Jumping in with David Adewumi’s “Why Black Nerds are Unpopular”
By way of liberatormagazine.com I read “Why Black Nerds are Unpopular” by David Adewumi. This permits me to grant myself yet another opportunity to release passions about the inconveniences of being me. Is there a way to “monetize” this? What I was supposed to do over the last few decades is to shut the f’ up and wait for someone to ask about me. This would have made me look like a shy, soft-spoken, kind of guy that finally gets to speak in the new Ken Burns documentary with that warm lighting casting serious, thoughtful shadows over my eyes.
My youth is littered with images, personal experiences and stories of Black men designated as “genius” or “gifted” (my childhood term) who came way, way before me that were kicked to the curb by the white-dominated world. And this kicking to the curb has little to do with Hollywood drama of fictional racist villains. It has more to do with being left for dead by the poor people in one’s “community.” Not only is David Adewumi writing like this American ‘tradition’ is continuing in the generation after me but he adds an African motherland twist on it by recounting the story of his father. This jumps out at me:
My grandfather gave my dad a piece of advice: ‘Don’t waste your time chasing girls, just focus on your studies, score high marks and when you are successful, the girls will come chasing after you.’ Sure enough, when he aced the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), scoring what was thought to be the highest mark in the entire region, he was offered full scholarships … and the girls came chasing.
David Adewumi also is astute and publicly honest enough to observe this:
An interesting phenomenon I’ve witnessed in the lives of my black friends, is that their parents give much lip service to the importance of education, graduating from high school, college, and graduate school, yet they do not reinforce this with their actions. The black kids who are trying to be popular did indeed learn it from their parents (or older siblings, who themselves learned it from their parents). One of my best friends’ dad takes him shopping one or two times a month — shoes, clothes, suits, accessories — he wants to make sure his son is dressed to impress.
And this:
Realistically, I should have used the term ‘African nerds,’ because almost all of the smartest black people I know were either born in Africa or are first-generation Africans… I’d like to think that there are black nerds whose families have been raised in the US generation after generation, but personally, I just don’t know of many. The only other black girl in my graduating class that was fairly intelligent — a nerd — was also first-generation American, although her parents were from Jamaica.
Now these are my points:
- My congratulations to the father of David Adewumi: the girls came chasing to reward him upon his academic success. This was not my experience—and I have been and still am quite a very handsome lad. Any Americans reading this would of course blame me for not having that “get-up-and-go spirit.” Surely I must have missed that flirtation from that bright, tight chocolate girl in my 20s. Your would-be accusations against me are pissing me off and you need to present me with some formal sociological research data to prove to me where I went wrong here. Now, my explanation begins with being born into a working-class American family that spent most of its time working in nuclear-family isolation—instead of forming lasting social alliances with other families—families with young daughters that would have naturally known of me and my exploits throughout my life. Without this head start from a socialite family, working-class guys of all skin tones are forced to fend for themselves and scrape together a miracle (like Todd MacFarlane) or (more close to home) a bunch of ghetto, squid-Billy bullshit for a “love life.”
- David Adewumi is right on the money to point out that first-generation Americans of color from Africa or Jamaica are the nerds he knows. He knows no nerds from my all-black-American background. There is a book not written by Malcolm X called The Millionaire Next Door that informs my Black-history self that properly-assimilated, n-generation Americans are not the majority among millionaires. Most of these hard-working frugal people are themselves immigrants or children of immigrants. This implies that living in North America from childhood can f’ you up. Just look at George Bush Jr. So it is a rare, rare event for me to find my chocolate woman looking out for me. I can walk into a restaurant in Little Ethiopia and the girls will get sweet on me with deep brown eye contact until they hear my black American accent. Sure I can rebound and still “work” them but I can’t get past their disappointment when they find out that I am not from Ethiopia. Just call it me being “arrogant”…
David Adewumi laments about the perils of black nerdom but can recount upwards of eight “kids” from his neighborhood he could share his lot with… For brothers and sisters like me scattered all over American ghettos (and still not using the Internet wisely) we had to go through being the only nerd with maybe less than one friend on the same tip. Now sprinkle some 1980s crack and gang violence on top of that shit and understand who the f’ you are talking to… Kayne West can go on and on in all caps about shit like this… at least I think he is talking somewhere around this… Now let’s go deeper: my blood brother and more than a few of my uncles are far more intelligent than me. So what happened to them? Why did I designate myself as the ‘only’ one? What is going on here? My experience informs that being extremely bright and having social skills can be your undoing in the ghetto. Not all the time but too often…Being a “black nerd” sounds like a cute little childhood problem that one can eventually grow out of… Being a “black nerd” sounds like a Negro child with a ghetto problem in need of a white-friend suburban solution… That’s what it sounds like to you? Here we go again: yet another one not really listening… Let’s not bore you any more with the immense scale of my poetic melodrama…