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

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