Dr. Ron Eglash
email: eglash@rpi.edu
www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.htm
This talk was recently published as:
Eglash, R. “Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters.” Social Text, 20:2, pp. 49-64, Summer 2002
Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American
Hipsters
The development of technological expertise requires
not only financial resources, but also cultural capital. Nerd[1]
identity has been a critical gateway
to this technocultural access, mediating personal identities in ways that both maintain normative
boundaries of power and offer sites for
intervention. This paper examines the figure of the nerd in relation to race
and gender identity, and explores the ways in which attempts to circumvent its
normative gate-keeping function can
both succeed and fail.
Nerd identity as a gate-keeper in science and
technology participation
Turkle (1984) vividly
describes nerd self-identity in her ethnographic study of undergraduate men at
MIT. In one social event “they flaunt their pimples, their pasty complexions,
their knobby knees, their thin, underdeveloped
bodies” (p. 196); in interviews they describe themselves as losers and loners
who have given up bodily pleasure in general, and sexual relations in
particular. But Turkle notes that this physical self-loathing is compensated
for by technological mastery; hackers, for example, see themselves as “holders
of an esoteric knowledge, defenders of the purity of computation seen not as a
means to an end but as an artist’s material whose internal aesthetic must be
protected” (pg. 207).
While MIT computer science
students might be an extreme case, other researchers have noted similar
phenomena throughout science and technology subcultures. Noble (1992) suggests
that contemporary cultures of science still bear a strong influence from the clerical
aesthetic culture of the middle ages Latin Church, which rejected both women
and bodily or sensual pleasures. He points out that the modern view of science
as an opposite to religion is quite recent, and that even in the midst of 20th
century atheist narratives, science (and “applied” technological pursuits such
as creating artificial life or minds) continues to carry transcendent
undertones. Noble’s historical argument easily combines with Turkle’s social
psychology of nerd self-image.
Normative gender
associations are not the only restrictions that nerd identity places on
technoscience access. In an essay whose title contains the provocative phrase
“Could Bill Gates Have Succeeded if He Were Black,” Amsden and Clark (1995)
note that the lack of software entrepreneurship among African Americans cannot
simply be attributed to lack of education or startup funds, since both are
surprisingly low requirements in the software industry. Rather, much of the
ability of white software entrepreneurs appears to derive from their
opportunities to form collaborations through a sort of nerd network—either
teaming with fellow geeks[2]
(Bill Gates and Paul Allen at MicroSoft) or pairing up between “suits and
hackers” (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple).
But if nerd identity is
truly the gate-keeper for technoscience as an elite and exclusionary practice,
it is doing a very inadequate job of it. First, while significant gaps are
still present, there has been a dramatic increase in science and technology
scholastic performance and career participation by women and underrepresented
minorities since the 1960s (Campbell et al 1999); yet during that time period
nerd identity has become a more and not less prominent feature of the social
landscape. Second, this change has been far stronger for closing the gender gap
than closing the race gap. For example, in the 1990s the gender gap in
scholastic science performance for 17 year-olds was significantly lower, while
the gap between black and white 17 year-olds remained the same. Yet Noble and
Turkle portray gender/sexuality, not race, as the overriding feature of nerd
identity (Turkle does not, for example, offer any reflections about the
possibility of racial identity in her comments about “pasty complexions”). Finally, we might note that in comparison to,
say, Hitler’s Aryan Übermensch, the geek image is hardly a portrait of white
male superiority.
Indeed, the more we examine
it, the more nerd identity seems less a threatening gatekeeper than a potential
paradox that might allow greater amounts of gender and race diversity in the
potent locations of technoscience, if only we could better understand it. Of
course to the extent that geekdom fails to create such barriers – to the extent
it allows women and underrepresented minorities to fully participate in
technoscience without being nerds – one can simply ignore it. But what happens
when we fuse the ostensibly white male subculture of nerds with its race and
sex opposites? To what extent might nerd identity become one of the fracta[3]
that can help open the gates?
The Nerd in
Historical Prespective
A good history of the American nerd has yet to be
written, but its starting point might be in the radio amateurs of the early 20th
century, starting with teen age “wireless clubs” in the 1920s.[4] In
an interview with Mark Dery (1994, p. 192) science fiction (“SF”) writer Samuel
Delaney notes this connection:
The period from the
twenties through the sixties that supplies most of those SF images was a time
when there was always a bright sixteen- or seventeen-year old around who could
fix your broken radio…. He’d been building his own crystal radios and winding
his own coils since he was nine…. And, yes, he was about 85 percent white.
These (predominantly) young white males were, however,
distinctly lower in class status than the figure of the intellectual or
“egghead” of the same period. A good illustration for the distinction can be
seen in the historical drama Quiz Show. In this film about a television
game show in the1950s, upper class WASP Charles Van Doren beats geeky working
class Jew Herbie Stempel, to the great relief of the quiz show staff: “At least
now we got ourselves a real egghead, and not a freak.” The implication is that
Stemple’s nerd challenge threatens both race and class boundaries for
intellectual status.
After WWII the broad
category of “electronic hobbyist” fused ham radio operators with dime-store
science fiction, model trains, stereophonic sound and mail-order kits. The
cold-war era emphasis on science education (as well as veterans’ education
funding) drove these hobbyists and their more scholarly counterparts closer
together. While the wholesome image of a Boy Scout merit badge in chemistry
underscores the normative side of these post-war nerds, there was always the
danger of their attachments to categories of the artificial or unnatural. In
the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, Sal Mineo’s character, “John
Crawford,” gives us one of the first screen appearances of the nerd. Nicknamed
“Plato” for his bookish habits, he rides a scooter rather than a motorcycle,
and is seen at one point primping his hair before a photo of screen star Alan
Ladd. A loner who lacks the tough demeanor exhibited by his male classmates, he
appears to have a crush on the film’s protagonist, James Dean. Plato’s implied
homosexuality is a warning for future generations of would-be geeks. Nerd
identity will come at a price, threatening the masculinity of its male
participants.
In the cultural logic of late 20th century
In his analysis on the history of race in
biology, Gould (1996, p.401-412) notes that although the racial categories
proposed by Linnaeus in 1758 were based only on geographic distinctions, in
1776 German naturalist J.F. Blumenbach extended the Linnaean categories to form
an evolutionary framework: two lines of “degeneration” from an original
“Caucasian” (a term he coined for the supposed origin near Mt. Caucasus) to
Asians and Africans. Ironically, Blumenbach was motivated by his conviction in
the unity of human beings—he opposed the claim for separate origins of humans
on different continents—but that did not stop succeeding generations of racist
scholars from using his work for their claims of an evolutionary hierarchy (and
thus a hierarchy of genetically determined intelligence). Blumenbach’s
categories were quickly collapsed into a single ladder of evolutionary
“advancement,” with Africans at the bottom, Asians in the middle, and whites on
top. In the postmodern era we have seen a return to Blumenbach’s dichotomy; the
best publicized have been The Bell Curve by Murry and Herrnstein, and
the pseudoscience of Phillip Rushton (1995). Much like Emily Martin’s analysis
of flexibility in postmodern representations of the immune system, these
examples of postmodern racism are also marked by a flexible designation of
particular characterstics: Orientalism and Primitivism.
Primitivist racism operates by making a
group of people too concrete, and thus "closer to nature" -- not really a culture at all, but rather beings of uncontrolled emotion and direct
bodily sensation, rooted in the soil of sensuality. Orientialist racism operates by making a
group of people too abstract, and thus "arabesque" -- not really a natural human, but one who is
devoid of emotion, caring only for money or an inscrutable spiritual
transcendence.[6] Thus the racist stereotype
of Africans as over-sexual and
Asians as under-sexual, with
whiteness portrayed as the perfect balance between these two extremes. Given
these associations, it is no
coincidence that we commonly see a stereotype of Asian as nerds, and of African
Americans as anti-nerd hipsters (figure 1). Pop musician Brian Eno, for example, starkly
states this race/geek alignment in a Wired magazine interview: “Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human
being without enough Africa in him...” (Kelly 1994, p. 149). But what does it
mean to use nerd identity as the grounds for contesting these links between
race, sex and technology? The following four examples of black nerds illuminate
some of the possibilities for dislocating (or at least broadening) these narrow
normative roles in the ecology of race and technoculture.
Let’s begin with the personal style
invoked by Malcolm X. At first nothing seems more incongruous than associating
a founding father of Black nationalism with pimple-faced computer geeks. But
Malcolm’s horned-rimmed glasses and insistent intellectualism recall the earlier figure of the egghead –
not quite a nerd, but only because he needed to challenge the class
restrictions as much as the mental stereotypes (in other words, challenging Herbie Stempel would not be nearly as powerful as
taking on Charles Van Doren). In the section of his autobiography covering his
dramatic self-education in prison, Malcom repeatedly attributes all credit to
Allah, his messenger Elijah Muhammad, and his struggle for black identity. Yet
the most overtly egg-headed example in his autobiography is his passion for the
debate over the identity of Shakespeare: “No color involved here; I just got
intrigued over the Shakespearean dilemma” (p. 213).
While the Shakespeare example proves Malcolm’s
cultural intellectualism, his persistent references to mathematics provide an
kind of underlying nerd power: “I’ve often reflected
upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in
another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been
better used” (p. 135). “When [Jackie Robinson] played… no game ended without my
refiguring his average up through his last turn at bat” (p. 179). “Allah taught
me mathematics” (quoting Elijah Muhammad, p. 237). “[The University of Islam]
had adult classes which taught, among other things, mathematics” (p. 240). And
in a television interview, his explanation for the new surname: “X stands for
the unknown, as in mathematics.” By
invoking the abstract rationality of math, Malcolm stood in shocking contrast
to primitivist expectations of white America.
Taking
Malcolm’s oppositional equation to a logical extreme, in January 1996 African
American computer wiz Anita Brown launched Black Geeks Online.[7]
Dedicated to “bridging the widening gap between technology haves and
have-nots,” they explain the aims of
this community service organization in the following introductory passage:
Why? Our experience indicates that from
South Central to South Jersey computing is a hard sell in “the 'hood.” Unlike baggy pants, hip-hop music and drugs,
Information Technology (IT) is rarely marketed to African Americans. Black
“geeks” rarely appear in media ads; there are few (if any) hardware and
software ads in Emerge, Essence, Vibe, The Source, Black Enterprise; and
the “nerd” and “geek” images associated with computer professionals are still
considered "uncool."
Brown’s “uncool”assertion is certainly
supported by what is probably the best-known
public figure of the black nerd, Jaleel White’s “Steve Urkle” from the sitcom Family
Matters (figure 2).[8]
Urkle was written into the show merely as a guest for one episode, he quickly
became the most popular character in the show. The winning combination of
Urkle’s uncool personae and black racial identity was partly due to White’s own
comedic genius, but his appeal also derives from a combination of popular
American fascinations: on the one hand, opposing the myth of biological determinism,
on the other, continuing the myth of Horatio Alger, who in this case must pull
himself up not the financial ladder but the social status rungs of youth
subculture.
While
Urkle’s geek personae is signature, other technology-associated black television figures remain less
nerd-identified. Consider, for example, the black characters on various
iterations of the Star Trek series, such as communications officer Lt.
Uhura (of the original series), chief engineer Geordi La Forge (of Star
Trek: The Next Generation), Chief of
Security Lieutenant Worf (also of The
Next Generation), Captain Benjamin Sisko (of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine),
and Vulcan Starfleet Officer Tuvok (of Star Trek: Voyager). Out of a total of 7, only 2—LeVar Burton’s
“Geordi LaForge” and Tim Russ’ “Tuvok”—really qualify as nerds, and neither of
them compare with the extraordinary geekiness of the teen-aged Wesley Crusher.[9] Such limitations for black nerds can be
illuminated through a comparison between the first series’ Vulcan, Mr. Spock,
and Voyager’s black
Vulcan, Tuvok (played by Tim Russ). Leonard Nimoy’s Jewish[10]
identity readily orientalized Spock, and as a result, Tuvok comes off as a kind
of alien Tiger Woods; less nerdish than “Spock” since he is a security officer,
rather than a science officer (thus
implying that black Vulcans are more physical or athletic). Even in outerspace
futures and alien landscapes, white access to technocultural identity remains
supreme.
The
career of African American actor Samuel L.
Jackson also illuminates the figure of the black nerd in popular media.
During the 1980s Jackson played as series of drug dealers and junkies,[11]
but his increasing popularity allowed him greater control over his roles. As a result, he quickly
switched to playing black nerds, including a computer hacker in Jurassic Park,
a Pulitzer-prize winning writer in “Amos and Andrew” and a mathematical prodigy
in “Sphere.” His role in “Sphere” is particularly illuminating in light of work
by ethnographers of scientific culture, such as Sharon Traweek.
Traweek’s dissertation (the passage did
not make it into her published book Beamtimes and Lifetimes) described an
event in which a graduate student of physics repeatedly stuffed bread into his
mouth at a restaurants. Rather than discourage these poor manners, his professors were delighted, calling the
waiter to bring more bread. This and similar scenarios brought Traweek to the realization that the ability to “ignore the social” (and thus express one’s
dedication to the asocial, universal realm of physics) is considered to be a
sign of a good physicist.
Similarly, Jackson’s mathematics nerd in Sphere is so socially unconscious that he unwittingly causes the vessel to run amuck (while he is immersed
in his favorite science fiction, Jules Verne’s 2000 Leagues Under the Sea)
with blissful ignorance. Jackson’s own
real-life dedication to the sci-fi genre is not trivial: after confessing
his geek love for the Star Wars films to producer George Lucas, he achieved the ultimate nerd fantasy of
playing a Jedi knight--“Mace Windu”--a role that originally called for a white
actor (figure 3).
Promises
and problems in strategies of reversal
What can we conclude about the oppositional possibilities
for the figure of the black nerd? Even if it is only through the world of
fantasy, Jackson’s agency in changing the racial composition of the Council of
Jedi Knights was a hard-won victory. As Anita Brown of Black Geeks Online
maintains, the contradiction between the cool of African American identity and
the uncool of nerds is no coincidence; it is precisely this racialized
intersection of technology and personal identity which functions as a selective
gateway to technosocial power. There are, of course, limits to this strategy of
technocultural identity reversal. We might, for example, focus on the ways in
which hegemonic whiteness allows itself to be defined as an unmarked signfier,
and thus can affirm its own identity through asocial or anti-social behavior, while
blackness depends on an explicitly social identity (e.g. if Traweek’s geek grad
student had followed proper decorum, or if Jackson’s mathematician in Sphere
had been obsessively reading Malcolm X, neither would properly perform as
nerds). But such limits are best understood not as specific to African
Americans, but as a general problem in resistance to hegemonic norms. In order to understand the more
general problematic, lets see how such reversals operate for other racial
groups, such as Asian Americans, and
other social categories, such as gender.
The
compulsory cool of black culture is mirrored by a compulsory nerdiness for
orientalized others such as middle eastern groups, groups from India, and Asian
Americans. Just as the black nerd fuses the
desexualized geek with a racial identity stereotyped as hyper-sexual, Asian
American hip hop allows racial
groups stereotyped as desexualized nerds to fuse with the hyper-sexual funk of
rap music. Oliver Wang’s superb analysis of Asian American hip-hop (Wang 1999) points to the oppositional power of these
Korean American Seoul Brothers and Chinese American homies; he notes that their work helps
to expose some of the realities of
struggling Asian immigrants in America. But Wang’s analysis runs the danger of
turning Asian American hip-hop into a narrative of sameness;
his argument could be read as saying that Asian American youth and
black youth perform hip-hop because both encounter similar challenges. Drawing such a conclusion would miss
some of the ways that the local contexts of these two varieties of hip-hop work
in opposite directions. While African American hip-hop affirms a kind of
unapologetically stereotyped identity (which, as Rose (1993) points out, works
as a mode of resistance when the refusal to apologize for “keepin’ it real” is
linked to demands for broader structural change), Asian American hip-hop seeks
to challenge comparable stereotypes of Asian American identity.
Asian American hip hop is useful not because it embraces previously disparaged
attributes, but because it questions what were previously the cherished
attributes for America’s “model minority.” Not affirming negritude, but
negating nerditude.
Similarly, female exclusion from the male
domain of technology is mediated by the opposition between nerd sexual
formations, which focus desire into male anti-social forms, and female youth
gender formations, which emphasize strong sociality. Wakeford (1997) makes this
point in her analysis of gender in web site constructions. Focusing on sites such
as GeekGirls and NerdGrrrls, Wakeford both critiques the easy assumption that
sexism is rampant throughout the web, and yet makes clear the motivations for
creating these hybrid techno-gender identities. She suggests that “the words
themselves are codes to explicitly subvert the easy appropriation of women, and
to resist stereotypes” (p. 60). These stereotypes are both external –
mainstream sexist portraits of women as unable or unwilling to engage with
computer technology at the level of personal identity – and internal
stereotypes from what GeekGirl creator RosieX calls “an older style feminist
rhetoric which tended to homogenize all women” (p. 60). Similarly, the triple
“r” in NerdGrrrls signifies an alliance to the punk-feminist bands (such as
Riot Grrrls) that produce both a break with humanist or romantic strands of
feminism, while calling for new forms of gender identity and affinity. Just as Black Geeks Online was battling
against both external racism and the internal affirmation of essentialist concepts
(essentialism that forced an opposition between black identity and
technological prowess), these grrrl geeks vow dual oppositional use of their
technocultural identity.
The problem with this line of resistance
is that, in the words of Donna Haraway, it is never enough to “simply reverse
the semiotic values”.[12]
Despite their identity violations, these figures of technological and cultural
hybridity often reproduce the very
boundaries they attempt to overcome: not surprising since they are focused on attaching
the “wrong” race to the “right” identity. While the figure of the black nerd
contradicts the normative opposition between African American identity and
technology, it does so only by affirming the uncool attributes of technological
expertise. The consequences can be tragic for the many African American
students and teachers whose interest and identification with science and
technology lead to accusations that they are “acting white.” This phenomenon is
sometimes referred to as “peer proofing” by education researchers (Fordham
1991). But the public reaction to such reports is often problematic, implying
that the need for change is purely internal to the black community, [13] rather than seeing a need to challenge the
ways in which nerd identity itself is constituted, or to loosen the geek grip
on technoscience access.
The AfroFuturist Alternative
It is for this reason that we see the turn to
AfroFuturism. Rather than merely reverse the stereotypes, the AfroFuturists
have attempted to forge a new identity that puts black cultural origins as much
in categories of the artificial as in those of the natural. AfroFuturists blur
the distinctions between the Alien mothership and mother Africa, the middle
passage of the black Atlantic and the musical passages of the black electronic,
the mojo hand and the mouse. Categories like “black nerd” lean too heavily on
the crutch of universalism; they assume that nerd identity is only racially
aligned by a kind of shallow, arbitrary association, and is otherwise
universally available. AfroFuturism, in contrast, challenges both the implicit
whiteness of nerds and the explicit technological absence of both realist and
romantic black essentialisms.
That is not to say there is an absence of oppositional
power in the reversal strategies categories like “black nerd” or “Geek Girl”—
Anita Brown, RosieX, the Seoul Brothers and their fellow travelers are my
heroes. Nor should we have utopian illusions about AfroFuturism; it is fraught
with problems stemming from its derivative relations to the original Futurist
movement, the elitism of academic influence, and most problematically, its
preference for artistic and literary approaches over science and technology,
economics, politics, and other disciplines. But its ability to disrupt and
redefine the boundaries of technocultural identity—the putative opposition between blackness and technology—rather
than merely relocate the figures that inhabit them is important and
controversial. Take, for example, the following discussion from the
AfroFuturist listserv concerning DJ Spooky:
I've heard more about who Spooky is than people
playing his music....I never hear about how great the music is...just that he's
a nice guy.… Spooky has always seemed to me to be an over-intellectual nerd
draped in hip drag...sort of like the "Junior" (My Mama Used To Say)
of electronica without the preppy clothes.… I'll be through to see if somethin'
new is goin' down with Spooky next week on JANUARY 18 at Joe's Pub...maybe the
cat'll put a foot in my grill with his power....I hope so…
Even
in the context of AfroFuturism, the figure of the nerd continues to haunt us.
Conclusion
Primitivist
racism and orientalist racism maintain their power through mutually reinforcing
constructions of masculinity, femininity,
and technological prowess; yet mere reversal is never sufficient as an
oppositional strategy. Nerd is still used in the pejorative sense; its routes
to science and technology access are still guarded by the unmarked signifiers
of whiteness and male gender. Groups,
such as the AfroFuturists, seek alternative routes to circumvent the
technocultural gateways of the Geek. Black nerds, Asian hipsters and geek
grrrls both succeed and fail in challenging these boundaries, showing the
limits of social transgression and the promise of reconfigured technocultural
identity.
Thanks to Alondra Nelson,
Kali Tal, Nalo Hopkinson, Ken Fleischmann, Oliver
Wang, and Thuy
Linh Nguyen Tu for their inspiration and guidance.
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[1] A discussion on the origin of “nerd” ran on the Humanist listserv in May 1990. Although the OED2 cites If I ran Zoo by Dr. Seuss (1950) as the earliest written occurrence (“And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo and Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!”) the earliest use in its contemporary sense was cited from student-produced burlesque at Swarthmore College in 1960. The term was not in common usage until the 1970s when it became a stock phrase on the television show “Happy Days.”
[2] I will be using the terms “geek” and “nerd” interchangeably here only for the sake of reducing repetition. The amount of writing devoted to making this distinction is surprising (cf. Kats 1997). Coupland’s 1996 Microserfs offers several comparisons; perhaps the most illuminating is that “a geek is a nerd who knows that he is one.”
[3] Derrida (1978, p. 278) introduces the concept of rupture or disruption as an unacknowledged contradiction in what appear to be seamless structures of modernity. Lyotard (1984, p. 60), referring to these as “fracta” (from Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry) more explicitly links such epistemological fissures to beneficial social change, and recommends their study through an interdisciplinary “paraology.” While Lyotard’s account comes dangerously close to implying that fracta automatically lead to a more democractic society, I would agree with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) assessment that such “dispersions” or “unfixity” only represent opportunities, not guarantees, towards the praxis of radical democratic politics (in the case of this essay, towards a more democratic technoscience).
[4] Bass (1985) for example notes the obsession with home-brewed radio among two generations of physics students, and Stone (1995) cites the crystal radio as an epiphany in geek self-construction. The popular electronics company, Radio Shack, still bears this legacy. Smith and Clancey (1998) provide several essays on these “hobbyist worlds.”
[5] This
association is illuminated by the tension it creates in the face of the rising
economic value of information technologies; how can corporations mass-market
products which are culturally associated with wimps and geeks? The film
industry’s answer is often in adopting elaborate apparatus that replaces the
keyboard and mouse with impressive physical agility carried out in a virtual
reality interface: e.g. Michael Douglas in Disclosure, Keenu Reeves in Johnny
Mnemonic, and Matt Frewer in
[6] The foundational use of “orientalism” is Said (1979), but his definition is more concerned with a western dichotomy of self/other than the contrast to primitivism used here. For other such contrasting examples see Gilman (1999) on the orientalist/primitivist contrasts in conceptions of the body, and Campbell (2000, p. 60) on differences in the”primitivizing” and “orientalizing” rhetoric of various narcotics discourse (eg marijuana versus opium). See Chinn (2000) for a more general discussion in relation to technology.
[7] Bown’s many achievements range from fashion entrepreneurship to national web awards. See http://www.blackgeeks.net/ for more information.
[8] The show ran 1989-1998. A top ratings performer as part of ABC's Friday family night, the series moved to CBS in its last season.
[9] Admittedly, Wil Wheaton’s character would be hard to beat; in a recent interview the actor himself admitted “I consider myself to be really nerdy. I like things that are traditionally nerdy, like role playing games…. I consider myself a geeky person and I revel in it. Geek pride and all those things” (see http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=6627). But the racial roles for Star Trek characters have been disappointingly limited; consider for example the ways in which Uhura’s duties were suspiciously close to those of a secretary. See Bernardi (1998) for a detailed survey.
[10] For example, the Vulcan four-fingered “live long and prosper” salute was an impromptu adoption from Nimoy’s childhood experience watching the kohanim give the hand gesture for SHIN (first letter of “Shaddai”) at synagogue services.
[11] For
example he played “Gang Member No. 2" in Ragtime (1981), “Hold-Up
Man” in Coming to America (1988), and a crack addict in Jungle Fever
(1991).
[12] The quotation (Haraway 1989 p. 162) refers to a postcard which reversed the King Kong/Fay Wray relationship: it shows a gigantic blonde woman reaching in through a skyscraper and snatching a terrified gorilla from its bed. Haraway remarks that such reversal is never enough—i.e. switching who snatches whom does not contest the symbolized racial politics. Later in her text she notes the same failure for the reversal provided by feminist evolutionary theories which attempt to establish a primeval matriarchy in human origins. Her broader point is that hegemony is too much a world-making enterprise to be undone by a simple act of reversal; such acts can become part of, but never fully constitute, the path towards more just and sustainable futures.
[13] Similarly, the Asian American community gets blamed for generating the need for stereotype contradictions. A Time magazine article titled “Kicking the Nerd Syndrome” concludes: “The fact that the best and brightest among Asian Americans are veering away from programmed patterns of success may be, in fact, another sign that the over-achievers are settling into the mainstream” (Allis 1991, p. 66).