Professor publishes 'study' that is meant to prove black women are ugly

[Liberal_in_LA]

I didn't link to the so called study here. It can be found by googling his name. ugly, ugly stuff. Sick guy. I'm tired of this shit :grr: :grr:

On Thursday, the University of London Union Senate, which represents 120,000 students, voted unanimously in favor of calling a campaign for the dismissal of evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. The London School of Economics professor made international headlines this week after publishing a scathing set of pseudoscientific bar graphs meant to prove how black women are “objectively and subjectively” less attractive than white, Asian and Native American women.

Kanazawa is currently on sabbatical, reports the BBC.

Our own Gender Matters columnist Akiba Solomon issued a brilliant takedown of Kanazawa’s work, and points to a fact that the ULU also makes clear: this isn’t an isolated incident. A press release issued by the group notes that Kanazawa’s previous work includes “Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?” and “What’s Wrong with Muslims?”, which estimates there to be “120 million potential suicide bombers worldwide.”

http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/05/fire_kanazawa.html

[Arugula Latte]

1. ...

:banghead:

[hlthe2b]

2. There seems no limit to the egregious behavior of racists...

:shrug:

[Abq_Sarah]

15. This guy seems to have contempt for everyone

Who isn't just like him.

[blondeatlast]

16. Well, I almost agree with him on that--I'm contemptuous of

smug, race baiting misogynists too. It must be just awful to loathe oneself, though.

[pipi_k]

3. Fuck that shit...

I'd look like Queen Latifah any day.

[blondeatlast]

4. You want to see smug, self-satisfied sumbitch? Here ya go:

May you live in a hell full of people JUST. LIKE. YOU.

[Zoeisright]

7. Um, HE'S ugly.

And he should get that mole on his face checked.

[alphafemale]

72. Wow. A few minor makeup tweeks and he'd make a perfect Bond villain.

[tabasco]

77. Hey! That's the "She Bang" dude!

He's freakin awesome!

[TimLighter]

5. Not too long ago he was being hailed as a genius in some quarters

for his study "proving" that "Liberals and Atheists are Smarter".

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm

[blondeatlast]

17. Happy to say he wasn't here at DU;; he was rightfully pegged very early on here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x237355

[seabeyond]

19. ya. i didnt even bother to go in and read the thread, but yea to those duers

on the thread debunking.

[Generic Other]

24. bananas pegged him right

"The Fennimore Cooper of sociobiology."

:rofl:

[blondeatlast]

37. That was a beaut! nt

[LadyHawkAZ]

6. He needs a psychiatrist

them's some nasty race and misogyny issues he's got, and someone's going to wind up getting hurt.

[Ian David]

8. His final paper in high school A.P. Biology was, "Hey, you. Nice zit." n/t

[LeftishBrit]

9. How did I know this would be Kanazawa!

Previous stuff on race:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/nov/05/highereducation.research

On why 'modern feminism is evil'

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200908/why-modern-feminism-is-illogical-unnecessary-and-evil

On war, hate, nukes and why Ann Coulter should be president:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200803/why-we-are-losing-war

His writings are not only nasty but pseudoscientific. He constantly confuses correlation with causation, and, despite paying occasional lip-service to denouncing the 'naturalistic fallacy' is an extreme example of the problem with some evolutionary psychologists: they assume that any behaviour that people have traditionally shown must have evolved for a specific purpose, and that changing it would be 'against human nature' and thus either impossible or 'evil'. The Kanazawa sort of evolutionary psychologist has a remarkable amount in common with fundie creationists. Indeed, he more-or-less says so himself:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201104/why-liberals-and-conservatives-are-both-wrong-about-evolut

[seabeyond]

10. evolutionary psychologist = new fad for male dominance. nt

[readmoreoften]

38. +1

[LoZoccolo]

70. Is this a common position amongst contemporary feminists? n/t

[seabeyond]

75. i dont know. it is an observation over seeing study after study, listening to men promote it

and doing research on internet out of curiosity, not to mention have real scientist call bullshit on so much of it.

[KansDem]

11. I've been trying to get a job teaching for years!...

And slugs like this guy seem to land the jobs!

What's up? :shrug:

[Ian David]

12. This is why this shit is so heartbreaking...

A Girl Like Me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWyI77Yh1Gg&feature=related

[yellowcanine]

13. attractive to whom? Generally white men find black women attractive just as

people in general are attracted to individuals who look "different" from themselves.

It has a biological basis. You are less likely to be closely related to someone who looks significantly different from yourself.

[TomClash]

14. Here's my study!

It took me five minutes to prepare, begin, continue, ponder and conclude my study.

Black women who are definitely not ugly:

1. Beyonce
2. Halle Berry
3. Angel Luv
4. Tyra Banks
5. Gabriel Union
6. Taraji Henson
7. Kelly Rowland
8. Rosario Dawson
9. Jessica White
10. Sanaa Lathan

I suppose my study is incomplete. I probably missed a few hundred million women or so.

[monmouth]

28. My AA friend Shirley with killer cheekbones...n/t

[TomClash]

49. There you go! nt

[butterfly77]

57. Where are the dark skinned...

women in that lineup? Are there suppose to be none?

[TomClash]

78. You mean you don't know?

Angel Luv
Gabriel Union
Taraji Henson
Rosario Dawson
Jessica White
Sanaa Lathan

These women are pretty dark skinned.

[Name removed]

18. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[pipi_k]

20. Actually there are methods

like facial symmetry, largeness of the eyes, etc.

But then there are subjective measures as well.

One example I can think of is Chaka Khan. She's not what you'd call classically pretty, but I've always found her very attractive for some reason. And I'm not even a lesbian. ;)


And I've known men who thought that women who were considered "beautiful" were rather ordinary.

But it doesn't follow racial lines...

[blondeatlast]

21. Where's the value to society in his study? Or the others that are quoted in the snip?

Is a study labeled "Are All Women Prostitutes?" going to advance society? I don't think so, and I don't think that every notion is worth "scholarly" study, nor is refuting such shameful work worthwhile.

I find your concern in how "we" progressives "look" fascinating. Why does it matter?

[Name removed]

26. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[blondeatlast]

31. Yes, as a amatter of fact I DID read it. I did not care for the "Why Liberals, etc, "

article; the reasons can be found upthread with a link.

And again--why your intense concern over how "progressives" "look"? Any SERIOUS time spent at DU clearly indicates that we are about as homogenic as any group of 150,000 people can be (as in, not in the least).

[angstlessk]

22. here is a test..put 100 50 year old black women vs 100 50 year old white women

and black women will win every beauty contest...hands down! They don't age...even 50 year old whites vs 60 year old blacks...still..the black woman will win...

I am s 60 year old white woman...my husband's mother is beautiful...still!

[seaglass]

27. Sorry test fail. I'm sure it would be more like 50-50. n/t

[seabeyond]

32. i was going to make the point that blacks dont age nearly the rate, but didnt feel the need to make

one race more and one less, in a competitive manner, or aging as a bad thing. it just is.

[Hannah Bell]

56. black people age slower? gee, who knew? i'd like to see some documentation.

and i mean "age" slower. not just that skin with more melanin has more protection against uv light so is likely to wrinkle less given the same sun exposure.

aging isn't all about skin.

to my knowledge there's no research showing that any racial/ethnic group "ages" faster or slower than another.

[JI7]

73. i think that's what was meant by "age slower"

[Courtesy Flush]

60. My wife is white, 50, and beautiful.

Hope that doesn't blow your numbers.

[Bucky]

23. Professor of *what*?

In order to teach evolutionary psychology, shouldn't it be a requirement that you've evolved?

[Xithras]

25. This is why professors have tenure. I looked up his "study", and he actually makes a point.

It's not a study at all, but rather is a blog post discussing the dataset taken from the latest wave of the Add Health study. For those unfamiliar with it, Add Health is a recurring study ordered by the U.S. Congress and administered by various agencies, and now has a recurring dataset running back to 1994. The purpose of Add Health is to study the mental and physical health of American adolescents, plot changes to that health over time, and has now become the largest survey of adolescent health ever performed. Kanazawa was NOT involved in it.

One of the aspects of Add Health is a personal image/beauty analysis. Participants are asked to rate their own attractiveness and intelligence, and then the interviewer uses a number of race-neutral measurements to assign an actual beauty/attractiveness rating to the individual. The attractiveness score of the respondent is assessed three times by three different interviewers over a multi-year period, and their "attractiveness score" is the average of the three ratings. This can be useful for depression studies and all sorts of other research purposes.

When Kanazawa ran the numbers for the latest wave of the study, he found something interesting. Black respondents consistently rated their own attractiveness higher than all other racial groups. Blacks are far more likely to think they're beautiful. At the same time, the actual beauty score for black respondents (based on the profile developed by the NICHD and not Kanazawa) was substantially LOWER for black women than for all other racial groups. The typical black woman, according to the Add Health data, is uglier than the average woman from other racial groups. This difference does not carry across to black MEN, who had beauty/attractiveness scores roughly equal to the other racial groupings.

Kanazawa isn't calling black people ugly, but is instead pointing out that the Add Health data says they are uglier. He doesn't really address why, though he does raise and then shoot down weight as a theory (the scores are lower even with BMI factored out), and posits that testosterone levels (which are higher, on average, in black women) may have something to do with it.

After actually READING the blog post (I admittedly skimmed some of it), the only objection I had was that he didn't raise the possibility that the attractiveness rating process used by Add Health was itself flawed. He simply talked about the numbers presented by the study, without ever questioning the validity of the data itself.

[blondeatlast]

29. I Googled him too. He's a smug, self-serving, misogynistic,

racist, Islamaphobic attention whore--and he deserves to have his funding cut off.

[Xithras]

33. I'm not defending him

I have no idea who this guy is, and don't really care. I'm looking at the work, and not the author. As an educator, however, I do take an interest when people start calling for the heads of other educators based on their research work.

The work itself simply asks a fair question: The Congressionally mandated Add Health data clearly states that black women are uglier. WHY does it say that? The work doesn't assign the cause, but simply discusses a couple of theories and leaves the question open for others to address. Is it real? Is it an artifact of their survey methods? This data is used by state and national government agencies when drafting laws and regulations that impact every one of us, so it's a fair subject to broach.

And WTF was that last sentence supposed to mean? I'm one of the most liberal people on DU, and don't really care for the intimation that I'd have some ulterior motive in defending racists.

[blondeatlast]

36. My apologies.

It was an unfair thing to say and I will remove it.

[readmoreoften]

39. You make a good argument for retrenching evolutionary psychology out of schools.

It's garbage science created through ontologically suspect categories, usually supported by skewed data. Hey, if you retrench whole departments, then you don't have to worry about tenure anymore.

[Starry Messenger]

53. +1000

Evo. psych will be looked on as phrenology is today, I can hope.

[Hannah Bell]

58. edit: i should have read the study first. from your description i thought he was

asking why the rating system produced this result, but he actually doesn't ask that question at all. he appears to take the results as objective fact.

process:

in a long-term study of adolescent health done, adolescents of various races are asked to rate their own attractiveness, then the researchers rate the attractiveness of the adolescent according to a scale devised by the researchers.

so it's the nc researchers & their scale that found black women "less attractive". not this prof. he's just asking why it's so (without questioning the results, the study, the scale or the researchers).

[kwassa]

63. Race-neutral measurements? Actual beauty/attractiveness? Bullshit.

then the interviewer uses a number of race-neutral measurements to assign an actual beauty/attractiveness rating to the individual.

In the eye of the beholder, perhaps.

How does one measure beauty? an emotional response measured objectively? Please.

[KamaAina]

30. Reductio ad absurdum

Q.E.D. :P

[joeybee12]

34. Just when you think you're reading something from The Onion....

Serious, serious nutjob.

[quinnox]

35. its an individual thing, as a white male its uncommon

for me to find a black woman attractive. But certain black women are very attractive, but on the whole its a handful compared to what I find attractive in the White, Asian, Native American women.

I don't know if a scientific study can be accurate on such a subjective thing though.

[readmoreoften]

41. Why would being a white male make it uncommon for you to find a black woman attractive?

I'm a white woman and I find black women attractive. Hell, I can even recognize when black and white men are attractive and I'm a lesbian....

[blondeatlast]

43. DU search is an amazing tool. nt

[Liberal_in_LA]

44. and when black women look at you? I'm betting they don't find you too attractive

[JI7]

51. what has you being white got to do with whether you find black women attractive

[seabeyond]

52. i was telling my son today, people have gotten used to sharing EVERYTHING on internet

that we have become a people that are no longer keeping some things private, when maybe we ought to.

;-)

[Taverner]

40. His Next study: Scientific Evidence that gays are icky

:eyes:

[orwell]

42. Ding Ding Ding...

...We now have the latest candidate for the Charles G. Koch Chair in Evolutionary Psychology.

[Odin2005]

45. Isn't this fuck-turd a buddy of Charles "Bell Curve" Murray?

[DirkGently]

46. Creep. His original headline: Why Are African American Women Less Physically Attractive Than

Other Women? According to the article, Psych Today changed it to "Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?”

Which is still kind of horrible to even raise, but which at least acknowledges the subjective nature of beauty.

So, he tried making a vicious blanket assertion that black women are actually less beautiful based on, at best, a survey of the opinions of some people somewhere. Which of anything, reflects poorly on those people, or our culture, not on the beauty of black women.

Nasty. Not surprising from a guy whom the article says also thinks we should have elected Anne Coulter President to nuke the entire Middle East.

[Hannah Bell]

59. maybe you should check out what he actually said:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=1135729&mesg_id=1136352



the one person who bothered to check finds that as usual, the media is misreporting.

by accident or by design?

who can say?

[DirkGently]

62. My post was based on the report of his headline. Got any indication that was misreported?

Edit: For your reading pleasure:

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?”

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

Kinda hard to miss his point, when he that's the way he chose to put it.

[Hannah Bell]

64. i just linked you to the only poster on the thread that went & read the blog post the controversy is

based on.

read it.

[DirkGently]

65. And I just explained the man chose a racist attack for his title. What part of that confuses you?

Edit. Oh, Jesus. Did YOU read it? The guy just leaps from a 1-5 rating from unspecified "interview" subjects to a conclusion that he can determine the "latent physical attractiveness factor" of black women.

It doesn't even pass cursory logical analysis. He just posits subjective responses as fact. No allowance for anything. Culture, race, age. Just concludes that interview results = "objective beauty."

It's bullshit on its face.

http://creativeseven.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/satoshi-kanazawa-article.pdf

[Hannah Bell]

66. "Add Health" is not *his* rating. It's from this:

http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth


*He* isn't the one doing the rating or devising the rating system. So my understanding (from the other poster) was that the prof was asking the question 'why (does this rating system rate) black women...."

But now that i've read the article, he does seem to be taking the results at face value when he talks about testosterone, etc.

my second question would be, what does rating the "attractiveness" of different racial groups have to do with adolescent health, & why is our government funding such crap?

http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/about

[DirkGently]

67. Xithras noted this in his own post, which is fine, by the way.

"the possibility that the attractiveness rating process used by Add Health was itself flawed."

And I think that's a big problem. Kanazawa just equates interview results with objective fact. Who wouldn't conclude that at most, you're looking at cultural differences in perception across racial lines, not "the latent physical attractiveness factor of black women?"

Reeks of an agenda to me.

[Hannah Bell]

68. "Kanazawa just equates interview results with objective fact."

yes, it does read that way.

moreover, as i said, why are the feds wasting money on such useless "ratings" & what does it have to do with adolescent health?

i don't see any scientific or public health purpose.

all research done in & designed by folks at north carolina - chapel hill.

[AsahinaKimi]

47. Satoshi Kanazawa

Sorry...but you're no prize yourself, Kanazawa san.

[Dorian Gray]

48. The question is

why it took THIS study to finally get rid of him? The others are offensive enough.

When Tenure Goes Wild!

[blondeatlast]

50. No kidding. nt

[WildEyedLiberal]

54. "Evolutionary psychologist"

That was all I needed to read. Amazing this junk pop science is still taken seriously by anyone with any academic credentials.

[seabeyond]

55. ha... not taken serious by scientist. but is taken serious by large cultlike group of men. nt

[Canuckistanian]

61. Sounds like Florida State University just got a new anthropology professor!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/10/974786/-The-Koch-Brothers-and-Florida-State-UniversityAcademic-Freedom-for-Sale

Congratulation, FSU!

[fascisthunter]

69. F'n Moron....

and I bet he thinks he's smart.

[Hannah Bell]

71. actually, your op should read: prof tries to explain why federal government-funded

study done at north carolina chapel hill found that black women (study participants) were rated less attractive than other women by researchers....

results which he takes to represent objective truth

[howard112211]

74. I am a white guy and all of my life my strongest "gut reactions" were in favor of black women.

I always found that "dollish blond" types were lacking something.

[Stevenmarc]

76. Really Satoshi? Like that big honking mole on your face makes you a looker.

[AndiMer]

79. Guy's a Douche

I wish I looked HALF as good as Mrs. Birnbaum, one of my professors this year who is black.