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Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com
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Sharp dressed man: Eric Kearney, second from left on the set of Hot Seat, drives two hoopties whose combined ages are almost as old as he is.
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Dani McClain talks white. The color of a new penny and just as shiny, she's one of those black people whose speech doesn't betray her race.
Cadence, tone, diction, vocabulary -- all white sounding. McClain got clowned in Crown Shoes because she talks white.
"I remember some kids an aisle over heard me and my mom," says the 26-year-old teacher and community organizer, settling into the gritty chic of a mismatched chair at Sitwell's, near her Clifton apartment.
"They made their way over and just looked at us talking and cracked up laughing," McClain says. "It was this mixed feeling of anger, maybe a little embarrassment and separateness. These were kids my age. I would've loved to have kicked it with them. Instead, they were clowning me."
Culture club
Public ridicule for talking white is the black nerds' refried lynching story. Black nerd status, however, transcends merely sounding white.
The ageless implication is if a black person studies hard, is bookish, speaks well and ultimately test drives a non-traditional aesthetic and profession, there must be racial fence jumping, an aspiration to whiteness.
Black nerdiness is exactly cattycornered. It's blackness flipped inside out. Popular culture struggles to grow accustomed to its face. You know one when you see one, and you almost have to see one before you know what one is.
In the galaxy of black nerdiness, racial identity collides at the intersection of class, religion and education. Black nerds -- often called Afrodemics -- are blamed for "whitewashing" by studying at prestigious colleges and universities.
They warily eyeball politics but remain independent, eschewing card-carrying memberships. Most turn childhood religiosity upside-down to shake out open-ended religious identities, choosing instead to study world religions.
Black nerds question more than they join.
Though ostracized by blacks and whites alike, black nerds work diligently via the arts, literature, grassroots organizing and small business ventures to suture America's racial divide.
They know well the sins of the fathers. But they aspire to an internationalist culture that doesn't compartmentalize according to the generalities of race, gender and class.
Finally, there's room at the cool table for black nerds. With BET bling-bling on the bow out and name brand white America losing its status quo appeal, black nerdiness is, according to James Hannaham's "The Rise of the Black Nerd" (Village Voice, issue of July 31-Aug. 6, 2002), getting "mad props" from mainstream culture.
"Not for a long time have so many brothers and sisters received so much mainstream attention without trying to be down," Hannaham writes.
But not in the tired Erkel way when the other 'N' word was a dirty word. There's proof this once subverted subculture is gaining ground, spanning think tanks to language to music and films (see "N.E.R.D." on page 30).
Stephen L. Carter, Yale Law School prof and a black nerd writer, got a multi-million dollar book deal for The Emperor of Ocean Park. Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days barely missed nabbing the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Meanwhile performance artist William Pope. L, creator of groundbreaking "crawl pieces," was invited to last year's prestigious Whitney Biennial.
And unlike their mainstream counterparts, black nerds aren't afraid to mix it up, blithely turning the accusatory finger on themselves.
In Talk, poet/performance artist/author Carl Hancock Rux dramatizes the ubiquitous (and played out) "panel discussion" to make light of the Afrodemics' affection for intellectual posturing.
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Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com
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Clifton artist and black nerd Joe Bailey thinks its hip to be square.
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Black nerds have "found new ways of addressing the tricky nature of modern American racism," Hannaham writes.
Step into a world
McClain and Joe Bailey, a 40-year-old Clifton artist, say it's due time the world caught up to them.
"Aaaaahhh!" McClain sings in a high-pitched, faux operatic voice. Arms thrown wide and dreadlocked head back, McClain, petite and doe-eyed, collapses in laughter.
"Finally!" she says. "Somebody's giving us our props! So few people have love for black nerds. We are so different. A lot of times in my life I felt so isolated."
Bailey says he conquered isolation and embraced his black nerdiness once he named it a rebellion.
"I'm defiant," he says, slurping down a raspberry Italian cream soda at Sitwell's.
He intermittently inks swirling shapes in his ever-present sketchbook. His trademark dusty dreads are shorn to shorter locks that lay and revolt against his massive head.
Bailey most embodies the physicality of the modern black nerd. In summer he rocks your Jewish grandfather's terry cloth cabana shirts, plaid shorts stolen from Mike Brady's dresser and sk8er boy sneakers.
Bailey owned Mellow Drama, the trend-setting thrift store that from 1997-2001 peddled urban chic cobbled from church basement and estate sales. It was dusty, cluttered, eclectic, stylish and cheap. Just like Bailey.
A shiny new CVS Pharmacy now stands along McMillan Avenue where Bailey's storefront/living quarters once beckoned hipsters.
"I don't wanna go along with a clique," he says. "I like expressing my individuality. To be in a clique, you gotta do what they want to do in order to fit in."
McClain, a globetrotting community organizer with a bachelor's degree in history from Columbia University, says she left and returned to Cincinnati before she fit in.
"It took me leaving this city to embrace my black nerd status," she says. "I went to Columbia. Columbia's a pretty diverse campus. I was interacting with a highly motivated, oriented-toward-academics, highly educated, politicized group of people."
McClain worked for Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based group that, she says, is overturning America's race- and class-based war on drugs.
"I started liking myself and feeling comfortable in my own skin in a way I never had before," she says.
Such self-love exacts a cost bought with the currency of intra-racial bigotry, racism and misogyny.
As with any movement, black nerdiness has faults.
"I certainly see men moving in the forefront of the black nerds I know who head things," McClain says. "You have to be very clear. You're not there to be hit on, you're not there to be flirted with. I'm very careful to keep my personal life separate."
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Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com
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Dani McClain talks white but has a chocolatey center.
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Blacker than thou
"Part of my dilemma is that I don't have my ghetto papers, but at the same time I'm not a boogey black," Bailey says. "I'm somehow caught up in the middle. It kind of makes me feel like an individual, like I don't have to lean one way or the other."
Like black nerds before and since, Bailey's felt his share of criticism and alienation from blacks.
Oppression by blacks who themselves complain of oppression isn't only ironic. It's a colored double standard, Bailey says.
"A lot of us blacks complain about stereotypes, but as soon as somebody does something different they're accused of selling out," he says.
Add to that the adolescent peer pressure rampant in high school, and a black nerd is born.
"I've been ridiculed because of my glasses, plus I was not good in sports," Bailey says of his days at Walnut Hills High School. "I wasn't athletic. I was taller and they expected me to be able to play basketball. And, sadly, because I just carried books I was ridiculed because I was smart."
McClain was born and raised in the racially diverse enclave of Camp Dennison. She went through the Indian Hill School District from kindergarten through 12th grade as the fly girl in the buttermilk. She forged black nerdiness with minority status.
"I didn't see the good of alienating myself," she says. "I knew I had to play the game because I wanted to be a huge success."
McClain was heavily recruited when college recruiters called. Being the smart black girl was a hot commodity, and she was offered and turned down the illustrious Wells Scholarship from Indiana University.
Still, racial identity was inescapable.
"When I look at pictures from school, I'm the lone black face," she says. "One Halloween we decided we wanted to be Coneheads and of course they're pink, so here I am with this pink cone on my head. It took me a lot later in life to learn what blackness meant for me, what it meant to be black in this country."
IsWhat!? MC and Hip-Hop impresario Napoleon Maddox says every black American qualifies for black nerdiness.
"The black nerd is real, but if you really look at it and break it down, to be black in America is to be a black nerd," he says.
Maddox never divulges his age but looks thirtysomething. He's known as much for his beat boxing and lyrical mightiness as for his promotion of Hip Hop and Free Jazz shows.
During the conversation he slumps on a thrift store love seat and scarfs a vegetarian chicken patty in a foil wrapper and rice stir fry in a recycled Blue Bonnet container. He's between meetings on a pit stop to rehearsal.
"Everything we know a nerd to be is somebody who has a different thought process and a certain level of genius is implied, even if we don't acknowledge it," he says. "Even if we play the clown. The rest of the world is copying black nerds and marketing it and making money off it."
Maddox is the antithesis of the typical black male MC. There are no platinum ropes with dollar signs swinging from his neck, and his gym shoes are unremarkable. His gap-toothed smile is free of gold fronts. He wears T-shirts gifted from a friend in music distribution.
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Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com
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Squeezin one off: Eric Kearney makes a point to Hamilton County Commissioner Phil Heimlich during a taping of Hot Seat.
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He's goofy, and his jokes are corny. He goes on for like a mile-a-minute about any subject.
He's been criticized for his no-maintenance look and his message-laden, PG lyrics. He dismisses it all.
"My father said, 'Speak so that you can be understood,' " Maddox says. "I've spoken unclearly, and I didn't get any darker. All the stuff like that, about my blackness, I can't even remember it. That's how relevant it is."
The black is/black ain't conversation among blacks is old, and Maddox stops short of using victim language to shake off them haters.
"Whatever I am, I had to be alright with it," he says. "If I'm not black enough for me, then the only person it's a problem for is me. I'm the one who has to face that. I can stand my ground in any situation and defend myself as a God child."
Maddox says black nerdiness is paradoxical because, in addition to its marker as a racial identifier among blacks, it must also withstand the stereotype stamp by popular culture.
"The biggest image I have of nerds is of pocket protectors and big thick glasses -- computer geeks," Maddox says. "It always seems like nerds are being defined by somebody else's parameters, and I define the parameters around me."
Business as (un)usual
Eric Kearney's bow ties and Brooks Brothers suits elicit unsolicited commentary from black Kearney-watchers citywide.
He might look preppy. But underneath those pique cotton shirts beats the smart of an ambitious entrepreneur often underestimated.
"My dad worked two jobs -- chemist at the Environmental Protection Agency during the day and then at night he was a waiter at Camargo Country Club," Kearney says, plowing into the explanation behind his Huxtable sheen. "After he'd come home at night he'd say, 'All these guys I waited on are wearing Brooks Brothers suits, so you need to dress this way.' I've been wearing a bow tie since I was 4 or 5."
While it's narrow to boil a man down to his suit of clothing, black Cincinnatians have long tried to get a grip on Kearney by cracking his dress code. Sometimes they just end up cracking up at the sight of him.
Shades of Dani McClain's shoe store culture clash?
"I don't feel rejected by the black community," Kearney says. "Maybe I'm just naive about how I'm perceived."
Perception and reality are part of the larger black nerd equation.
A Dartmouth-educated businessman and entrepreneur, Kearney knows it, concedes it and flicks it aside in one fell deconstruction. Then, as if to prove blackness exclusive of nerdiness, the 39-year-old Cincinnati Herald publisher pulls the Racial Responsibility Card.
"I left a law firm where I was making good money and had no problem," he says. "I've saved a black newspaper in this city. A lot of other people could've done it, but nobody else stepped up."
Kearney is a mini media mogul who, along with his partners, co-owns The Dayton Defender, The Northern Kentucky Herald, Blackbook.com and Nip Magazine.
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Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com
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Just another brick in the wall: MC Napoleon Maddox says all black Americans qualify as black nerds.
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Alone, he owns Abdiel Business Ideas, a turn-around company focusing primarily on black businesses. Last year he purchased Afterwords Advertising, Cincinnati's largest full-service black-owned ad agency.
His business ventures and board memberships add to blacks' perception that he belongs to an elitist, nearly all-white boys' club.
Kearney doesn't live on that street. His businesses operate near the main artery of all-black Avondale -- within earshot of gunshots and a ho' stroll from crack deals and bodegas.
With his wife and daughter, he lives within walking distance of their shared office space and not in the nouveau riche colored sections of West Chester or Anderson Township. He alternates between a bumper-stickered 1985 Chrysler LeBaron and a 1986 Honda Accord.
"They think I belong to the Club of the Business Elite," says the 1993 Charter Committee candidate for city council. "The perception and reality is completely incongruous. Trust me, they're not inviting me to their house for cocktails and my kids aren't hanging out with their kids.
"I know what the business elite looks like. I could call some of the names. I've been invited once or twice, but I see how big the gap is between black wealth and white wealth. I know in my lifetime I won't be as wealthy as my white peers."
Class, then, is also a tentacle squirming from the black nerds' afro.
Unlike the class of bourgeois blacks who assimilate and then disappear into white corporations and neighborhoods, black nerds answer the pull to bring other blacks along.
"My dad always wanted me to go into business for myself," Kearney says. "He was on my ass about studying and acting right. There was a big emphasis in my house to help the black community, joining organizations to help the black cause. Also, there was an emphasis about not bragging or talking about what you do, being low-key."
Kearney was the only black nerd reticent about answering questions for this story.
"In a way, that really hurts me because I don't talk about what I do," he says.
Cool like dat
Artist Joe Bailey revels in black nerdiness as the antidote to stifling black stereotypes.
"Black men always gotta be shooting somebody or pimping women, always angry or uptight," he says.
The more attention black nerds receive, the less isolation, self-loathing and identity chasing there'll be, he says.
"When you feel like you're not a part of society, you feel like you don't exist," he says. "Because the stereotypes on TV were so stupid -- like Erkel -- nerds are not who we're made out to be. People who are successful are nerds.
"I think being a nerd is the best way for me to add to the community. I wanna see things flourish. I'm being defiant because I'm against what it's cool to be."
Maddox, recalling his days in a private high school, says black nerdiness was then as it remains today. It's an identifier.
"The idea of being a black star just by the virtue of being black was greatly overcast just by being black in America and being at a predominantly white school," he says. "It's cool to have you around when it's cool to have you around but, other than that, you're still black and broke."
In the end, Kearney craves what his father worked his life to give him, regardless of the relegation of identities and the stipulations of class.
"Frankly, I would like for my daughter to be better than me, and I'd like for her to have more opportunities," he says.
At the close of the conversation, Bailey gets an assist for helping with the story's headline by simply adding one word --other -- that spares "nerd" from confusion with, well, the other 'N' word.
"That's what nerds do," he says. "We come up with ideas." ©
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