now, at least a little, so one of the core parts of being a nerd became gentrified. And all those other things you mention- band, cross country, anime, Magic, AP classes, chess, sci-fi, whatever, it's very popular with a huge swath of different people. At the same time, there's so much of that stuff that it's basically impossible for even the nerdiest to keep up with all of it.

Put it this way- I think that in the 80s there was a very real subculture of nerds, like the guy in "Ready Player One." They could all handle basic computer skills, watch Star Trek and Star Wars, quote Monty Python to each other, and play chess at an amateur level. They all had a shared reference of nerdy interests, which few normies were interested in back then. But now, that's changed in both directions- too much nerd interests to learn them all, and too many normies invading to keep the culture. Black nerds were an even more specific subtype, so they probably got pushed out even harder.

Ready Player One was shit, though. Knights of Badassia is a more authentic nerd film.

It was a book before it was a movie though... and I liked it.

I'm Gen Z. They're still playing Street Fighter/Tekken and rambling to me about Dragon Ball Z.

Seconding this, I know over a dozen black nerds and other than one who was my roommate during an internship, I met them all through fighting games (many more nerdy and niche than SF/Tekken)

Street Fighter and DBZ were for normies or quasi-normies, though. DBZ was heavily advertised on Cartoon Network, I used to watch it after school when flipping through channels. Hardcore nerds were probably playing (or making) obscure PC games and torrenting/watching subtitled niche anime.

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