David Adewumi

I recently purchased the book Hackers and Painters, a collection of essays written by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham.

The first chapter,‘Why nerds are unpopular,’ is probably the single, most cogent analysis I have ever read on the social hierarchy of middle and high schools across America (although, as I will point out later, this is definitely not unique to the United States).

Paul’s experiences mostly correlate with American ’suburbia,’ and as my high school — located in Central Pennsylvania — is actually a short trip away from his, I can’t imagine the two are entirely different.

While many have posted responses that both affirm and challenge Paul’s experiences, I decided, however, to take a different approach with my reflection on his essay; instead drawing out some of the more pertinent points, and applying them to the Black Nerd culture.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular…in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

I would say, as a young black male, there is a strong inverse correlation between being a nerd and black, and being popular. I’ve seen many black friends who are fairly intelligent that were mediocre students in high school, and either failed out or were equally mediocre at the University level. Why? Popularity is, as Paul mentions, often times a choice of priorities — some sacrifice intelligence for popularity — and for blacks, this probably happens for 9 out of every 10.

Despite our different sets of diagnostics to accurately peg intelligence, the term is generally ambiguous, but at least on the Paul Graham scale of smart, I would put myself on the lower end of the super nerds. I was a National Merit scholar, easily figured out how to beat the standardized tests (don’t we all), and in the military scored a perfect score on the ASVAB, the Armed Force’s versions of the SATs, and twice was offered appointments to West Point, the US military academy. Intelligent, but by no means one of the brightest of the people I’ve met — I’m not even the smartest in my own family.

But my intelligence didn’t make me popular, in fact, in the black sub-culture of my high school and town, any sign of great intelligence is to be avoided like the plague.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular…But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

In the black culture, popularity may be even more important than in the typical American secondary school that Paul describes. I would say this is due to numbers — because black people are so few in comparison, the number of popular ’spots’ available, greatly declines, and there is little to no chance of slipping through the cracks unnoticed, blending in, as there might be at a typical suburban American high school. In a white school, a black will stick out obviously for the color of their skin, and even in an urban, pre-dominantly black school there is a higher degree of emphasis based on popularity than their white counterparts.

For blacks, it goes above and beyond just clothes — sneakers (Air Force ones, Jordans, etc.), jewelry, hairstyle, shape ups, belt buckles, chains, tattoos, diamond studs, do rags, fitted caps — which makes popularity that much more exclusive and more difficult to attain. If you ever watch a black family (and this holds trues from Latinos whom I’ve spent time with as well) they spend much more time worrying about the material and outwardly appearance — driving the right car, clothes, accessories, hair, etc. Paul alludes several times throughout the essay (and indeed, in his response, ‘Re: Why Nerds are Unpopular’) that these experiences are more present in American high schools, but I would beg to differ.

My dad, born and raised in Nigeria, once told me a story. When he was growing up, his family was poor, really poor. So poor, in fact, that he did not receive his first pair of sandals until he was 14-years-old, which, ‘even’ by Nigerian standards signifies near abject poverty. He missed more than a few years of school working on farms in order to raise money just to complete high school. The schools, still adhering to the British system, enforced a uniform dress code. My father’s family only had enough money for him to own one uniform, which he wore day in and day out for an entire school year. With a bit of wear and tear, he developed a hole in the bottom of his school shorts roughly two hands across.

Needless to say, not only was my father not popular in high school, but he was, of course, picked on for not having adequate clothing. One would think that in a uniformed high school society, such as an Anglican school like my father’s, the dress code would make clothes less important, but I’ve actually found the inverse to be true. In travels to Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Nigeria, Kenya, and the Bahamas, I’ve seen the school clothing emphasis devolve into belt buckles, shoes, jewelry, hairstyles, tattoo, headgear, etc. The dress code is only a pretense at uniformity, kids will just spend several hundreds of dollar on accessories instead of clothes.

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.

So even in some countries outside the US (and I could give more examples), being popular and being intelligent are usually mutually exclusive, and popularity is just as important and time-consuming as it is in America.

The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

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.

I’ve never once seen his dad invest in a book, or some other apparatus that would lend itself to learning — yet his dad will claim with his words that education is the most important thing for a young black male. While I have not grown up with this particular kid since childhood, it’s hard for me to imagine he was reading books, playing with flash cards, or engaging in other educational experiences at an early age. Most likely he was given the hottest action figure toys, sat down in front of a TV, and dressed up to be a handsome little tyke.

In fact, he, like most of my black friends, looks at me askance whenever I talk about reading books. You might think that reading were an incurable virus from the way they look at me with a book in my hand.

This would seem to reinforce an article that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly comparing consumption expenses of blacks and whites.

On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

For my family, however, it has been a different story. When my dad was growing up, there was a keen emphasis on perfection in education. If he scored a 99 on an exam, his father would not congratulate him, instead ask him why he was lazy and missed the last point. He was however, the first and only of 10 siblings to graduate from high school, subsequently university, all the way through Ph.D. While my dad was not that stringent and overly-concerned about 1 grade point with his own sons and daughters, both parents have made it absolutely clear my whole life that high marks in school is top priority. My older brother and sister taught me to read when I was very little, and we didn’t play with action figures or watch Barney, we read books, practiced flash cards, and did word problems with my dad. For my next door neighbors, also Africans, they never owned a video game system, didn’t watch much TV, while instead were encouraged to do mathematics, science, and reading from an early age — as both hobby and school.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they’ll tend to become nerds.

Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it) this is where my path diverges somewhat from Paul’s. While I wouldn’t consider myself to be possessed with a movie star-like appearance (and I wasn’t the sibling of popular kids), I was what many would call a ‘natural athlete.’ Personally, I detest the term natural athlete, as it implies, as Paul refers to in his comment about drawing, that it is something innate, that I was born with, upon which I have nothing to improve. Conversely, I have spent hundreds of hours honing my skills and abilities in various sports, and was fortunately able to draw fruit from my labor while still in high school.

For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that’s why they’re good at it. Likewise, popular isn’t just something you are or you aren’t, but something you make yourself.

My athletic prowess, looking back on my high school years now, was probably one of the few things that allowed me to attain a fair measure of popularity. As a junior I started on the varsity football team, and, even though a grade ahead and therefore a year younger than most of my comrades, I anchored my high school relay team to one of the fastest times in the nation, for which we were recognized as National High School All Americans. I was even lucky enough to get recruited by some Division I schools for athletics.

That, however, was high school. As Paul writes, the worst stretch for most kids is junior high, somewhere between eleven and fourteen years of age. And so it was for me as well.

Because I didn’t fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn’t realize that the reason we nerds didn’t fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

This, too, could be said about black nerds. We’ve been trained by our parents — or come to the realization ourselves– that the current system is severely broken, and we’re merely biding our time, working the system, while not focused on our immediate surroundings (popularity) but rather on future gain (learning from other really smart people and/or most likely figuring things out on our on.)

Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it’s damaging even to the winners.

Very much so (damaging) to the black, non-nerd counterparts I know. Sure, some of them will become professional athletes, although only one or two I know, and neither success nor happiness in life is determined by one’s intelligence,however, of what I witnessed, mediocrity is a shell that few break out of.

Many of the popular kids, having sacrificed learning and building on their intelligent nature, are set back for years, from which many never catch up. What Paul doesn’t mention, is how the emphasis on popularity can be cyclical — if the desire to be popular, or conversely intelligent, is mostly learned from one’s parents, than logically if you weren’t a nerd than your kids won’t be either, and this is what I’ve seen amongst my black friends.

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. On my neighborhood street alone, there were 8 black kids — all first generation African — and between us eight, 5 or 6 of us were National Merit scholars, two went to MIT for computer science, one to U Chicago, four others offered full scholarships to a number of universities across the country, and one even got a perfect score on her SATs, the only one to do so from my high school in recent years (that I”m aware of at least.) Between our four parents, three have attained a Ph.D in their respective fields.Keep in mind there were maybe 50 to 60 blacks in a graduating class of about 650, in a high school that has roughly 2800 people.

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. Even that one guy running for President is a first-generation black nerd. This isn’t to say that aren’t many generational black Americans in the US, I just haven’t come across many –from Camden to Baltimore, and Colorado to Pennsylvania.

I would go so far as to say that the lack of black nerds is probably a cause for major concern, but within the scope of this writing, possibly too large a problem to properly address, although certainly an interesting one.

Logically, this discussion might lead to the question ‘Where are all the Black Entrepreneurs?,’ but I think that’s better left for another day.

(Some interesting discussion on Reddit and Hacker News).