Psychology Today Publishes New Evidence That Racism Is Alive and Well

This article, by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, was published this weekend on Psychology Today. It defies the idea—which many people seem to hold— that racism no longer exists.

Saying awful, inflammatory things is kind of Kanazawa’s schtick. For example, in 2008 he claimed that Ann Coulter would have made a better post-9-11 president than George Bush because she would have used nukes to wipe out the middle east entirely, and in 2006 he published a controversial paper suggesting that poor health of people in some nations is the result, not of poverty, but rather lower IQ. He’s that kind of guy.

Normally, to avoid being part of the machine that spreads this kind of garbage, I wouldn’t share an article in which a controversial blogger with a psychology degree uses bad science to put down an entire race of women. But this story is significant because Kanazawa, hosted by the nice people at Psychology Today, inadvertently prove that racism in America, and the world at large, is still alive and well.

For his post (which has now been taken down), Kanazawa uses data from the Add Health project (a study which tracked survey responses from adolescence to adulthood on a wide variety of subjects) to conclude that black women are “objectively less physically attractive than white women.”

To come to his conclusion, Kanazawa overlooks the subjective nature of sexual attraction, and ignores the social factors that might lead men living in a caucasian-dominated society to rate African American women as less attractive. He doesn’t ask why the men interviewed in Add Health gave the answers they did, but takes them as scientific evidence.

In fact, he concludes: “The only thing I can think of that might explain the lower average physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races…”

Testosterone—the only thing he can think of— has nothing to do with the Ad Health Project’s findings, which themselves are seeped in terrible science.

Those who believe racism is little more than a dark stain on our nation’s history point to wildly successful African Americans like Beyonce, Oprah, and President Obama while ignoring the vast majority of blacks in the U.S. who are struggling with double the unemployment rate of whites, inferior public schools, and a prison system tailored to keep minorities disenfranchised and weak.

They use the Oprah argument to explain why affirmative action is racist against whites (rather than flawed because it pits underprivileged people from all races against each other) and to stand up for the behavior of Birthers like Marilyn “This Obama Chimp Family Photo Is Not Racist” Davenport.

Racism doesn’t just evaporate in fifty years, following four hundred years of slavery and oppressive segregation laws. It lives on in outright white supremacy organizations, the Birtherism fiasco, and “scientific” blog posts like Kanasawa’s.

And for white people to deny that is just plain rude.

For Kanazawa’s full story, including commentary and poor statistical methods, go here to BuzzFeed.

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/90423/psychology-today-publishes-new-evidence-that-racism-is-alive-and-well/