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hyperwhiteness

Preacher's Daughter: A Word About Slutwalk, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Who Gets to Reclaim Racist Words and Traditions

Music post by Kristin Rawls on October 11, 2011 - 11:51am; tagged blackface, Carolina Chocolate Drops, hyperwhiteness, language reclamation, racism, rape, Sexual Violence, slut-shaming, tradition.

Full disclosure: I have had misgivings about Slutwalk from day one. "Slut" has never been a term used against me. Though the idea of reclaiming the word seems to resonate with many young, white heterosexual women, it is not clear to me that it's something that can unify all women. It felt alienating and exclusionary to me from the start.

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Revenge of the Feminerd: Nerd "Hyperwhiteness"

Social Commentary post by Jarrah Hodge on June 17, 2011 - 10:21am; tagged anti-racism, General nerditry, hyperwhiteness, linguistics, mary bucholtz, revenge of the feminerd.
Weird Al dressed as a typical nered-white with glasses, a tucked in white shirt. He is balancing two symbols of two computer programs on each of his fingers

Reading Benjamin Nugent’s book American Nerd in preparation for writing this column I came across a reference to research by UC Santa Barbara linguistics professor Mary Bucholtz, which argues that nerd culture manifests "hyperwhiteness" in its language. Nugent didn’t elaborate on this much in his book but he’d also written a review of her research for the New York Times, and I thought the whole idea of how nerd culture is racialized was really interesting…and pretty problematic.

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