As far as the racial aspect here, I think that others (ex: I’m interested in where Original.Lee is going) are covering it much better than I could…but it seems like there’s far less incentive for white folks to feel like we/they need to “act” in any way in particular in regards to book learnin’ than for other races in America.

Hmm. That didn’t seem to go anywhere
::wanders back off into lurking-land.

I did get a lot out of my time there, and from being in the fraternity. It helped me be able to at least fake “normal” when absolutely necessary. I got pulled out of my shell some. And being able to spend hours in a lab was just heaven.

Anyway, back to Octavia Butler. Now that I’m older, her stories have so many layers of resonance for me that I keep going back and re-reading bits over and over and savoring them and digging deeper every time. She was brilliant, dammit.

Sorry if this is kinda OT - I intended to emphasize the weirdness of where her book was in the library as opposed to her magnificent storytelling ability and use of language.

[I always heard this one story about the washing machine catapult, but that might’ve been a little Cambridge urban legend]

It sounds like you got a lot out of your time there (I know some people who dropped out pretty quickly, for various reasons: more ambition than they could fit into four years, perhaps a bit of the Asperger’s Syndrome you mention). Thanks for elaborating! :D

Now they are dumped into a city where there are 100’s of thousands of college students or college-age people. Most are from rural or suburban backgrounds; few have lived in an urban setting, never mind part of one of the most densely populated urban areas in the country. Lots of different activities and different ways of thinking that they’ve never been exposed to are available. Their academic abilities are something that is celebrated, not deprecated. The projects they can get involved in are cutting-edge research (paid for by your tax money, BTW, and thanks!). They’re surrounded by people like themselves in school. For the first time in many of their lives, they actually get to feel “normal”. Out of school they get some pretty interesting reactions when they’re talking to a bunch of random college students from BU or BC or Tufts (or even Hahvhud) and answer the question “where do you go to school” with “MIT”.

They’re usually a looooong way from home ….

When I was there I joined a fraternity. They (and all the other living groups at MIT) have specific methods and processes they use to socialize their freshmen and get them more involved in the social mileu (instead of sitting up in their rooms studying all the time) and in the community in general.

Exactly.

At Wiscon this year, a black woman was relating one of her stories of Octavia Butler’s death. At the memorial in NYC, hundreds of black people showed up to mourn the end of her life and celebrate her work.

Octavia had an identity as a sci-fi writer specifically, but that’s not an identity that many black people feel comfortable with. I don’t put an onus on them as a community to fix that problem, but it’s still a problem that has ramifications on the business end of science fiction. Black writers and fans feel isolated; they tend not to partake of the community offerings. White editors and writers don’t see black people at events, and underestimate the number of black fans who are interested in futures that are progressive and representative.

And of course you get Octavia’s response to the whole thing which is that black people need science fiction, because black people need to imagine a better future.

Some black authors, like Tempest Bradford and Nalo Hopkinson and N. K. Jemison, are following in the footsteps of the older generations black science fiction gurus like Octavia and Samuel Delany, in trying to find ways to make the white SF community less homogeneous and racist. There’s a lot of emphasis now on marketing; that’s hitting editors where they live as the aging white audiences of golden age SF die off.

There are lots of really fantastic black sf writers, and it’s painful to see them marginalized.

Anyway, check this out. It’s called the Carl Brandon society and it exists to deal with some of these race related problems in SF. The origin of the name is an exemplar of the problem that SF is often considered incompatible with a black identity. When black people ventured into the predominately white space of SF conventions, they would find each other in covert pairs, and they joked about the absent fan — Carl Brandon. Have you seen Carl Brandon? Now the society works to counter some of the race problems in the genre with awards and scholarships. I’m a member, but I’ve been lazy and not joined their mailing list, so I don’t know the full range of their activities. Mea culpa.

On blackness and nerdiness, the one I keep going back to… is Pam Noles’ essay Shame, which is about growing up black and a nerd. It deals with racism in science fiction, the fact that science fiction *specifically* doesn’t *have* to be racist but often is through the laziness of adopting the tropes of a racist culture.

The Benjamin Nugent thing: My first thought is that there’s some very good theory in there and some not-quite-right conclusions. On the one hand, the act of mining my influences and examining my surroundings means acknowledging my whiteness and my experience of whiteness and trying to own it, delving into the ways that’s influenced my life. As several have said above, though, the conclusion that nerdiness is solely a white phenomenon ignores the existence of nerdy people of color.

There’s a very personal, self-devoted strand to geek culture. It’s a tendency to seek what’s dearest to you and what you like — you might stumble across it when it’s in style, or five years later. It might be a piece of rap music or a Shakespearean sonnet or a roleplaying game that went out of print in 1988. It might be a song your immigrant parents taught you, or a programming language, or a series of graphic novels, or a cartoon recaptioned from Japanese to English with some hilarious errors.

And part of the geek aesthetic is ownership of the experience of your obsessions and influences, regardless of whether they correspond to the matching set of your cultural heritage. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t.

It’s easiest when they do, especially for anyone aware of the issues surrounding appropriation, or anyone encouraged by their environment to avoid ‘crossing race boundaries’ in either direction. But it doesn’t always line up so neatly.

I own the experience of singing Rock of Ages in Hebrew way back when, and I have a lineage on it, so I can brag about it. If I fell in love with a Mexican dialect of Spanish I wouldn’t have a lineage on it, only the experience of falling in love with it. But the experience of a thing inside the thing’s context is a different experience than the experience of a thing in your own context; I’d say that geek culture inclines toward cultural insensitivity when it ignores the fact that personal context is subjective.

(I’ve been struggling for a long time to articulate the difference between appropriation and thoughtcrime. I think I’ve just gotten a little closer…)

I might hazard that self-devotion is encouraged in white culture more than in minority cultures; though I know white people, too, who’ve been socialized into “work, earn a living, worry about yourself later”. I think the perspective that places external value on communicating about a busy inner life is encouraged more by a privileged background, whatever that privilege is; hence the slant towards male and the slant towards white in geek culture, by numbers. And anywhere where there is a slant towards male and a slant towards white, there will be a proportionate slant towards racism and sexism, for reasons fairly obvious.

Now I can’t speak much for the sci-fi community. My husband is a black sci-fi fan, but I don’t think he would feel comfortable all in the sci-fi community. I haven’t asked him, but I know he doesn’t go to anything sci fi related. He goes to movies, watches TV shows, and reads books and on line stuff, but I get the distinct impression that he feels quite alone in his love of sci fi. He’s the only one of his friends, who are mostly people of color, who likes sci-fi related stuff.

I’m rambling, but this reminds me of the conversation my dude :) and I have had over and over again.

I have to say, I’m really interested in RonF’s MIT stories - I’ve heard a lot of interesting things from former students there that run along the same lines (good changes, bad changes…).

(and btw, i think you actually will agree it’s obviously false if you pause for a second. Take myself and Tekanji, both of whom have posted on this blog — we both spend a lot of time talking about the role of women/minorities in geek cultures, she in gaming, I in science fiction. Take a bit of a broader look and you’ll look at the Feminist Science Fiction Blog, the Angry Black Woman — any number of places where the issues of representation, race, and sex are enumerated daily. Trust me. There’s a lot of shit to deal with.

Personally, I work in literature. I sell my fiction primarily in SF circles, and I participate in that community as a professional writer. I attend the most prestigious literary MFA program in the world, which is in effect my “day job”. I’m intimately familiar with both worlds of publishing. The issues are shaded differently, but extremely similar in terms of amount.

I don’t actually mean they’re identical. I can’t support that. But there are extremely strong memes in both directions that SF in particular is either MUCH MORE or MUCH LESS sexist than average. Many geeks/nerds who read and enjoy SF are progressive, and therefore think that there are no problems in the field. Many outsiders think that referencing the Jetsons is somehow a relevant critique of the entire genre. I’ve had experiences arguing that YES, sexism exists in one forum while at the same time arguing at NO, the genre is not irretrievably tainted in another.

Academia is another example of a place where racism and sexism remain as systemic barriers to women and minorities, despite an overall culture that feels more supportive to me personally than the outside world.)

Anyway, my big point here is that I see a lot of people dismissing Rachel’s article by saying that they don’t think there are conflicts between race and nerd identity. I hear otherwise from black people I know in my field. I think it’s problematic to dismiss those voices based on our own sense (as most of us probably feel like nerds, geeks, and dorks) of struggling to be anti-racists. I hear this conversation within the SF community when people are saying there’s no racism there; there is. In this case, I think we want to deny that there are any cultural conflicts around color and nerd identity, but in doing so, we end up drowning out the voices of those who say there are.

I went through a lot of changes at the Institute.

With that assumption, I don’t understand why you would simply state “that is false” without, you know, some support? Especially since you now seem to be claiming not that the utopia is false, but that there is no improvement at all.

I’ll submit this: People who are seriously attached to almost ANY activity (fencing, programming, Warcraft, Shakespeare, touring with the Dead)* are, when dealing with others who share their love of the activity, less exclusionary based on other factors. Including race.

They may be just like the rest of the population in other situations. But they’d rather discuss Voltaire with a person of another race, than hear about American Idol with a person of their own race. The more “non-standard” that the activity is, the more the activity “wins” over other factors. And the more of an extreme advocate the person is, the more they care about sharing it, rather than who they share it with.

Nerdiness is a non-standard activity. It is outside the mainstream. It represents a limited lifestyle, though admittedly less limited than others. The ‘uber-nerds’ will always be limited though. (there are only so many people who are or can be electrical engineering majors at CalTech or MIT. And not everyone there is a nerd at all. My dad went to MIT… as an architect. He’s certainly not an ubernerd.)

As a result, nerds are more likely to value “nerdiness” e.g. intelligence, skill, and ability, over other characteristics.

Why do you think that is obviously false?

*Obviously, not including activities grounded in exclusion. This provides a lot of the balance.

Equally false is the perception that they are exceptionally racist (or misogynist).

This seems so obviously true to me that I’m surprised that there seems to be debate.

—Myca

Why do you think it’s

That geek culture is A PERFECT BASTION OF UTOPIA wherein people care about clothes but not color.

??

First, geekiness is less about clothes and more about brains.

Second, “perfect” is always wrong–no surprise there–but so what? It’s possble that geeks and/or nerds are vastly more (or less) accepting of other races, without being either perfectly racist or perfectly utopian, is it not?

Science fiction, of course, has been and often is racist. So is the romance genre, in which there’s a big schism in publishing.

In any case, science fiction culture is correlated with the culture of nerdiness and geekiness. It is also perceived as being a bastion of whiteness, as apparently are nerdiness and geekiness. My point in posting was to support that this perception has basis in something other than a shared geek culture. There are schisms in geek culture based on race, and denying that they exist by saying it’s all about whether or not people wear geeky clothes, is buying into one of the two dominant mythologies about race in geek culture both of which are evident here.

1) That geek culture is MORE RACIST AND MYSOGINIST THAN NORMAL CULTURE! O NOES!

2) That geek culture is A PERFECT BASTION OF UTOPIA wherein people care about clothes but not color.

Both are false.

If society is racist, why is sci-fi perceived as “more racist” than romance novels, or military adventure novels?

I’ve heard it said society is racist.