Satoshi Kanazawa and the Pseudoscience of “Black Women Are Less Attractive”

[salvorhardin]

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.”

...

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.
More: http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/05/satoshi_kanazawa_is_a_scientific.html

Kanazawa has a long history of using spectacularly bad science to justify some truly bizarre and bigoted beliefs. Any time you see Kanazawa's name in or on an article, do yourself a favor and just skip it. It will invariably be rubbish. Wikipedia does a good job of listing some of Kanazawa's controversies over the years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa

[sakabatou]

1. Where's my clue-by-four?

Oh there it is!

[salvorhardin]

2. Unfortunately, I keep seeing Kanazawa being quoted approvingly on the left

Primarily because he's published research in which he concludes that liberals and atheists are smarter, and smart people tend to use drugs more. I think most lefties would be shocked to know the extent of Kanazawa's crackpottery. Bad science is bad science, even when it confirms our beliefs and values.

[damntexdem]

3. Given that most of our species history predated the light-skin mutation ...

the argument is evolutionarily unsound. That is, attractiveness as exhibited and as appreciated was strongly bound up in sexual selection, so that humans (and any other animals) would tend toward what was appreciated as sexually attractive, even as ideas of attractiveness changed socially. Such a biological imperative would have worked for many millenia when all humans had dark skin, whereas the much shorter time since the light-skin mutation, though spanning millenia of sociocultural differences, would have had relatively-less influence on biological determination of "attractiveness." So insofar as Kanazawa's "attractiveness" is culturally-based, it is culturally relative and rapidly changeable; and insofar as it is biologically hardwired, it was developed principally when all humans had dark skin.

Or to answer more directly: "Why are Black women rated less physically attractive than other women? Answer: Racism and/or the legacy of racism.

[14thColony]

7. That was more or less my thought as well

Attractiveness probably has a heavy "availability" component as well -- if "attractive" is a subset of "available/proximate" then no surprise if, averaged out over large samples, people in general tend to prefer what is familiar (available), and the further from the familiar/norm it is the more likely a specific appearence is to be labeled unattractive (meaning too different from the norm).

Although one point of order -- depending on what you define as "human," the earliest humans would have probably been white (possibly even glaringly white, barring sunburns of course). Homo erectus probably was, as he is thought to be the point in human evolution when we lost most of our body hair. Under their fur, chimps, bonobos and gorillas are pasty white, and so in all probability was homo erectus (and possibly even later human species) until such time as a dark skin mutation was able to propoagate through human populations in Africa. The populations that left Africa had an opposite environmental pressure which shut off the dark skin mutation and let their skin colour drift back to its original state.

[provis99]

4. well, black women turn me on.

He could have just asked my opinion.

[sakabatou]

6. Same here, seeing how my girlfriend's black

[struggle4progress]

5. Pasty-skinned me keeps finding plenty of black women attractive: lots of hard-working folk

there, with good values and real commitment to community, unafraid to speak their minds

Had a black substitute minister this week in church: she gave one of the most thought-provoking sermons I've ever heard, then sat down behind me and stunned me with her singing

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye
-- Saint-Exupery

[chillspike]

8. Here's a Kanazawa quote Wiki missed:

"What can evolutionary psychology tell us about what we as a society can do so as not to repeat the Swedish mistake and make our citizens happy? The best thing to do is to kill all the feminists and hippies and liberals. Destroy political correctness completely once and for all."


Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200812/how-be-happy