Deconstructing Ghetto Nerds

Anyone who has followed the site for any length of time knows that we’re interested in how people use, misuse and abuse the word “ghetto,” so it’s no surprise that a blog post on the rise of “ghetto nerds” caught our attention.

In the post, Sonia Sotomayor is linked with Colin Powell and Junot Diaz as examples of ghetto nerds -  ”new and increasingly influential player[s] in American life.” Sotomayor and Powell are both from the Bronx, and the Myth of Junot Diaz hinges on the fact that he was raised near a landfill in that most ghetto of states, New Jersey. (Nevermind that his childhood home was a suburb and not an urban dystopia full of smoke and the howls of gangsters being stabbed outside of soup kitchens by ninja robots.)

What’s interesting about this phenomenon is the extent to which Sotomayor and Diaz’s backgrounds have factored into descriptions of who they are in the present and in projections of the person they have yet to become (How will Sotomayor’s fondness for Puerto Rican food impact her judicial decisions?! The people must know). We suspect Powell’s background is not constantly enmeshed into his present-day narrative because 1) being black in this country is to be different anyway, and Latinos present a “new” minority for the mainstream to ponder and attempt to label neatly, 2) he has so many present accomplishments to his name that his past is of less concern, or 3) it is more or less understood, in the narrative the majority voice has created for black Americans, that black can come from urban, rural and suburban areas alike, but that the myth for accomplished Latinos holds that they must either be the hard-working progeny of immigrant farmers who toiled under harsh sun so that their children might be doctors or lawyers or politicians (we pity the child of an illiterate immigrant who grows up to be a mere insurance agent) , or, like the song goes, a rose in Spanish harlem, pushing their way up through manhole covers on some street where salsa is playing through open apartment windows.

This is all to say: God, how stupid. How limiting and silly and stupid this all is, to take one person’s story, or a background that applies to a select few and use it to make a sweeping statement about a varied and complex group of people. What a way to miss the point: That Sonia Sotomayor’s story is so inspiring because neither our past nor our future in this country has to be set in stone. That Junot Diaz, despite the brand he has created for himself, is but one voice that beautifully and comically and heartbreakingly describes one experience.

In reality, ghetto nerd fairy-tales aren’t just about the race wars, it’s a brute simplification to boil them down to that. They’re also about overcoming class, urban blight, and, as Gonzalez says, the anti-intellectual bias so pervasive in America’s streets, outside the middle class’s college prep mentality.

True. Ghetto nerds are more than the juxtaposition of an anti-intellectual term coupled with another often used to alienate minorities. But let’s also be mindful not to conflate the experiences and struggles and accomplishment of poorer, urban Latinos with those of all of us. Our own stories are already so interesting without attempting to turn them into an American fairytale set in the tri-state area.

Here are two very famous examples of why the concept of ghetto nerds (and, thus, the idea of overcoming poverty through hard work and intelligence) is an American ideal, and not limited to defining immigrants and non-white people:

Abraham Lincoln

Let’s see: Born to two illiterate, uneducated parents? Check. Grew up in one-room home? Yup. Relatively self-taught? Indeed. Voracious reader? Oh yeah. Sounds like we’ve got a Kentucky-born, Indiana-raised, White House-inhabiting ghetto nerd on our hands.

Dolly Parton

The fourth of twelve children, Dolly has described her upbringing as “dirt poor” and, like Lincoln, grew up in a one-room home.  Despite her childhood poverty, Dolly worked hard and is now one of the most influential women in music. To give back, she’s developed the Dollywood Foundation, which awards every child in Sevier County, Tennessee a free book in the mail each month until he or she is five years old.

Sonia Sotomayor and the rise of the ghetto nerds [True/Slant]