In October, 2016, I made the mistake of dressing up for Halloween while Black. Halloween is a difficult time for people of a certain complexion; there are only so many pop-culture icons we can emulate in costuming. Wanting to make a good impression for girls I would never see again, I perused the list of available costumes that would work in my favor.
Police Man? Nope. It was the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I’m not one for irony.
Killer? No way. Masks are extremely off limits.
Caveman? Negative. That’s one drunk racist away from being a whole incident.
And then I found a bow-tie: that was my first mistake. Got my hands on thick rimmed glasses. Ironed my white, short-sleeve, buttoned-down shirt, and tucked it deep into my khaki shorts. A few pens in my pocket and one nasally voice later and boom: the perfect nerd outfit.
What a fool I was. Why? Because all that night, hoards of liberated college students came up to me yelling and cheering, as though I were a celebrity, “URKEL! DID I DO THAT?”
I didn’t understand, but I would soon realize that since 1989, the nerd costume has been off limits for Black people. Why? Because White people love Steve Urkel.
Now, I don’t mean to take this lightly. But it is undeniably and blatantly apparent the young nerd performed by Jaleel White is an absolute favorite regardless of where he appears. Most people forget that the black sitcom Family Matters originally included the lovable next-door neighbor for only one episode. From only 3 minutes of screen time, Steve Urkel became the most popular character on the show for 9 seasons.
And for good reason too, so one might think. Bright, colorful, comedically gifted: Steve Urkel had all the makings of a pop-culture icon in the 90s. His trademark line he used after making a catastrophic blunder, “Did I do that?” said in a high, nasally tone, became one of the most well known sitcom catchphrases of all time. Helping to fill the gap left by successful 80s Black sitcoms, Family Matters stood on par with the monstrously successful The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air due to, in no small part, Steve Urkel.
As much as we’d like to think the success of Urkel came from a place of earnestness, the realities of the American society say otherwise. Urkel is so well liked because he is a myth. When you think of myth, you might think of those figures from Greek mythology: men with wings, women with fish tails, centaurs and minotaurs alike. These myths take elements of life that would never naturally go together according to the society they dwell in, and make them one; a symbiotic relationship for the entertainment of the masses. A formation even greater than the sum of its parts.
In this regard, Steve Urkel is an American myth; he combines two elements of American culture that according to the public consciousness do not mix.
The first, obviously, being America’s love affair with nerdiness and nerd culture. Nerds burst into popularity with high-school comedies in the 1980s. We made four films out of the feel-good film Revenge of the Nerds, and made an icon out of the titular protagonist of Napoleon Dynamite. We promoted traditionally nerdy genres like sci-fi and superhero flicks to global super stardom. Why? Because we love an underdog, don’t we? Physically non-intimidating and intellectually superior, the nerd is a perfect cast for the lovable, ironically heroic icon.
When paired with the second element, however, you find yourself talking about an oxymoron. Of course, it is a tricky, precarious thing to discuss depictions of Black people in U.S. culture. There is a long, painfully existent history of pre- and post-emancipatory anti-Black imagery perpetuating stereotypes and, at the time, socially acceptable understandings of Blackness. Jim Crow, the ‘Mammy’ and ‘Jezebel’ caricatures, Mandingo, Uncle Remus in Song of the South: these, among others, were and, to an extent, still are canonical to the non-Black understanding of Black people in the U.S., largely propagated by White Southerners in the mid to late 19th-early 20th century.
Black people, historically, have been characterized and stereotyped as anything but nerdy. Aggressive, incompetent, ignorant, criminal: this is the image of Black people for more of American history. Black people have been identified as naturally athletic to the point of bestiality and hypersexual to the point of perversion. More contemporarily, blackness has been associated with coolness, a association stemming from the inauguration of Jazz into the American culture.
All these traits add up to Black people being the exact contradiction of a nerd. What, then, do we make of Steve Urkel, the King of Black nerds?
One critic, Ron Eglash, owes the popularity of the Family Matters star to a phenomenon unique to the American experience. He claims that Urkel’s popularity “derives from a combination of popular American fascinations: on the one hand, opposing the myth of biological determinism, on the other, continuing the myth of Horatio Alger, who in this case must pull himself up not the financial ladder but the social status rungs of youth subculture.” Eglash believes Steve Urkel is the perfect crafting of these fascinations, and that his influence on American control has led to numerous other examples since the 1990s.
To clarify, Horatio Alger is a 19th century American writer, best known for the “rags to riches” analogy he propagated in his novels. A “rags to riches” narrative often shows some character(s) on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum reaching fame and/or fortune, either through hard, honest work or through a miracle of sorts changing the trajectory of their lives overnight. In this regard the trope is used to define the unlikely popularity of nerds who, ironically, are categorically unpopular.
The other fascination is essentially this: you know when you go only and see a picture of a cat in a top hat? You don’t even need to see the picture, because the image in your mind is hilarious enough as is, is it not? Nevertheless, I’ll show it to you.
Why is the image of a cat in a top hat funny? Well, it’s because cats do not belong in top hats. A cat is, no matter how much you may think your cat is a prince/princess, an animal. As an animal, a predatory animal at that, a cat exhibits certain behaviors that do not align with the uses of a top hat. Cats are not fancy, regardless of what your favorite cat-food brand tells you; they are, at least, not the type of fancy that designates a top hat as reasonable attire. On top of this, cats, in nature, do not wear clothes, let alone attire as human as a top hat. Therefore, it is funny to imagine a cat acting outside of their biologically determined behavior, especially in a way so opposed to that behavior.
In this way, the Black nerd is, in the White American view, a cat in a top hat. No, Black people are not cats (though an argument could be made that Black people were cool cats at one point). Nevertheless, we find that the same ideas of biological determinism found in both the common understanding of the household pet and in the understanding of the Black person.
Eglash is clear and fair in asserting that biological determinism, as it pertains to human beings, is a myth; in no way are the behaviors of any person determined on account of the situation of their birth. This myth has largely been dispersed as an effort to draw lines between people for socio-economic gains. As it pertains to Black people, this myth was used to justify the terrors of slavery and the injustice of segregation. And for as long as this myth has existed, there has been a fascination with those mythical persons opposing it.
One of the earliest examples of this fascination comes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which the titular slave, respected and connected to his home, is sold and deposited further south. The novel has, of course, been both commended for its sympathies towards slaves in a time when sympathy was not in the public consciousness and scorned for condescending African-Americans in comparison to contemporary attitudes. Introducing Uncle Tom, Stowe builds a character acting in a manner opposed to conceptions of his biologically determined traits:
He [Uncle Tom] was a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence. There was something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a confiding humble simplicity. (Stowe, 26)
The juxtaposition set of Tom’s biological attributes and his ‘correct’ demeanor and subservience, though it may have done a great deal in changing public perceptions, creates yet another myth that is pushed to ascend the social ladder. The vision of Black men behaving respectfully within their rein is fodder for the fawning of a public that, while abolitionist, remains weary of the lines between person and slave.
In this, we find an issue with the supposed good assigning “positive” traits onto Black characters does for the image of Black people. Yes, while this reinvention of the stereotype may be less out-rightly harmful, it is just that: a reinvention. The myth of biological determinism does not actually die; it is only reinvented into an image that evokes sympathy and fascination out of the very people that invented the first myth.
Both versions lack Black autonomy: the notion that Black people, like anyone else, can behave or be characterized in ways that are decided upon by the figure, rather than by their biology or public image. Autonomy denies the binary view this fascination seems to suggest. Autonomous beings do not simply act in one way or another, but are subject to whatever behaviors that their experience permits or signals. Black autonomy, typically, is portrayed in response to offenses made by White America: jazz, hip-hop/rap, graffiti: these, and more, were made or adopted as an artistic response to White oppression. Certain behaviors and lexicon in Black community, additionally, have been used as a means of creating a culture outside of the White creation.
In being denied autonomy, Steve Urkel, like Uncle Tom, is made subject to the whims and fascinations of a concept that is inherently opposed to his being, as the experience of being a person leads to autonomy. What is more concerning, however, is how this figure has become so easily identifiable in the world of television. Multiple distilled versions of Urkel’s character can be found in many sitcoms and, even more concerning, children’s programming. What started out as an offensive over-simplification of the experience of Black people has fairly quickly become an irrefutable necessity in many shows, such as The Fairly Odd Parents (A.J.), Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide (Cookie), and, most recently, The Loud House (Clyde McBride).
So I am not surprised with how many people believed I was emulating Steve Urkel that fateful October night. What I am most surprised by is that the public has allowed such a sentiment as the character exhibits to permeate our culture, under the guise of bettering public image. If we could only step back and see what we’ve done, we might just ask ourselves the question any reasonable person would once they’ve seen the mess they’ve made: did I do that?
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