WOMEN'S RIGHTS PETITION
OVERVIEW
On May 15, 2011, Psychology Today contributor, Satoshi Kanazawa posted an article entitled "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" (now removed from their website, but reblogged here). We demand that the Psychology Today editorial board publicly account for how and why this racist and sexist article was allowed to be published on the Psychology Today website, and take transparent steps to prevent this from happening in the future.
Kanazawa's article is nothing more than a vile regurgitation of racist and sexist beliefs about black women disguised as "objective" and "scientific" research findings, and contributes to a historical legacy of using distorted "science" as a tool to justify violent ideas about and treatment of black women. Kanazawa has a history of writing biased and error-ridden articles that attempt to justify racist beliefs. Other scientists have discredited his research and his legitimacy as a social scientist has been called into question. That Psychology Today publishes Kanazawa's often problematic articles casts serious doubt about the trustworthiness of their publications as well as the rigor of their editorial process.
Psychology Today is not just a magazine and website, but it's also a site that people access resources for mental health services for their well being. Publishing damaging and crude articles such as Kanazawa's demonstrates a profound disrespect for anyone who turns to Psychology Today for these resources.
Though Psychology Today has removed the article from their website without explanation, the editors have not acknowledged or taken responsibility for publishing the article, discussed the editorial standards they require from their contributors and whether this article satisfied those standards, or explained why Kanazawa remains as a contributor, despite being discredited by other social scientists. Psychology Today editors have a journalistic and ethical duty to be both transparent about how this article was published and accountable for this failure in public trust.
Because of the damage that this kind of misinformation creates for both the public and Psychology Today, we demand the following:
1) a public statement from Psychology Today editors demonstrating accountability for the article itself and the editorial conditions that allowed this article to be published on your website,
2) the removal of Satoshi Kanazawa as a contributor to your website, magazine, and any other Psychology Today publications based on his history of discredited research and repeatedly submitting racially biased articles to Psychology Today, including this most recent disturbing article that your editors chose to abruptly scrub from your website,
3) and the development of more thoughtful and sophisticated strategies for identifying how racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, and other oppressions and biases shape any so-called "objective" scientific inquiries, methodologies, and findings that your contributors examine in your publications. These strategies should be communicated to the public in an effort to be more transparent about how you are disrupting bias in your reporting.
Also, please visit this additional important change.org petition demanding that "psychological professional associations to devise a formal statement alerting the public that, given their track record, Psychology Today should not be considered a reliable source of psychological knowledge."
This petition has been endorsed by the following people:
Alisa Bierria
Aishah Shahidah Simmons
James Braxton Peterson, Ph.D.
Wil Gafney, Ph.D.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D.
Yvonne Welbon, Ph.D.
R L'Heureux Lewis, Ph.D.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ph.D.
Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D.
Jennifer Williams, Ph.D.
Tamura A. Lomax, Ph.D.
Erica R. Edwards, Ph.D.
Tishana Trainor
Tarana Burke
Imani Uzuri
Kenyon Farrow
Linda Perkins, Ph.D.
Llanor Alleyne
Yolo Akil
Kim Ford
Yaba Amgborale Blay, Ph.D.
Ruby Sales
Brittney Cooper, Ph.D.
Susana Morris, Ph.D.
Tiona McClodden
Amina Wadud, Ph.D.
Moya Bailey
Sarah Haley, Ph.D.
Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Ph.D.
Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Ph.D.
Sofia Quintero
Osizwe Raena Harwell, Ph.D.
Nuala Cabral
Alondra Nelson, Ph.D.
Asha French
Salamishah Tillet, Ph.D.
Joan Morgan
Crunk Feminist CollectiveSIGN THIS PETITION
by Latoya Peterson
Justifying racism using “science” isn’t new, by any means. Every few years, it appears that someone needs to provide a rationale for bigotry, so they publish some sort of madness and hope most of the readers suffer from scientific illiteracy. The problem is that even with a thorough debunking, people latch on to articles like this to confirm their own biases. So, if you are suddenly confronted with racist foolishness masquerading as science, here is how to respond. Since it’s here, let’s use the Psychology Today article (available in full here) as an example.
Look at the Methodology
Whenever you hear the word “study,” start checking for the methodology. Oftentimes, a methodology will reveal more about the study than the summarized results.
A good example of this is a study we were alerted to a year or so ago. The Daily Mailcovered a scientific study which proposed that racism may be hard wired into our brains. However, there was an obvious flaw in the study:
All the viewers were white but the researchers believe the results would still have been similar with any other group.
Now, this study wasn’t using basic things, like a sample representative of population. Yet the study authors felt confident in applying the results to everyone.
The same issue pops up in Satoshi Kanazawa’s piece. He actually doesn’t refer to his own research, but another study. And he doesn’t link to the other study, assuming that all readers will know the term “Add Health.” What he refers to is a rigorous, national study…about teen development and health.
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (also known as Add Health, the Add Health Study, and the Add Health Survey) is a nationally representative study originally designed to examine how social contexts (such as families, friends, peers, schools, neighborhoods, and communities) influence teens’ health and risk behaviors. The study is now examining how health changes over the course of early adulthood. [...]
The Add Health Study surveyed 90,000 7th to 12th graders, and has re-interviewed the same group of teens as they age. The study is made public to assist others studying adolescent health, and collects information on the following:
What kinds of topics does the study address?
The study collects information on:*Physical and mental health, such as weight and height, injury and disability, dietary patterns and physical activity, substance use, access to and use of health care services, and suicide and depression
*Interpersonal relationships and sexual behaviors, such as family relationships, friendships, interracial relationships, faith community interactions, sexual activity, and sexual orientation
*Education, including cognitive ability and individual, family, peer, and community influences on school performance
*Delinquency and violence, including individual, family, peer, and community influences on delinquency and violence and risk factors for delinquency and violence
*Involvement in adult roles, including parenthood, jobs, marriage
*Genetic characteristics and biological measures that indicate the presence of specific diseases and disease processes
*Measures of the environments in which participants live and go to school
So this study provides a lot of data on the lives of teens. However, Kanazawa tries to pull information that wasn’t intended to be studied from the report, with no further discussion or references, and present it as fact. (In fact, would you know what the Add Health study was intended to do if we didn’t look it up?) Problematic, to say the least.
We had issues with Allure’s report on the changing face of beauty in the United States,but at least their methodology was much more clear – we knew how many people were surveyed, the images of the models they were shown, what questions they were asked, and how that compared to a similar survey done twenty years ago.
Interrogate the Author of the Study
Kanazawa calls himself “The Scientific Fundamentalist,” and claims to take “a Hard Look at the Truths of Human Nature.” His other articles include things like “Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes,” “Beautiful People Really ARE More Intelligent,” “What I Have Learned from Barry Goldwater,” and this statement on Eva Longoria and Tony Parker’s divorce:
Yes, I called it, nearly two years ago. I knew their marriage was very short-lived long before they themselves did. Once again, such is the power of the evolutionary psychological imagination. We know everything, not because we are special, but because we are evolutionary psychologists.
I’m a Mac, and I predict events before they happen.
I’m afraid to click the links for that rationale.
Amazingly, Kanazawa’s work fits neatly into this bingo card, created by the Punk Ass Blog:
Check for Scientific Racism
Wikipedia has a very useful summary (and a few interesting convos on the talk page) dealing with Scientific Racism. But the clearest example is actually found on the Wikipedia page for The Bell Curve, where an intrepid Wikipedian added a debunking guide for racist misapplications of science:
Evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves described the Bell Curve as an example of racist science, containing all the types of errors in the application of scientific method that have characterized the history of Scientific racism:
claims that are not supported by the data given errors in calculation that invariably support the hypothesis no mention of data that contradicts the hypothesis no mention of theories and data that conflict with core assumptions bold policy recommendations that are consistent with those advocated by racists.[38]
Be Wary of People Trying to Quantify What is Subjective
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And yet, every few years, someone tries to prove that x is definitively more attractive than y group. The closest science has been able to come to anything remotely resembling consensus is a link between symmetry and facial attractiveness.
Everything else is informed by personal preferences, how one interprets beauty, and cultural messages about beauty – which again, do change. What was beautiful in the 1980s and 1990s isn’t necessarily valued today. And globally, the idea of beauty shifts often. So trying to definitively state what is attractive and what is not is a bit of a losing game.
Remember that race is a social construct
Racebox.org shows how these alleged racial categories have changed over time. Here’s who you could be in 1890:
1940:
and 1970:
Combine that with the shifting categories of “black” and “white” and how people have been included and excluded based on political whims, and trying to explain definitive differences becomes an exercise in futility.
Evolved Primate
What Is Wrong With Asking Why Black Women Are Less Attractive
At the University of Minnesota, I have seen reference to Satoshi Kanazawa - who writes the Scientific Fundamentalist blog here on Psychology Today - used in graduate seminars as an example of poor and flawed quantitative methods research.
Scientific Fundamentalist blog posts also appear in undergraduate classroom sessions. Typically when trying to teach soon-to-be-college graduates how to distinguish pseudoscientific conjectures from scientifically reasoned argument in the quantitative social sciences.
I tell my students making their first attempts at writing scientific papers that I will judge them first and foremost on the extent to which they make explicit and transparent the assumptions and conditions under which the data available to them and the methods they are using to analyze this data, are conducive to the type of inference they wish to draw from their results.
Good science, I would argue, does not strive for the elusive goal of objectivity, but transparency and coherence. Good science is not dependent on whether the question you are asking is extraordinary or mundane, nor does it rely on the sophistication of your instruments and methods. Much simpler, good science distinguishes itself by choosing methodological approaches suitable for addressing the questions one wishes to ask given their admitted assumptions. Good science practice is about making a conscientious effort to be clear about one's assumptions, so others may scrupulously challenge how or whether these assumptions, questions, and methods cohere.Bad science, I tell my students, is marked by an incompatibility or gross incoherence between the data (or more general: the information) available, the methods that are used to organize and summarize this data, and the conclusions one derives. In other words: Bad science is trying to answer a question and draw conclusions from data that does not pertain to your question and/or using methods not amenable to your question and/or data.
Pseudoscience takes bad science one step further. It displays a willful effort to hide the incompatibilities that exist in your bad science; often by inappropriately using scientific jargon and being vague about assumptions.
I mention these things, to introduce the thoughts running through my mind when I read an article on the Fundamentalist blog, "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" yesterday morning.
This article - and the more than 13K Facebook "like"s it gathered in less than a day - have taught me how terribly repulsive pseudoscientific writing can actually be while still receiving a certain level of public approval. It reaffirmed my opinion that scientific literacy is not just an educational challenge, but is actually one of the key social challenges of our times.
The infamous post itself (found here, and which should be read to fully appreciate the scope of its absurdness), was effectively taken off the PsychologyToday servers yesterday afternoon, but not until after it evoked a host of harsh responses (you can find excellent responseshere, here, here and here).
I would like to add a few basic points of criticism to the discussion:
1) Kanazawa asks "Why are black women less attractive?"
From a scientific perspective, the only question his data has any chance of ever convincingly addressing would be "Why do the American interviewers RATE Black women as less attractive?" These are two substantially different questions, and Kanazawa asks the scientifically untenable of the two. There are certain assumptions to be made, in order for us to extrapolate from differences in ratings to differences in actual attractiveness. Kanazawa is deceitful when ignoring the existence of these assumptions, and how crucially they relate to each and every one of his conjectures.
2) Kanazawa writes that his data "measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively", and further that "at the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. "
Whatever one thinks of claims of objectivity more generally, the claim that interviewer ratings of attractiveness on a 5-point Likert scale are objective stands in stark contrast with the only way attractiveness is defined: subjectively. Attractiveness is intricately tied to the rater's socio-cultural and biological context. In addition to societal norms of attractiveness, people tend to change who and what they rate as attractive as they age. Attractiveness ratings are also dependent on a slew of conscious and subconsciously processed physiological cues. These cues are also context specific (e.g. to make an evolutionary psychology type argument: if the rater is in menopause she might respond differently to cues of fertility than when at peak phase in her reproductive cycle). I return to Kanazawa's notion of objectivity under point 5.
3) Kanazawa writes he can "compute the latent "physical attractiveness factor" by a statistical procedure called factor analysis. Factor analysis has the added advantage of eliminating all random measurement errors that are inherent in any scientific measurement."
I will attempt in as little technical detail as possible, to explain the problems with Kanazawa's use of Factor Analysis here: Factor Analysis is a data rotation method aimed at identifying sources of shared variance in your data. Kanazawa implies it can be used as a method to arrive at a reliable measure of attractiveness. In fact, what factor analysis does given the data Kanazawa is using, is reduce the attractiveness ratings across subjects to their smallest common denominator. To see what this implies, take for instance this example in which you ask different tasters to rate several red and white wines for tastiness, using a similar 5 point scale.
"Taste" like "Attractiveness" is multi-facetted. It consists of multiple dimensions, for example, sweetness, bouquet, and body. Across these dimensions, different raters may vary significantly in how each dimension influences their overall taste rating. Some people might rate sweet wines as more tasty, others might find it most important that a wine have a rich bouquet. Within this important rater-specific variation of what makes a wine tasty there often still exists at least one dimension that impacts tastiness in a common way across all raters. This communality could even be something unrelated to actual taste, for example, the shape of the wine glass. When people simply have different tastes across relevant criteria such as bouquet, sweetness, body, but everybody consistently prefers wine from a smaller glass to wine from a larger glass, factor analysis would reduce your ratings to the variance that is due to the difference in the size of your glass. It eliminates all the other things that determine your tastiness ratings, including the most important ones. Using this method it is possible to get results that rate white wines as more tasty according to the factor score even if everybody consistently preferred red wines to white wines in your study. This is because the results are really assessing what different raters have in common when responding to the same question about tastiness. Everyone would agree calling the size of the wine glass a "latent wine tastiness factor" is a gross misnomer. Yet this is exactly what Kanazawa does. In its more useful application, Factor Analysis is employed to identify what different ratings of the same construct via different measurements (questions) have in common. The factor score is in no way informative for Kanazawa's inquiry.
4) Kanazawa invokes a couple of graphs showing standardized ratings to conclude, "women on average are more physically attractive than men. Women of all races are on average more physically attractive than the "average" Add Health respondent, except for black women."
One more time for good measure: Being RATED as more attractive is different than actually BEING less attractive. Given the social embeddedness of attractiveness perceptions I cannot understand how Kanazawa is so eager to hypothesize why Black women are less attractive, rather than asking whether the ratings might be saying more about the raters social context than about the people they are rating. In particular I am disturbed by his argument that an exclusively biological perspective can even answer his questions.
5) Kanazawa writes, "It is very interesting to note that, even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others."
Apparently Kanazwa's distinction between "objective" and "subjective" assessments is that "objective" ratings are what other people say about you, while what you yourself say is "subjective". Ehm? By this account, here are some more things that other people are saying about Kanazawa's entire body of work...
6) The race difference in intelligence (and the positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness) cannot account for the race difference in physical attractiveness among women.
Kanazawa gives this hypothesis on the basis of previous work in which the latent factor of intelligence is shown to correlate with the latent factor of attractiveness. At this point, I must invoke the technical issue of factor indeterminacy. In psychological research, we often deal with variables that cannot measured directly. These are latent variables and to work with them we need to use stand-ins. When working with latent variables, the calculated relationship between their stand-ins can be very different than the actual relationship between the two variables. Suppose, as a numerical example, you can measure intelligence with a reliability of rI=.80 (a reliability that is quite impressive for most applications), and suppose your measure of attractiveness is equally reliable; rA=0.8 also. You now correlate your intelligence score with your attractiveness score and receive a statistically significant correlation of 0.3 for a very large data set (this high of a correlation is in the ballpark of what Kanazawa would typically rage about). When the math is done, this correlation (of stand-in variables) is equally consistent with any correlation between the true underlying constructs (i.e. actual intelligence or actual attractiveness) within the rance of -.83 to +1. In other words, the true relationship could be anywhere from a strong negative association (intelligence is inversely related to attractiveness) and a perfect positive association (intelligence is equivalent to attractiveness). The meaning of these calculations can never be understood without an accompanying theoretical argument. Kanazawa habitually avoids providing any theoretical backing for the way he interprets his correlations.
An anticipated critique to what I'm saying here is that people will argue that I'm uncomfortable with his argument because it is politically incorrect. My above explanation has no reference to political correctness. The source of my frustration with Kanazawa's writing is his pseudoscience. Given Kanazawa's history of unabashedly blogging about research that he very well knows to be faulty at best and outright wrong at worst, my criteria for pseudoscience I discussed above are met. Yet, there is a natural reason that I (and others) have decided to respond to Kanazawa most recent article, and not as extensively to previous ones, that clearly follow the same disturbing pattern. Every other week there is a ridiculous Fundamentalist post claiming to explain "Why Night Owls are more intelligent", or asking "Are all Women essentially Prostitutes?", or posing the conjecture that "If Obama is Christian, Michael Jackson as White." It is seems hardly worth the effort to each time try to debunk the absurdity underlying these sensationalist arguments. However, when this unreasonable behavior spills into discussions of socially contentious issues such as race, I believe that pseudoscience left uncommented is dangerous. In particular it can quickly provide a basis for "scientificracism", and so I believe that it is dutiful behavior for scientists and writers - especially when sharing the same media platform - to take a stance when these kind of discussions surface.
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Daniel R. Hawes was flustered by having to write about himself in the third person. They don't train you on how to do that at the University of Minnesota (where he is currently trying to get a PhD in Applied Economics)!
Nonetheless, Daniel gave it a shot, and decided it would be fun to write his bio in third person past tense; make it read like a story. Now if only he could do the same in his blog posts, which are usually short discussions of a wide variety of research papers from Psychology, Neuroscience and Economics.
>via: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201105/what-is-wrong-aski...
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The Pseudoscience of “Black Women Are Less Attractive”
Photo: Creative Commons/Paleontour
Yesterday, the website of Psychology Today allowed an evolutionary psychologist named Satoshi Kanazawa to post a set of bar graphs meant to prove how black women are “objectively and subjectively” uglier than white, Asian and Native American women.
The post, which was an installment of Kanazawa’s “Scientific Fundamentalist” blog, was titled “Why Are African American Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”—until someone at Psychology Today tweaked the headline to read, “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?”
Although the change simply shifted the emphasis from racism to sexism, I’m thinking the editors were attempting to science-up things a bit. Sadly, changing a headline—then yanking the post without explanation—didn’t change the truth: a national publication that claims to have created a space for “leading academics, clinicians and authors in our field to contribute their thoughts and ideas in the form of blogs,” has hosted some of the shoddiest scientific racism since “The Bell Curve.”
Why Kanazawa’s Work is Shoddy
I resent using my time on Earth to debunk bullshit. But since I’m arguing about how racist, sexist and tacky Kanazawa’s argument is, here goes:
Kanazawa, who draws a paycheck for teaching students at the London School of Economics, built his graphs on data from Add Health. Add Health is a massive longitudinal study commissioned and funded by the United States federal government to examine adolescent health outcomes. Starting in 1994, thousands of 7th to 12th graders from across the country filled out detailed surveys at their schools and some participated in follow-up interviews at their homes. Researchers wanted to identify factors that “may influence adolescents’ health and risk behaviors, including personal traits, families, friendships, romantic relationships, peer groups, schools, neighborhoods, and communities.”
Over the next 14 years, the multiracial group of participants continued to take Add Health surveys. According to the study administrators at the University of North Carolina’s Population Center, the adult phases of Add Health have “enabled researchers to study developmental and health trajectories across the life course of adolescence into adulthood.”
Now, Kanazawa didn’t base his baseless invective on the thousands of survey responses. Instead, he looked at how researchers rated the appearance of the adolescents and later the adults taking the survey. Here’s how he explains the data he used:
“At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1=very unattractive, 2= unattractive, 3=about average, 4=attractive, 5=very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.”
I’m confused about how these data are objective. Did some bias-free robots from the utopian ether descend upon each testing site to perform this portion of the evaluation? Or were the interviewers human beings, subject to the same racism, sexism, ablelism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, fat phobia and whateverthehellelsephobia that undergirds beauty standards?
My intention here isn’t to dog out Add Health. I don’t trust Kanazawa to use their work properly, and since he doesn’t identify which subset he’s using, who the interviewers were, or what the study’s architects hoped to learn from the ratings, I can’t cross check this mad scientist.
What I know for sure: Kanazawa is just a bigot with a Ph.D, tenure, and a blog. He’s a twisted man who in 2008 championed Ann Coulter for president because he believed she would have dropped “35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.” I could go on, but it’s a waste of energy.
Why This Matters
To wind up this post, which gives Kanazawa way more attention than he deserves, I’m going to share a few personal anecdotes about black women and our alleged ugliness. Most women I know have such stories, but what makes them real and dangerous rather than one-offs of bad luck or true indications of attractiveness is the legacy of racist pseudoscience like Kanazawa’s. His mess is overt and sloppy, so it’s easy to debunk. I’m worried about how the underpinnings of his ideas have transcended centuries and nations, and how there’s still a financial incentive for publishing them.
Anyway, a few real-life examples of Kanazawa-style theorizing:
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On my second day of high school, a black girl who had befriended me described how a crew of boys and girls had been discussing my appearance. The consensus was that I was cute, until one outlier announced, “She ain’t cute; she look like a monkey!” My so-called friend wouldn’t name the outlier.
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In college, when I had my short, natural Ceasar and wardrobe of long, flowing skirts, a black boyfriend from Harlem told me I was very attractive—to him. “My boys at home wouldn’t get it,” he said of my “big eyes and big, white healthy teeth.”
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In my mid 20s, a Dominican-American gentleman leered at me during New York City’s infamously hectic Caribbean Day Parade. When I didn’t respond, he announced, “It’s funny how the ugly ones have the worst attitudes. And she got a flat ass. And she’s black?”
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Working at a now-defunct magazine, I had heard that a high ranking member of the fashion team didn’t “use” black models because they were “ugly and fat.” That didn’t stop me from suggesting a conventionally attractive black friend of mine for a column that set everyday people up on blind dates. The photo editor, an often disheveled white woman, groused about having to shoot “these ugly people.” When I pointed out that one half of the supposedly unsightly duo was a close friend, she replied, “And?”
See? Science.
For a PDF of Kanazawa’s post, click here. Over at Racialicious, Latoya Peterson has five easy steps to debunk crap science—with pictures!
Update: Just seeing how Psychology Today’s race blogger Mikhail Lyubansky, Ph.D. did a thorough rebuttalyesterday. Not thrilled with sending traffic to the site, but his column is on point.
>via: http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/05/satoshi_kanazawa_is_a_scientific.html
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When we embrace our curvy bodies, we’re told we’re fat. When we accept our thin frames, we’re accused of lazy or bad cooks. We’ve been charged with nursing and caring for the children of our white employers from Antebellum times through today, but we’re constantly being portrayed as bad mothers. We put a weave in our hair trying conform to a beauty standard that has nothing to do with us and we’re still called “nappy-headed hoes”. When we go to school, get degrees and a career, we’re “un-marry-able”. If we work and have kids early instead of going to school, same thing happens. When we or others decide to celebrate us, white women scream out “REVERSE RACISM” but we have to comb through 50-11 magazines with white women on every page to find ONE with a Black woman on the cover. We bare it all in a video or keep condoms in our nightstands and we’re called sluts. We dedicate ourselves to The Church or are decidedly single and we’re prudes or “bitter”. All too often, we are forced to choose our race over our gender or risk feeling the wrath of our Brothers, despite having to live with the realities of both. From Saartjie Baartman aka “Venus Hottentot” to Satoshi Kanazawa’s “scientific” study claiming Black women being less physically attractive than EVERYBODY else, we’ve been studied like freaks of nature instead of just regarded as human beings with the same value as all others.
We’re pretty much damned if we do, damned if we don’t. So, the stereotype of “The Angry Black Woman” is rooted in a very visceral truth. We’re tired of this shyt. Stop telling us to stop getting upset. Stop telling us to not be mad despite having to deal with this crap ALL THE TIME. Why are we supposed to put up with this reckless disregard for our humanity with a smile on our face? Because we’re women? Because we’re Black? Please, miss me with that bull. We are HUMAN first. This anger is righteous and all ignoring it and the causes of it will do is create a dyspeptic breeding ground for spiritual, psychological, social and physical dis-ease.
–Excerpted from “The Matriarchal Legacy of The Black Woman’s Anger”
Photo Credit: Lynette’s Two Cents
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Racialicious is a blog about the intersection of race and pop culture. Check out our daily updates on the latest celebrity gaffes, our no-holds-barred critique of questionable media representations, and of course, the inevitableKeanu Reeves John Cho newsflashes.Latoya Peterson is the Owner and Editor of Racialicious, Thea Lim is the Deputy Editor, and Arturo García is the Site Lead. You can email us at team@racialicious.com.
>via: http://ht.ly/4Xpzu
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Academic slammed over 'black women less attractive' research
ATTACKED: Satoshi Kanazawa
AN ACADEMIC at one of Britain's most reputable universities has come under fire over his 'research' supporting the idea that black women are less attractive than other races.
An inflammatory blog from London School of Economics (LSE) psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa was hurriedly removed from the US-based Psychology Today website on Monday (May 16) just hours after it was posted.
Kanazawa has a history of racially-charged research and has been attacked for using flawed science to promote racist stereotypes, including the claim that sub-Saharan Africans have poor health because of low IQ and not poverty.
Fed-up students, graduates and academic contemporaries are now demanding that the LSE reconsider his position at the institution.
Professor Paul Gilroy, a sociology lecturer at the LSE and author of seminal text There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, said: “Kanazawa’s persistent provocations raise the issue of whether he can do his job effectively in a multi-ethnic, diverse and international institution.
“If he announces that he thinks sub-Saharan Africans are less intelligent than other people, what happens when they arrive in his classroom? What happens when they feel that they cannot take his classes because of his widely publicised opinions?”
He added: “The LSE risks disrepute if it fails to take a view of these problems.”
Kanazawa based his piece on the findings of a survey of men and women across the races who were asked to rate each other’s attractiveness. Black women scored the least, even though they marked themselves highly.
Among the criticisms was his motivation for the research, the lack of scientific grounding and a lack of context. He did not explore the idea that women were measured against the dominant European ideals of beauty.
Kanazawa, whose website carries the slogan ‘prepare to be offended’, was himself unable to draw any serious conclusion.
After musing it had nothing to do with black women’s ‘lower IQs’, or because they were ‘much heavier on average’ than women of other races, he added: ‘The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone.
‘Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races… Women with higher levels of testosterone have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive.’
A campaign group has been formed calling for an end to Kanazawa’s tenure at the leading institution.
Women’s rights activist Rukayah Sarumi, who co-founded LSE: Home of the Racist Academic. Say No, said: "This kind of pseudo science is not only dangerous for black women, but society as a whole. When racism is given legitimacy through the power of science, it emboldens racist and prejudiced organisations and adversely affects the confidence and esteem of young black people. This is not the kind of thing that can be allowed to fester in a progressive society."
>via: http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=19692