White and nerdy?

Is nerdiness just an extreme form of whiteness? In the Times magazine, Benjamin Nugent cites a study by Mary Bucholtz which shows that nerds in the U.S. are merely high-schoolers who refuse to adopt African-American culture. Jo reminded me of the Weird Al song, "White and Nerdy," which suggests there may be something to this. And it's fair to say that European teenagers, even the ones who are coolest back home, tend to look geeky by American high school standards, if fashionable by SoHo or NoLIta ones.

However, having studied nerds (or as Gawker would put it, The Nerds) for eight years, I'm going to have to disagree. The two ethnic groups most associated with nerdery in America are (East) Asians and (Ashkenazi) Jews. Not black, but not white, either. From the little I've learned of American high schools that are not largely Jewish and Asian, the students mocked as nerds sound more stereotypically Jewish or Asian (socially awkward, good at math and/or music, short and/or skinny, etc.) than stereotypically white, regardless of their ethnicity. Nugent's article mentions neither Asians nor Jews, which cannot be because of a politically-correct fear of mentioning race, in that the article is all about race.

If you're going to ascribe an ethnic quality to nerdiness, you might as well be precise. Want to see hyperwhite? Take a look at this. The region of America I'm from, the Northeast, has at least one thriving Caucasian-American culture that's not at all nerdy, and that has not, to say the least, embraced African-American style. Socialites, 'it-girls,' and country-club tennis champs, along with their i-banking, pink-shirted husbands, possess an aesthetic that sells. And not because its consumers are assumed to use Latinate words.