Almost every American movie has a nerd personality somewhere in the script. And Hollywood nerds are often lovable and laughable.

Many different types of nerds have surfaced in the past few decades: the Bill Gates nerd, Screech nerd, Millhouse nerd, Dwight Schrewt nerd and Michael Scott nerd.

They all have their own little quirks, but they share one similarity: they're all "hyperwhite."

Certainly, ''hyperwhite'' seems a good word for the sartorial choices of paradigmatic nerds. While a stereotypical black youth, from the zoot-suit era through the bling years, wears flashy clothes, chosen for their aesthetic value, nerdy clothing is purely practical: pocket protectors, belt sheaths for gadgets, short shorts for excessive heat, etc. Indeed, ''hyperwhite'' works as a description for nearly everything we intuitively associate with nerds, which is why Hollywood has long traded in jokes that try to capitalize on the emotional dissonance of nerds acting black (Eugene Levy saying, ''You got me straight trippin', boo'') and black people being nerds (the characters Urkel and Carlton in the sitcoms ''Family Matters'' and ''The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air'').

It may be said that appropriate whiteness requires the appropriation of blackness, but only via those black styles that are becoming deracialized and hence no longer inevitably confer racial markedness on those who take them up.

White nerds disrupted this ideological arrangement by refusing to strive for coolness. The linguistic and other social practices that they engaged in indexed an uncool stance that was both culturally and racially marked: to be uncool in the context of the white racial visibility at Bay City High was to be racialized as hyperwhite, "too white."