Black Ladies, Just Like the Other Ladies

by Shani O. Hilton

So … maybe we should just dismiss the Psychology Today writer who uses Science to prove that black women are uglier, dumber, fatter, and more masculine than other races of women? After all, this is the person who illustrated a post about how criminals look different from noncriminals with a picture of O.J. Simpson. He’s also the same person who says men are more intelligent than women, that we should profile Arabs who want to travel by air, that feminism is evil, and that all women are prostitutes.

I mean, he’s clearly a crackpot, right? Maybe we should just all move along.

But! Satoshi Kanazawa is doing this thing that a lot of people do: he’s using vaguely related facts to affirm his own biased beliefs. There’s even a name for it: confirmation bias.

So by using fake science — no, there’s no such thing as an objective measurement of attractiveness — Kanazawa can claim that some unknown sampling of people have “objectively” judged black women to be the least attractive women of any race.

The problem with race-based assessments of attractiveness or intelligence — particularly when it comes to black people — is that it completely ignores a couple of things. First, that black people can be Paul Robeson or Anatole Broyard or Butterfly McQueen or Lena Horne. There’s no one kind of blackness. This leads directly to point number two, which is that most black Americans have varying degrees of white genetic material, and, traditionally, fairer skinned black women — those who are closer to white — have been considered most beautiful.

That means that you could conclude that a) the blacker a lady is, the less attractive she is, that or b) in order for racism to work, people have to believe irrational, crazy things about other races — like that black women are less attractive and less feminine than other ladies.

Which, I say, is crazy!

Shani O. Hilton is objectively black, y’all.