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Although best known for his stint as the “Rubberband Man” in Office Max commercials and his role as a soothsaying slacker-genius in My Name is Earl, the best thing Eddie Steeples ever did on camera was a thing I doubt anyone actually remembers him doing on camera. In Akeelah in the Bee—a film about a girl from Los Angeles who competes in the Scripps National Spelling Bee—Steeples played Derrick-T, a neighborhood dope boy who apparently has taken Akeelah’s brother Terrence under his wing. (And if you’re struggling to possess the level of reality suspension necessary to picture Eddie Steeples as a drug kingpin, don’t. This was a kid’s movie.)
An hour or so into the film, Derrick-T catches Terrence teasing Akeelah about her interest in spelling. And Terrence, thinking Derrick-T would find Akeelah’s interest in the bee as silly as he does, attempts to get Derrick-T to join in with the teasing. But to Terrence’s (and Akeelah’s) surprise, Derrick-T actually thinks what Akeelah is doing is pretty cool, shares that he used to write poetry in school, and orders Terrence to help Akeelah study.
It’s admittedly a corny scene. But it’s stuck with me in the decade since I first saw the movie because it served as a stark contrast to the prevailing cultural narrative about black people (inner-city black people, particularly) devaluing intellect and education, where those of us engaged in academics and choosing to properly conjugate verbs were accused of “acting white”—a narrative that was also a stark contrast to my reality.
Like Akeelah, I also grew up in the hood. From 1989 to 1995, I lived on the 700 block of Mellon Street in East Liberty; the worst block on one of the worst streets in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods at the time in Pittsburgh. I’ve seen people shot and killed in front of me, I’ve had my own house (accidentally) shot into; my own mother (accidentally) shot; and since the Bloods (red) ruled neighboring Garfield, the Crips (blue) ruled neighboring Homewood, and the L.A.W. Gang (black) ruled neighboring Larimer, I know how it feels to exist in a space where the wrong color sweatshirt or hat or shoelace could be a fatal decision.
I’m sharing this as neither a point of pride nor shame. This was just the world an 11- and 12- and 13-year old me had to navigate. I (obviously) managed to make it out. And I have no doubt whatsoever that this navigation was much, much, much easier specifically because I was a bookish and nerdy kid who played basketball. Sure, I was teased like most other kids are, but mostly the neighborhood dope boys and gang members—once they became aware that I had some academic and athletic talent—went out of their way to protect me and ensure that I didn’t get caught up in the same shit they did. And I have never, ever, ever, ever—not in East Liberty, not at St. Barts (where I attended middle school), not at Peabody High School (where I attended for a year), and not at Penn Hills Senior High School (where I graduated from)—been teased for “taking white.” Or had anyone suggest that getting A’s and B’s was somehow “acting white.” Being smart has always been considerably and demonstratively “cooler” than not being it.
This—the idea that the “Black kids roundly and regularly tease other black kids for being smart and earning good grades” is more of a myth than a reality—was recently echoed and deconstructed in a piece from Vox’s Jenee Desmond-Harris.
As Desmond-Harris articulates, are there black people who were teased specifically because they were smart or awkward or just different? Yes. But this isn’t a uniquely black problem, and considering it a uniquely black problem pathologizes black people. This is a fact I believe most black people are aware of, and this myth is mostly kept alive by people who either are legitimately clueless about black people or wish to promote a narrative of black pathology for their own personal and/or political agendas
Which brings us (finally) to Barack Obama.
In less than a week, he will no longer be President of the United States, a position he’s held for the past eight years. He will, however, retain his status as the coolest motherfucker in the country, a position he’s also held for the past eight years and will keep for the foreseeable future. No one—not Jay Z, not Beyonce, not Oprah, not Lebron, not Michael Jordan, not Drake, and not Donald Trump (which you know absolutely kills him)—possess more of that type of social capital than he does, or even comes anywhere close. This level of status is particularly exaggerated within the black community, where he’s generally regarded as a not-quite-but-pretty-damn-close-to messianic figure.
He is also a nerd. And not a nerd in the contemporary, performative, and inauthentic “nerd culture” sense, but a real-live fucking nerd. He’s bookish and reticent and introverted. He’s gangly with arms too long for his body and ears too big for his head. He hoops in fucking sweatpants! With his T-shirt tucked into his sweatpants! While wearing the same non-descript Costco Nikes that referees, school nurses, lunch ladies, crossing guards, and police officers rock! His shoes are the world’s most accurate and concrete distillation of WHAT ARE THOSE???
He was a constitutional law professor—an occupation so nerdy it sounds like it was specifically invented for a movie about dorks. As my homegirl Terryn joked when discussing his nerd bonafides, he didn’t even start “brushing his hair to the front” until he met Michelle. If he was a decade or so younger, he could have easily beaten out Jaleel White for the role of Steve Urkel. I imagine it feels counterintuitive to look at someone like him now—someone so powerful and influential and so gotdamn stocked with swagger—and consider him to be a nerd. But objectively speaking, he qualifies.
Of the dozens of legacies and impacts Barack Obama created as President and will continue as a private-in-name-only citizen, one that has continued to amuse me is what his mere existence does to counter that narrative of pathological and specifically black anti-intellectualism. Of course, you can counter that Obama is considered cool because he’s President and in spite of being a nerd—that we’d fawn over a half empty can of La Croix if it somehow managed to be the first Black President. But much of what makes him so adored is mined from his nerd status. I know I greatly appreciated that, for eight years, my president wasn’t just black, but was the smartest and wonkiest person in every room he entered.
He didn’t make black nerds cool. He just proved what we’ve already known to be true—what I learned growing up in East Lib, what Derrick-T conveyed to Terrence and Akeelah, and what Trumpian logic and politics would never admit—that the idea that we black people don’t appreciate intelligence and academic achievement needs to be taken behind a barn somewhere and shot in the fucking face.
Damon Young is the editor-in-chief of VerySmartBrothas (VSB) and a professional black person. He is working on a book of essays for Ecco and can be reached at @verysmartbros or damon@verysmartbrothas.com.