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Nerdism Equals Racism?
By Kyle | April 10, 2008
Former Time writer Benjamin Nugent’s insightful and methodical new book “American Nerd: A History of My People,” which is coming from Scribner in May, links the historical view of the nerd to, among other things, racism. Nugent ties the rise of the nerd/jock dichotomy to the swell of immigration in the late 19th century, which connoted urban density that left little opportunity for physical exercise, jobs that took people away from physically demanding farming and placed them at desks and diluted influence for Anglo-Protestants. WASPS took up the cause of athleticism as a reaction to all of these things, to emphasize their status above the “greasy grinds,” as nerds were then called, and began to lobby to limit Jewish admittance to elite colleges on the grounds that they lacked the rugged spirit.
Nugent casts anti-semitism in a new light, finding an elegant way to show how it differs from other kinds of racism.
Nugent constructs what he calls “the racism chart.” It looks like this:
Really sensual———– Human——— Not Sensual———
————————————————————-
Animals—-Africans—E u r o p e a n s— Asians—- Machines
[--------J O C K S------------------][------------ N E R D S-----]-
As Nugent notes, the history of anti-Semitism seeks to place Jews at both extremes of this spectrum. Quoting the progressive-era racialist Madison Grant, Nugent writes, “Grant’s emphasis on the courageous disposition of the Nordic nicely accomodated the centuries-old commonplace in English literature that Jews shied from physical confrontation…Still, modern Western anti-Semitism has been so varied that it’s hard to locate Jews on the animal-machine scale. Voltaire attacked the Jews for being too devout and insufficiently rational. The eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Romantic nationalists attacked Jews for being excessively rational, lacking the spiritual attachment to a particular land necessary to create a strong, unified country. A tradition of German anti-Semitism bestialized Jews, depicting them as animals with claws, and in eighteenth-century English anti-Semitic caricature, Jews were shown as having a secret lust for all things porcine, which resulted in sodomy with pigs.”
Or as Christopher Hitchens put it in a piece on anti-Semitism in the March issue of The Atlantic, “Almost every tribe or ethnicity has a rival tribe or ethnicity that it views as inferior or dirtier or more primitive: the Hutu with the Tutsi, the Sinhalese with the Tami, the Ulster Protestant with the Irish Catholic, and so forth. The ‘other’ group will invariably be found to have a different smell, a higher birthrate, and a lazier temperament. These poor qualities are sometimes attributed even by Jews to other Jews: elevated German and Austrian Jews once wrinkled their nostrils at the matted sidelocks and large families of the poor Ostjuden who had come from the backwoods of Galicia and Silesia; the Ashkenazi-Sephardic rivalry in Israel sometimes recalls and resembles this hostility. But garden-variety racists do not usually suspect the objects of their dislike of secretly manipulating the banks and the stock markets and of harboring a demonic plan for world domination.”
So anti-Semitism is a case of: hate first, figure out why later.
