What I didn’t realize was that I was also on a mission. Books were certainly an escape for me that summer — an escape from boredom, an escape from my mother’s nagging about being more sociable, an escape from the smoggy heat of Los Angeles. But I was looking for more than a window on the world to distract me from my resentments and worries. I was also looking for a mirror to affirm my experiences as a bright middle-class black child living in a white suburb.

I couldn’t have articulated my need in those terms at the time, but I could tell that my experience didn’t fit the norm. So I became a misanthropic bookworm. I hated parties so much that I’d bring a book with me just in case I found a chance to slip off to a quiet corner to read in peace.

I confess: I was a hyper-articulate terror. I’d correct people’s pronunciation, scolding black kids to say “ask” instead of “ax” and reminding white kids to say “anything” not “anythin’”. A few black friends stuck with me into my teens but constantly admonished me not to be such a geek. When I confessed to one friend that I wanted to visit New York City because Dorothy Parker, my idol at the time, had lived there, my friend just rolled her eyes and replied, “God, you are too weird for words.”

During that summer in the library I read a lot of books about young African-Americans. But I couldn’t identify with them. Either the books focused on memories of growing up poor in the segregated South, like William L. Armstrong’s “Sounder,” or they closely followed the formula established by Ronald Fair’s “Hog Butcher” and Kristin Hunter Lattany’s “Soul Brothers and Sister Lou”: inspiring portraits of inner-city youth struggling to escape a poverty-stricken ghetto via unique talents.

None of those stories spoke to me in the same way as Kin Platt’s sad tale about a little white boy’s nervous breakdown in “The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear.” I’d read the painful story over and over again as if picking at a scab. It reminded me of life with my own high-strung mother.

I also loved Sally Watson’s historical novels (which have been newly reissued by Image Cascade Publishing due to the networking of long-time Watson fans who met over the Internet) about girls who defy the conventions of their day. When I was a kid, I repeatedly checked out Watson’s “Mistress Malapert,” a tale about an aristocratic Englishwoman who masquerades as a boy in order to join William Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe. Recently, I discovered a new Watson favorite, “Jade,” in which a young girl becomes a pirate after aiding a slave rebellion aboard a ship bound for colonial Virginia.

I figured that if I was such a misfit, I wanted to be a spectacular misfit like Watson’s heroines. I kept reading and kept searching for a model that reflected me, a dark girl in the bright suburbs of L.A.

I finally found what I was searching for when I pulled “Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and me, Elizabeth,” by E.L. Konigsburg off the shelf. I immersed myself in the tale of how a fifth-grade witch named Jennifer drafts the lonely new girl at school to be her apprentice so that the two can concoct a flying ointment. I loved Konigsburg’s story about interracial friendship and witchcraft not so much because the title character, Jennifer, was a black girl isolated at a white suburban school, as because she was so inventively odd. I could relate to a girl who was such a voracious reader that she could walk down hallways while reading without looking up.

A year and a half later I better understood Jennifer’s plight when I became the first black child to ever attend our neighborhood elementary school. My parents and I didn’t discover this fact until I showed up for class on the first day. It was 1974 and we, naively, never noticed that we were one of the first black families to reside in that part of town.

A little freaked out by the weightiness of the situation that first year, I often hid out in the library, rereading favorites like “Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and me, Elizabeth.” I found solace in Jennifer’s quirkiness as I fought loneliness and isolation. Konigsburg’s tale helped me to process, on an unconscious level, how vulnerable I felt being the sole black kid at school. It was the first time that I had felt on display, and I could never completely shake the feeling that I was a target, despite the general friendliness of most of my classmates. Indeed, their fumbling politeness made me feel like a living civics project. Their excitement about taking part in that brave social experiment called integration made me feel shy and resentful.

Jennifer taught me that self-invention is one of the best ways to protect yourself from rejection; how can you be rejected if the person who fails to win favor is not really you anyway?

I’ve spent years looking, without much success, for books that made me feel the way I did reading “Jennifer, Hecate.” But I’ve finally found three books that accurately portray the black geek experience: ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” Trudier Harris’ “Summer Snow: Reflections From a Black Daughter of the South” and André Leon Talley’s memoir, “A.L.T.” Each book gives readers insight into African-Americans, like the fictional Jennifer, who live at a distance from the mainstream black community due to sexual orientation, geography, sensibility, education or simple perversity.

At first glance, one would never suspect that these three writers had anything in common other than their African-American heritage. Packer’s an extremely talented fiction writer whose first collection of short stories was chosen by John Updike as NBC’s “Today Show” Book Club selection for May. Harris’ collected essays are about her efforts to earn a Ph.D. in English. Talley, an influential journalist who writes for Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily, is a very tall man who regularly turns up at fashion shows looking like the love child of Wilt Chamberlin and Little Richard in bespoke suits paired with floor length mink coats.

Yet all three authors draw on a Southern upbringing to reveal the rich inner lives of outcasts who use humor to keep loneliness from sabotaging their ambitions. Continuing the legacy of James Baldwin, Packer’s stories focus on smart young people growing up as fundamentalist Christians. Packer’s characters struggle to keep the hegemony of church, tradition and family from smothering a budding sense of autonomy, while Harris and Tally look back on their Southern roots with more affection. The first third of Talley’s memoir, for example, is devoted to his upbringing in North Carolina. A child of divorce, he was raised by his churchgoing grandmother, Bennie Frances Davis. Her sense of style and sensitivity to life’s pleasures shaped Talley’s character as much as his mentor, Diana Vreeland, did.

But the bonds of family and tradition are not enough to protect these writers from being outcasts. Occasionally the books touch upon casual American racism, but the point of their tales is less about the hostility encountered in the larger world than the rejection they receive at the hands of their fellow African-Americans. All three writers explore the idea of the Other’s Other, revealing intra-black conflict and prejudices. Harris finds that her education impedes her marriage prospects and complicates community ties. She notes with pain how neighbors and church members shy away from her, intimidated by her elevated status as a professional woman:

“Receipt of the Ph.D. is the ultimate admission to nerd-dom. It is also the beginning of a lifetime of ‘set aside’ experiences. Countless black folks who have been introduced to me over the years have immediately resorted to calling me ‘Doc.’ From their perspective, ‘Doc’ is a general title of respect, but I would maintain that it is ritual without substance, a game people play to remind you constantly of how different you are. ‘Doc’ works as many of the interactions with black nerds work: It claims and rejects at the same time. It admits that you are well educated, but it also sets you up — constantly — as a noticeably different person precisely because you are well educated. You become the streetlight at the entrance to the community. It’s obvious that you’re there, and you may be something that no one else in the community is, but who the heck wants to be like you?”

Talley and Harris both write in moving detail about the pain of being misunderstood, or even rejected, for their ambition. In the segregated South, they expected whites to underestimate their abilities but find it difficult to be rejected by the black community for aspiring to nontraditional professions. In her essay “Mind Work: How a Ph.D. Affects Black Women,” Harris discusses how some African-Americans often see education as primarily a key to financial upward mobility and fear that too much education can cause harm for their offspring: “There was a general belief, however, that too much education created problems. Those problems might be manifested at the simple level of a cousin who didn’t have any mother wit. Or, more dangerously, they might be manifested in insanity.”

André Talley shares his own experience with closed-mindedness. He recalls a cousin asking him what he wanted to be when he grew up: “I had thought a lot about my potential future career as I pored over my collection of magazines, so I decided to go ahead and tell him. ‘Well, okay. I’m going to be a fashion editor at a magazine!’ His mute response was a dazed and disgusted look, in which he furrowed his brow until it was as wrinkly as an old man’s, shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the room. His rudeness stung me, though, as you know, if it had any effect on what I eventually chose to do with my life, it was to spur me on. Still, I felt as if he’d betrayed me by asking for a confidence and then shrugging it off. I thought about his reaction as I sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the window, and I realized that his opinion didn’t matter much to me, not in my heart. But after that incident in my bedroom, I decided to keep my dreams more firmly to myself, and I never discussed them again with any but my female friends until college. (You can analyze this, if you will, but I think such responses are common among people who don’t live according to the expectations of others.)”

Characters in Packer’s stories face these same obstacles in the ’80s and ’90s. A black nerd must use his debate team prize money to bail his alcoholic father out of jail. A recent college graduate’s neighbors in Baltimore cannot understand the young woman’s plan to live in Japan and teach English.

But Packer is strongest when she writes about how group dynamics influence an individual’s behavior. She wisely starts the collection with one of her funniest tales, “Brownies,” which reads like an O. Henry story dictated by Amiri Baraka. A fourth-grader narrates how a camping trip taken by her African-American Brownie troop subverts racial assumptions. After a confrontation with a white Brownie troop sharing the same campground, the narrator witnesses two black girls in her troop manipulate the other girls for their own amusement. The two bullies receive a surprising comeuppance, not only proving that even the meekest geek can prevail, but also that pain and humiliation serves as a strong bond among outcasts, whatever their background.

Packer creates such vivid characters that I can’t help but worry for their future as I once wondered about Konigsburg’s Jennifer. I hope that they will survive their painful youth with their ambitions intact, as Harris and Talley have done. Talley eventually found people who understood him and encouraged his dreams once he obtained a scholarship to Brown’s Ph.D. program in French studies. He eventually abandoned his studies to embark on a career as a fashion journalist in New York City, where he befriended icons like Andy Warhol, Halston, and Karl Lagerfeld. Harris stayed the course and obtained her Ph.D. in English. She is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I hope that younger bookworms discover these books this summer; I feel so much better knowing that these authors’ experiences and perceptions paralleled mine, and they have shown me that some of my oddities were actually coping mechanisms. ZZ Packer has taught me that having a sharp tongue and a twisted sensibility is a form of self-protection. Trudier Harris’ wise observations validate my experiences as a black intellectual, while André Talley reminds me that I can accomplish anything if I’m lucky enough to have someone’s unconditional love and a strong faith.

When fans logged on in September, Sci Fi had just broadcast the first 11 episodes of the show’s fourth season, with the balance to come in the spring after a short break. “Farscape’s” staffers and actors celebrate the end of each season’s production schedule by communicating online with the fans — from Australia, where the show is produced — to discuss upcoming episodes and drop “spoilers” about the season finale.

The fans received more than spoilers this session. Immediately following a phone conference with Sci Fi programming executives, “Farscape” executive producer David Kemper, along with actor Ben Browder and co-executive producer Richard Manning, informed the “Farscape” faithful (known as “‘Scapers”) that Sci Fi Channel had just reneged on its commitment to purchase the fifth and final season of the series. Effectively, the show had just been canceled, leaving the audience with a series finale that ends in a cliffhanger.

Predictably, within hours of the cancellation announcement fans had gathered on message boards and in chat rooms to create strategies for protesting Sci Fi’s decision. What began as a collective of fans bemoaning the loss of their favorite show has become the Save “Farscape” campaign, one of the largest and most sophisticated fan campaigns in television history.

The Save “Farscape” campaign is hardly the first grass-roots effort to save a television series. In 1968 NBC would never have realized that people were watching “Star Trek” if superfan Bjo Trimble hadn’t encouraged other viewers to protest the series’ imminent cancellation. Dorothy Swanson organized a successful letter-writing campaign in 1983 to save “Cagney and Lacey,” and subsequently founded Viewers for Quality Television to assist other worthy but ratings-deprived shows, such as “Designing Women.” Fans of the late-night cult classic “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ brought fan-based campaigns into the Internet age when they launched a Web site to find a new home for the series after Sci Fi canned it in 1999. (The site continues to bring “MSTies” together, although efforts to relaunch the show were long ago abandoned.)

In the ’90s, grassroots efforts to save canceled shows have gained momentum. Fans protesting the cancellation of the ABC drama “Once and Again” persuaded the network to finance enough episodes to conclude open-ended storylines. Creative “Roswell” fans caught the attention of WB programmers and bought their show more time by sending them bottles of hot sauce as a reminder of the condiment favored by the aliens on the series.

Each successive campaign absorbs and improves upon lessons learned during previous protests. ‘Scapers have taken the best from all of them; they sent Sci Fi executives packages of crackers, in homage to the title of a favorite “Farscape” episode, “Crackers Don’t Matter.”

But protests are perhaps also becoming more sophisticated in reaction to the insensitivity of media monopolies. Movie buffs filed class-action lawsuits in Chicago this February against two movie theater chains for screening commercials before the start of movies. People are beginning to realize that letter-writing is just one of many tools required to express their will.

‘Scapers have launched their own multi-tiered campaign. Desperate to save their show soon after the announcement, fans flooded Sci Fi’s New York offices with e-mails, phone messages and letters. But initial protests have matured into a long-term effort with one specific objective: to increase the show’s ratings by marketing “Farscape” to mainstream America. In a press release issued soon after Kemper’s announcement, Sci Fi defended its decision to cancel the series, saying that declining ratings no longer justified the show’s expense.

During another online chat in December, Kemper said that the only way to change Sci Fi’s position would be to improve the ratings for the show’s remaining episodes. Galvanized by this last shred of hope, fans have focused on recruiting new viewers to obtain the six additional “Nielsen families,” or households monitored by Nielsen Media Research, that would pull “Farscape” up to a 2.0 in the ratings, a figure the show has not reached this season.

Six more families might not sound like a lot, but it’s actually a pretty daunting task. That’s six households out of the approximately 5,000 Nielsen families, whose identities are a closely held industry secret. And of course they must also be among the 75 million households that receive the Sci Fi Channel either on cable or by satellite dish. To achieve that end, fans have demonstrated as much creativity and resourcefulness as “Farscape’s” creators to bring attention to their struggle. Their efforts included launching a global protest rally in 26 cities in seven countries, funding and producing a 30-second commercial that has aired in 24 major Nielsen markets, and a letter-writing campaign targeting “Farscape’s” sponsors and other broadcasting executives.

By focusing on the ratings, ‘Scapers are playing by the rules of the television industry. The problem is, no one knows whether those rules even apply anymore. There is a growing sense in the broadcasting industry that the governing business model is dysfunctional. Most media executives agree that scripted television programs (i.e., sitcoms and dramas) are too expensive to produce and don’t guarantee audiences large enough to justify higher advertising rates and cover costs. To make matters worse, media companies rely on data collected by an outmoded and flawed ratings system, which remains heavily reliant on the paper “viewing diaries” collected by Nielsen.

Acknowledging the industry dissatisfaction with its system, Nielsen recently introduced its “People Meter,” a semi-Orwellian set-top device that monitors who is in the room and what they’re watching on TV. About 5,000 families currently coexist with a People Meter, and the “overnight ratings” Nielsen accumulates from them have become crucial figures that can make TV careers, or end them.

Even if ratings were collected with absolute accuracy, it might not be enough for an industry that prefers to chase after elusive demographic segments instead of cultivating advertisers eager to reach the audience that’s already watching. In “Farscape’s” case, Sci Fi wanted the show to perform better with boys. But the show has already attracted a broad audience, including large numbers of women attracted to the show’s strong female characters, feminist storylines, and the sexual tension between human John Crichton and his alien flame, Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black).

According to advertisers, women and sci fi don’t mix. These same broad demographics prompted the producers of the syndicated series “Stargate SG-1″ to change the mix of characters and storylines so that show would attract more boys and young men, prompting female viewers to mount their own protest campaign last year. Ironically, Sci Fi recently purchased broadcast rights to the retooled “Stargate SG-1″ and placed it in “Farscape’s” old slot, Friday at 9 p.m., which may have contributed to Farscape’s audience erosion.

The entire industry grapples with the same troubles that led to “Farscape’s” cancellation. Vivendi Universal acquired Sci Fi’s parent, USA Networks, at the end of 2001. One year later the conglomerate almost collapsed and had to sell off many of the assets it had recently acquired, thereby pressuring all its units to tighten cash flow and contribute to the bottom line. At the same time, mounting debts forced the Jim Henson Co.’s corporate owner, the German media firm EM.TV, to consider downscaling. EM.TV may sell all or part of Henson to a third party, such as the Walt Disney Co. or an investment group led by former UPN chief Dean Valentine.

These overarching tensions came into play in the fall of 2002 during negotiations over “Farscape’s” fee for its final season. Mindful of its own profit margins, Sci Fi offered an amount lower than expected, arguing that the show’s declining ratings meant lower advertising fees. “Farscape’s” producers argued that they could not make the show with a smaller budget and had no extra funds to cover the shortfall in licensing fees. According to industry insiders, Sci Fi then exercised a contractual provision that permitted it to opt out of its renewal agreement.

It’s a shame that “Farscape” has fallen victim to corporate financial distress, but the only reasonable prognosis is more of the same. The TV industry has yet to adopt workable alternatives, preferring instead to ax veteran programs in favor of cheaper shows. Some producers are considering sponsored content, in which a single advertiser’s message is an integral part of the program (Are we really ready for “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter  and Driving My Ford”?), while others believe that international co-financing may be the only way to cover expenses.

Unscripted television — like the theater of cruelty that we call “reality TV” — is the option TV programmers are wholeheartedly adopting at the moment. No wonder writer-producers like Kemper are rallying the fans to protect the dwindling number of scripted shows already on the air. If anything, television in the U.S. has lagged behind other nations in going all reality, all the time. Jack Lechner, a film executive and author of the book, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You: One Man, Seven Days, Twelve Televisions,” says, “If you look at most television systems [in other countries] 50 percent is scripted programs, at best.” Indeed, the Sci Fi Channel now broadcasts “reality” shows like “Crossing Over With John Edward” and “The Dream Team.”

The most interesting aspect of the Save “Farscape” campaign has been the willingness of the fans to address and remedy the problems of television economics in order to save their show. If scripted television is doomed, these fans may be on the forefront of a collective effort to keep high-quality dramatic serials on the airwaves for all to enjoy, not just those who can afford premium cable or video on demand.

Using a wide range of e-commerce tools, ‘Scapers have collected money for a variety of purposes. There’s the “Farscape”: Beyond Hope fund, which financially supports the advertising initiatives to promote the show and garner higher ratings. This fund has raised about $9,000 to fund press kits for the media, newspaper ads, and a traveling promotional kit distributed at sci-fi/fantasy conventions. Fan sites devoted to Ben Browder and Claudia Black, the actors portraying “Farscape’s” lead characters, collected donations to pay for ads in USA Today, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter to gain public and media attention.

Other funding drives for the show have been even more innovative. In a radio appearance last Sept. 20 on “Interstellar Transmissions,” a science fiction radio call-in show in Florida, Kemper discussed a radical idea with listeners: Could “Farscape” viewers actually find a way to finance the show themselves? Energized fans formed a task force to formalize the idea and bring it to fruition.

Matt Sampsell, a research scientist at the Fusion Research Center at the University of Texas, was so inspired that he started the “Farscape” Fund and an online “viewer financing” petition on his own, and later joined with other “Farscape” fans to form the Viewer Consortium, a nonprofit advocacy group designed to develop viewer-financed programming.

Sampsell, now managing director of the Viewer Consortium, says, “I started doing some math in my head. “Farscape” attracts at least 2 million to 3 million people as a regular audience. Even if 1 percent of them were avid enough fans to spend $15 on mailing letters, setting up rallies, and funding advertisements, that adds up to $3 million to $4 million. And it made sense that we would be willing to spend more money for relatively direct participation in the show’s production. Writing letters is a good strategy, but you can never be sure if anyone reads them. There is no interaction.”

The Viewer Consortium aims to raise more than $750,000, about what Sci Fi pays to broadcast each episode, to fund a new episode of “Farscape”; it has gotten as far as discussing its idea with the Jim Henson Co. Nicole Goldman, a spokeswoman for Henson, acknowledges that the company is aware of the Viewer Consortium’s efforts, but declined to discuss the matter further.

“Farscape” supporters admit it’s an ambitious goal. But they also point out that such a sum amounts to less than a dollar from each Farscape viewer in the U.S. alone, and that the consortium has already gathered some $260,000 in pledges. But fans have still greater ambitions. Staffed by about 25 volunteers all over the country who work together via telephone and the Internet, the consortium hopes to establish a stronger voice for television viewers by converting viewer passion into financial and marketing assistance for their favorite creators and distributors.

Industry observers remain skeptical. “The odds for viewer-funded financing are pretty remote,” says the author Jack Lechner. “They’d have to come up with millions” to really make an impression on producers, he argues.

Organizers of the Viewer Consortium also want to develop alternatives to the current ratings systems and broadcasting structures. Unlike the now defunct Viewers for Quality Television, the organization takes a pragmatic approach toward the structure of the television industry. “The idea here is to have mechanisms for the consumer to affect the industry beyond just lobbying [a network or other distributor],” Sampsell says. The consortium plans to distribute a publication that educates viewers about television industry business practices so that they can frame their ideas and prospective production deals appropriately.

On the one hand, it’s heartening to see the do-it-yourself ethic of the Internet applied to the sick-unto-death broadcasting industry. It’s also sad to reflect that no one even considers involving government agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission — that once upon a time were meant to help safeguard the rights of consumers and the public interest in broadcasting.

Unless ratings dramatically improve, this incarnation of “Farscape” will soon come to an end. Sci Fi will broadcast its last episode on March 21. The sets have been dismantled; cast and crew members have moved on to other projects. But the television industry should beware that this is just the beginning of a new level of fan-based direct action. What if the sophomoric narrator of Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity” was right, and what really matters is what you like, not what you are like. The Save “Farscape” campaign shows that people can organize a resistance and work together, based on a commonality of pop culture sensibility. Once they’ve refashioned the broadcasting industry, maybe they’ll move on to politics.

Before the fur starts flying again, I’d like to say a few things:

1) I’ve learned to never make jokes about Oprah Winfrey. Mea culpa. I solemnly swear to never do it again.

2) I wrote the piece to shed light on the invidious classism and internalized racism of the black upper middle class.

I’m happy to debate the finer points of who and who is not a BAP, but I feel there’s significant elitism, classism and unearned entitlement involved with being a BAP, and am, therefore, not surprised that Condoleezza Rice feels comfortable advocating on behalf of a presidency that supports the ruling class.

On the other hand, I can really relate to her. I’m proud to see a black woman in such an important and powerful position. I respect her intelligence, but I cannot blind myself to the fact that I disagree with her politics and feel that she’s made personal choices that I wouldn’t feel comfortable making. That’s the main point of the piece.

I’m glad the piece triggered emotional responses. Perhaps it will galvanize people to write letters or essays of their own and, in turn, inspire others. Don’t stop there; use that energy to discuss, debate and act collectively to break down the barriers that separate us from one another.

Overlooking, for now, the racist and sexist undertones in this wide-eyed gushing, I have to say that Rice is no mystery to me. She’s a BAP — a bona fide Black American Princess — who exhibits all the telltale qualities of the category: a razor-sharp proficiency, cool manner and a good daughter’s devotion to carrying out orders. Believe me, I ought to know.

I count myself a wayward black American princess. As the editors of last year’s “The BAP Handbook: The Official Guide to the Black American Princess” put it, I have been programmed since birth to “strive for perfection” in everything I do, as well as possess a keen sense of entitlement.

The black American princess is a prim, well-groomed, accomplished and articulate woman. In mainstream business culture, she rarely draws any attention to her ethnic heritage. She’s often the sole black woman sitting in workplace meetings, or the hard-working, dedicated accomplisher of miracles for her church or community organization. (Not all black educated professional women are BAPs. Oprah Winfrey? Not a BAP, no matter how hard she may try; she’s too spontaneous and relaxed — and she grew up poor.)

The BAP baffles most people by confounding their expectations. Unless prodded, she exhibits no clear racial consciousness and staunchly defends her individualism. She speaks standard American English, rarely switching to the black English vernacular unless forced to by an overly familiar white colleague trying to establish intimacy. She may speak several languages, has likely traveled extensively, and may excel at antiquated avocations and elitist pursuits, like opera singing, violin or lacrosse.

BAPs are the feminine avatars of the black bourgeoisie, the fairer (if not in skin tone) half of a subculture larger and more complex than that limned by the Eastern Seaboard’s patrician black Brahmins portrayed in Stephen L. Carter’s bestseller “The Emperor of Ocean Park.”

This tribe of upper-middle-class African-Americans prides itself on its heirs’ ability to assimilate and integrate. Growing up in white suburbs and attending elite schools and institutions of higher learning, black American prince and princesses are immersed in Anglo (often WASP) culture and emerge with modes of speech, behavior and grooming that brand them as “Oreos,” black on the outside and white in the middle.

From an early age, BAP matriarchs teach offspring their duty to present a flawless front in public, affirming the superiority of our forebears in defiance of Jim Crow and other racist institutions. BAP mothers also pass on negro noblesse oblige to their children, especially their daughters, who often lead fundraising efforts to support African-American causes. But they’re more likely to raise money via debutant cotillions and other social events than car washes and bake sales.

BAP encoding presumes that internalizing white Western culture is a way to combat the historical stigma associated with being African-American. Since Rice is exactly 10 years older than I am, I believe that our parents shared the same belief in this pre-civil rights era acculturation process. Often fiercely proud of their African-American heritage, our parents were either blind to the fact that BAP conditioning is based on the wholesale acceptance of racist and sexist stereotypes about African-Americans generally, or knowingly encouraged us to internalize these painful stereotypes as a form of inoculation against racist perceptions faced in the larger world. So BAP mothers pinched and prodded us, reminding us to stand up straight, clearly enunciate each letter when speaking and never display public emotion (unlike other, poorer African-Americans).

Observers may categorize BAPs in subsets. Like Rice, I’m the bookish black-girl brainiac type. Many of us attended all-girls schools (Rice and myself included), which only intensified our obsession with propriety. I’ve dubbed this variety the “black bluestocking.” Members of this group are easy to spot. Most of us offset intelligence with an earnestly girlish demeanor that’s not threatening. I secretly covet April Cornell clothing and own more than five pairs of Mary Janes.

Older men seem to respond most positively to black bluestockings. So I’m not surprised that a series of avuncular mentors — including academic Josef Korbel and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft — assisted in Rice’s ascent into the foreign-policy power elite. I’ve experienced this odd connection with older white men myself. When I became the first and only black female associate at a San Francisco white-shoe law firm in the ’90s, I established the strongest rapport with the senior partners.

As I prepared to leave the firm after realizing that I detested practicing corporate law, I had one last tjte-à-tjte with my mentor, who was 30 years my senior. He urged me to hang in there and try to turn things around at the firm. “I feel like I’m talking to one of my kids,” he sighed. His words brought tears to my eyes because I shared that familial bond. Black bluestockings have huge dutiful-daughter complexes. We have been programmed to obey and never challenge the expectations of authority.

Rice repeatedly manifests her own dutiful-daughter training. Friends tell me that the former Stanford provost, literally acting in loco parentis, had no problem implementing the campus administration’s most painful orders — cutting budgets, laying off people of color or disavowing solidarity with female professors. Like me, she had been taught to be a good soldier, carrying out orders with efficiency and without regard to social consequences.

Rice’s dutiful-daughter role flourishes in the Bush family hierarchy. It began when Rice was a loyal advisor to Papa George during his administration. It continues with Dubya in this administration, though they have more of a cozy sibling dynamic. Isn’t it curious that the press never comments on any sexual tension between Rice and President Bush, despite the fact that she’s his closest aide? If President Clinton had had a similar relationship with a female aide, the press would have had a field day trying to discover a sexual component to the attachment.

The fact that Rice is attractive without being sexual confirms her (pardon the pun) BAPtist upbringing. As black women, we have been taught not to flaunt our sexuality, thus subverting and preempting the stereotype of the oversexualized black woman.

Condoleezza Rice is the first bona fide black American princess to step into the public limelight since Lena Horne. She’s a particularly exotic BAP because she’s the first geeky BAP to be in the spotlight. Black male nerds’ cultural profile has increased since the 1980s, with the appearance of cartoon characters like Oliver Wendell Jones in “Bloom County” and television characters Steve Urkel of “Family Matters” and Dwayne Wayne of “A Different World.” These media images helped us to identify black-geek characteristics in real people like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. But we’ve never seen a female version — until now. Rice’s stiff, processed helmet of a pageboy hairstyle is the black-girl geek equivalent of pundit George Will’s bow tie.

And it is Rice’s very BAPtitude that led to her success. Her ascension to power shows how the establishment will reward an individual who completely appropriates white behavior and privilege, regardless of race or ethnic background. But it’s also her BAPtitude — and its embodiment of an outmoded “white makes right” philosophy — that’s responsible for whatever African-American animus exists toward Rice.

Make no mistake, BAPdom has its perks. It helped get Rice to the White House. Visibility and privilege grant access to people, places and experiences most people only read about in Dominick Dunne’s tales about polite society. Looking back on all the sleepovers, parties and wedding receptions that I’ve attended, only now do I realize that I was often the only person of color in the room at all, or the only one who was not a servant.

It hurt to disappoint my mentor when I left my high-flying law firm. I knew that ditching the firm was not the action of a dutiful daughter. But I had begun to reexamine my BAPtitude, realizing that the price of maintaining it was too high. BAPtitude can become an insidious mask — not unlike the one in poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” — that conceals the wearer from herself as well as from others. Like some twisted take on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale (say, “The Red Shoes”), that mask of perfection and poise wears you, instead of you wearing it.

I now struggle to balance my assertion of individuality with expressions of solidarity and concern with African-Americans, most of whom do not share my background and values. Like Rice, I’ve often refused to succumb to a race-based consciousness — what economist Glenn Loury called the “figment of the pigment” in his review of “America in Black and White” by social scientists Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom. Yet I can’t pretend I don’t feel anger and humiliation when I’m confronted with racism. My BAPtitude isn’t enough to shut out the racism around me.

I’ve learned something else, too: A cheerful BAP mask of perfection stifles spontaneous emotional display, often preventing personal connection, which only serves to heighten the wearer’s sense of alienation. It’s lonely when one’s poise ossifies into impenetrability.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons why Rice, like so many other tough-minded BAPs I know, has such a strong religious faith. The Lord is an excellent confidant when someone feels misunderstood. I pray that her Christian compunction overcomes any conservative impulse toward moralism and helps to keep the United States out of war.

Unlike Condi, I’ve decided to loosen the bindings of my mask and display my imperfections. I’ve been gratified and occasionally surprised by others’ compassion when I dare to display my frustrations and even lose my temper in public. Fewer folks than I feared appear to think less of me for doing so. No one gasps or points fingers. And even if one of them were to do so, I feel as if I can now look back at them with pride and say: “This is me, all of me.”

In her latest film, “Monsoon Wedding,” Nair shifts her attention back to India to focus on her own Punjabi background. The film follows an upper-middle-class Delhi family gathered for an elaborate weeklong wedding celebration, filled with singing and dancing, during the monsoon season. It captures the paradoxes and pleasures of contemporary urban Indian society, a combustible marriage of ancient traditions, global consumer culture and high-tech communications.

Describing the film as a homemade and home-grown homage to the big-budget “Bollywood” musicals for which Indian cinema has become famous, Nair has produced a rollicking film about her homeland that comes with a universal appeal. Indeed, “Monsoon Wedding” won the top award for best picture at this year’s Venice Film Festival and is breaking box-office records at art houses in New York and other cities throughout the United States. Catchy Indo-pop music, traditional Punjabi wedding songs and old-school tunes from musicals familiar to generations of South Asian moviegoers are incorporated into the film’s soundtrack to support and comment on the five plotlines running throughout the wedding celebration.

Each narrative in “Monsoon Wedding” represents some aspect of love: The bride-to-be waits until the last minute to choose between her married ex-boyfriend and the groom selected by her family through a traditional marriage arrangement; the builder hired to erect the wedding pavilion silently courts the family maid; the bride’s harried father discovers comfort in his wife and children; a bumbling cousin who grew up abroad flirts with another relative, a hot Delhi beauty; and a fiery unmarried cousin reveals a dark secret.

I spoke with Nair by telephone just after she’d returned to her New York home from a stint as jury president at the Berlin Film Festival.

What inspired you to make “Monsoon Wedding”?

The whole film was conceived in a spirit of self-imposed leanness. I wanted to make a lot of nothing, to consciously turn my back on big budgets and manipulations and excesses of any kind. I decided to make a film in 30 days even before I did the script. That way you can finance it, because there’s nothing to lose! I wanted to make a self-imposed low-budget film, and then while writing the film it became a circus, with 68 actors and five plotlines and 30 days.

Did you have everything pretty much written by the time everyone had assembled at the start of the 30-day shoot?

Yes, the script had mostly been written but then it was consciously refined, sculpted and pared down and, in some cases, expanded while working with the actors during improvisations that took place during the filming. In order to achieve such a large film in 30 days, it eventually required much more mastery and discipline behind the camera.

Did you choreograph the dance scenes?

We worked with a great choreographer [in a studio] for about two weeks before shooting the first sequence and then he came to work on set with us. I’ll never forget what he asked me. He said, “Do we have four days or five days for this sequence?” and I answered, “We have four hours.” His jaw dropped. To shoot a big scene in four hours is unheard of in India. Well, anywhere, really. But we did it. “Don’t worry,” we said, “we’ll go ahead and plot around it.”

Did you look for dancing ability in your actors?

Because the film was really a homemade portrait of Bollywood, I didn’t require a big-time Bollywood dancer to do it. The film was about people like us imitating Bollywood style. So I never tested the girl who I cast, I just hoped she could dance. I asked her and she said “Oh, I love to dance,” that kind of thing. But I never auditioned her as a dancer.

Did you select the music yourself?

Yes, it was all personally compiled. Some music that played in the film, like the dance sequences  well, two of the three — was pre-planned. The big number in which the girl dances [Ayesha, played by Neha Dubey], that was something we purchased the rights to before we started shooting. That song was a very hot number at the time. I just asked my niece, who was in college, “What are you dancing to?” I heard a number of these and I picked that song because I wanted a song that could be reinterpreted in a pretty modern way and be a crossover popular song.

All the other Indian pop songs in the film are personal choices, mainly ’70s Bollywood pop songs that I love for one reason or another. For example, this great love song that the lovers hear on the radio, while they are making out in the rain — that’s a song my husband would sing to me in our courtship. So it’s very personal, the whole thing. And each song is laden with double meanings, to comment on the situation that’s happening on-screen. Like the song playing when Alice [the maid] bumps into P.K. Dube [the contractor] and the glasses fall is a ’70s song that says, “Today the weather is playing tricks on me. Is something happening or nothing happening?” These lyrics directly relate to the magic of Alice and Dube and the monsoon that is to come.

You’ve commented elsewhere that Indian kids today have realized that it’s hip to be Indian. Why do you think the younger generation of Indian youth, including nonresident Indian youth, embrace these songs? Is it ironic?

In my generation, we embraced the music as nostalgic but lovely. Kids today look at the ’70s music anew because oftentimes the music comes back to them remixed, so it’s being embraced as contemporary music. Like the song in the film that I bought is a classic song which has been remixed and redone by a band in Delhi called the Midival Punditz. [The song is "Fabric," a remix of a classic tune called "Ras Se Behare Tore Nain."] It’s wonderful! These are kids you’d never imagine would know such a semi-classical song, but they’ve done it and they’ve remixed it and made it into something modern.

Who did you make this film for? What kind of audience were you envisioning?

I made the film just for myself. Really, truly, I’m telling you, I put myself through this river of 30 days, and the madness and all the fun of it too, because I wanted to lower the stakes. So that I had to just please myself, be truthful to myself and not pander to anybody’s demands on me. How will they understand three languages spoken in one sentence? How will they understand all these different types of music? How will they understand five plotlines at the same time? There are so many ways you can just undercut yourself. But by leaving it so low-key and so “everything through the backdoor” as I always say, I just had to be true to myself.

I applied this sensibility to this film more than any other film I’ve done. With “Salaam Bombay!” nobody knew me, but this one, after I’d done the big things — the epics and the big budgets and the Hollywood productions — I just wanted to make a film as the purest act of making it. It was a utopian idea and it worked.

Surely Western audiences won’t get all the jokes, all the layered references.

I hear them laugh in the film. The film is so local and authentic to itself, but it’s actually universal in different ways you don’t imagine or don’t know. I’ve heard, especially with this film, people from Iceland to Hungary to Southern California asking me how I knew about their family. How did I do that? It’s a very Delhi family, in a real way, but they can relate to it. As long as people can identify with the stories and the characters, they can always discover the deeper meanings and the jokes later. The great thing about a film with five stories is that a lot of people can return to see it again!

You enjoy the circus aspects of making films and yet say that you want to simplify your filmmaking process. How do you reconcile those two concepts?

My main work is to choreograph chaos. The chaos has to be choreographed perfectly so that you can capture it, but the planning has to be such that during the very act of shooting I want to be in a state of complete emptiness; sort of have a space in my brain so that it can happen and intuition can take over and can work with what’s in front of me. That is a good example of the yin and yang of chaos and simplicity. You mastermind the chaos, you choreograph it and control it as best you can and then you expel it to the point where you can just let it all go and then see what happens and make the best out of what you’ve seen.

There are a lot of hand-held camera shots in the film. How did you work out the camera angles?

We workshopped the scenes for two weeks with the actors, and one week with the actors in the house. We designed the camera movements and shots and knew the blocking; that’s what takes time. Everyone in front of the camera knew what they were going to do when we were going to shoot. So we took our positions and let the improvisation occur, but already knew what we were going to do because we’d achieved so much in so little time. Always the idea was not to do this myself and then just connect the dots. I would never just connect the dots, I always wanted to do it interestingly, not by rote. Why do that? The idea was always to be at play, but to be at play you had to be enormously prepared.

You come from a theatrical background, both as an actor and a director. How does your acting background inform your sensibility as a filmmaker?

I really love actors and I guess I know how to speak to them because I don’t try to control them and tell them where I want them. My feeling is that each actor is an earnest human being and needs to think for himself or herself and I just respond to that person. Sometimes it takes one way and sometimes it takes another way and sometimes it takes imitation of what I’d do — so often I work with nonprofessional actors.

Your screenwriter on this film, Sabrina Dhawan, was one of your teaching assistants in Columbia University’s graduate film program. I’ve been impressed that you’ve mentored other women in your career. Was that a conscious effort?

Nothing pleases me more than to see interesting creative expression realized. That pleases me very much if it happens to come from women, but it’s not conscious. In “Monsoon Wedding” we didn’t set out to get a crew of 90 percent women. We just ended up with the best crew that happened to be women. That’s fantastic.

You have become so prolific. It seems like you put out a film every year.

It’s been a boom ever since I moved to New York. I’ve become a cosmic force, I did “The Laughing Club of India,” “Monsoon Wedding” and “Hysterical Blindness” [premiering on HBO this spring] all in one year. I don’t know what I’m doing next.

In closing, do you see any parallels between the success of “Moulin Rouge” and your own film? Did Moulin Rouge accomplish its goal of uniting Bollywood with the Western musical?

I don’t think “Moulin Rouge” achieved the unabashed quality of Indian dance and emotion that is seen in Bollywood films. But I loved it. I couldn’t compare it exactly to “Monsoon Wedding,” which is a homemade Bollywood film, on my terms, not a classic Bollywood. But the classic Bollywood spectacle has a mystic and magical side that can be compared with “Moulin Rouge.”