Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Donald Glover has long been one of the patron saints of Black nerds. He, along with De La Soul, Andre 3000, Questlove, Issa Rae and Jordan Peele, have been some of the leaders of the blerd tribe. But in Glover’s new TV show “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” on Amazon Prime, he’s a spy who’s suave, smart and tough. He’s an ex-military man who’s just as comfortable wielding a gun as he is opening his shirt to his navel. He spends a lot of time in the early episodes with his chest all the way out like he’s proud of how much time he spent in the gym. You can be a nerd or a blerd if your shirt is buttoned all the way up and you’re working inside a CIA office shuffling papers, but when you’re out in the field, wearing your shirts wide open, killing people with machetes and handling all of this with aplomb, I’m sorry you aren’t a blerd anymore. The cool Black nerd vibe Glover was giving us for years is gone. RIP.
I’ve always been a sucker for the blerd vibe. Those are my people. When I first heard De La Soul, the kings of hip-hop blerd, I realized that within the world of ’80s hip-hop, they represented me. When I first saw Glover on “Community,” I realized he, too, was one of us.
Let me take a step back. When I was growing up, being considered a nerd was one of the ultimate disses — it meant you were really smart but, also, interpersonally inept. Nerds were ridiculed for their inability to express themselves with the ease of the cooler people. But millennials reclaimed and recontextualized the word. They had to — in a world where computer nerds from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg were changing the world, it was no longer an insult to be a nerd. Nerds were among the most powerful people in the world, so for millennials, being a nerd became something people were proud to be. It no…
Read the full article here
