Jumping in with David Adewumi’s “Why Black Nerds are Unpopular”

Buy this Book at Amazon.com! By way of liberatormagazine.com I read “Why Black Nerds are Unpopular” by David Adewumi. This permits me to grant myself yet another opportunity to release passions about the inconveniences of being me. Is there a way to “monetize” this? What I was supposed to do over the last few decades is to shut the f’ up and wait for someone to ask about me. This would have made me look like a shy, soft-spoken, kind of guy that finally gets to speak in the new Ken Burns documentary with that warm lighting casting serious, thoughtful shadows over my eyes.

My youth is littered with images, personal experiences and stories of Black men designated as “genius” or “gifted” (my childhood term) who came way, way before me that were kicked to the curb by the white-dominated world. And this kicking to the curb has little to do with Hollywood drama of fictional racist villains. It has more to do with being left for dead by the poor people in one’s “community.” Not only is David Adewumi writing like this American ‘tradition’ is continuing in the generation after me but he adds an African motherland twist on it by recounting the story of his father. This jumps out at me:

My grandfather gave my dad a piece of advice: ‘Don’t waste your time chasing girls, just focus on your studies, score high marks and when you are successful, the girls will come chasing after you.’ Sure enough, when he aced the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), scoring what was thought to be the highest mark in the entire region, he was offered full scholarships … and the girls came chasing.

David Adewumi also is astute and publicly honest enough to observe this:

An interesting phenomenon I’ve witnessed in the lives of my black friends, is that their parents give much lip service to the importance of education, graduating from high school, college, and graduate school, yet they do not reinforce this with their actions. The black kids who are trying to be popular did indeed learn it from their parents (or older siblings, who themselves learned it from their parents). One of my best friends’ dad takes him shopping one or two times a month — shoes, clothes, suits, accessories — he wants to make sure his son is dressed to impress.

And this:

Realistically, I should have used the term ‘African nerds,’ because almost all of the smartest black people I know were either born in Africa or are first-generation Africans… I’d like to think that there are black nerds whose families have been raised in the US generation after generation, but personally, I just don’t know of many. The only other black girl in my graduating class that was fairly intelligent — a nerd — was also first-generation American, although her parents were from Jamaica.

Buy this Book at Amazon.com! Now these are my points:

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