Third World Girls

Beyonce premiered her ‘Run The World(Girls)’ music video in June, the first single from her new album 4. Set in some part of Africa, perhaps Ethiopia, Beyonce is at once with Abyssinian lion and is once that lion King. She writes ‘King B’ on a mirror whilst looking at herself in one of the 4 album stills and I can’t help but think of John Berger’s idea that women watch themselves being watched – I certainly can’t stop watching her. And although her video may be about the revolution of the ‘third sex’, a revolution that Simone de Beauvoir did not anticipate, this video bares relation to Beyonce’s husband’s ‘Run this Town’ video and so I can’t help thinking whilst watching this that as James Brown put it ‘This is a man’s world’.

One man who would like to run the world, it would seem, is Dr Satoshi Kanazawa – the George Bush of social science.  Having previously published articles such as ‘Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?’ (in which he argued ‘high-class prostitutes like Allie and Maggie have more in common with college professors, corporate executives, or poets than with the more affordable and visible members of their profession.’), in the same week that Beyonce premiered ‘Run the World(Girls)’, LSE’s Dr Kanazawa published an article in Psychology Today in which he argued that ‘Black women are … far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women’. And so it would seem that such a man would be against the idea that women, let alone ‘black women’, could ‘Run The World’.

Kanazawa’s claim that ‘black women are less attractive’ is not only an inane instance of racism, but more importantly it is another instance of the racist’s idea that black people (by virtue of being called ‘black’ people) are a homogeneous group of people who are all the same colour (black and not varying shades of brown) and all originate from the same country (that country being the country of blackness known as Africa). What Kanazawa’s ‘research’ seems to want to show is that it is not black woman that are unattractive but it is African women who are unattractive. But perhaps what people can away take from his ‘research’ is that the people who were shown photos of these ‘black women’ did not find these women attractive, and from that we can conclude that these ‘black women’ were not found attractive by the people who saw their photos. Why must we then start making generalisations about ‘black women’?

I think that what is most important about Kanazawa’s ‘research’ is that it shows an impulse to want to define who ‘black women’ are. So that even in generalising about ‘black women’ Kanazawa shows us that even racists struggle with the concept of blackness. Psychologically speaking racists like Satoshi Kanazawa want to know something more about ‘black’ people like where they come from, in order to help them come to terms with them. The words ‘African’ or ‘black’ are no longer enough even for such people; and perhaps they are no longer enough for the ‘black’ people in question. Somewhat bemused at the idea that although he is telling ‘black women’ that they are objectively unattractive black women insist on seeing themselves as attractive, Kanazawa writes ‘It is very interesting to note that, even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others.’ Yes it is very interesting; it is very audacious.

Let us question Kanazawa’s use of the word attractive and his ideas about attractiveness. If by attractive he means ‘sexually desirable’ his claims are necessarily false. We infer that his are false claims from examples of the millions of black women that have been born and therefore exist, from the millions of black women who find themselves being desirable and are thus able to have sex with men and/or women, and what do the x amount of black women who were raped during colonisation, the slave trade, the abolition of the slave trade and today tell us about attractiveness and the power of ‘black women’? Indeed if black women were truly as unattractive as Kanazawa says they are it would seem that they would not exist and he would have no reason to make such claim. Thus the very existence of a ‘black women’, whether she is Ethiopian or African-American, is necessarily undisputable proof of attractiveness of other types of black women.

Now, I’m not attempting to answer any of the sociological implications of attractiveness; I am merely addressing the biological ideas of attractiveness that Kanazawa draws his conclusion that black women are unattractive from. Yet from the observations I have just made it is obvious that to say that black women are attractive is false. Thus what Kanazawa really wants to be saying is not that black women are unattractive but that they are ugly, and this is of course a very inane thing to say, and it is precisely because he attempts to do this is why his arguments must be interpreted as racist.

Now Satoshi Kanazawa may not find whatever he considers ‘black women’ to be attractive but I don’t particularly find chubby-mole speckled-middle aged-racist academics attractive, regardless of their ‘race’ – but that’s just me. I do not dispute that people have the right to express themselves, but Kanazawa has a status as a social scientist, he is a lecturer at LSE and so that means his mode of expression should be rooted in scientific practices.  But his practices are not scientific and so we have to question the nature of his study: who were the ‘black women’ that were shown to these people and how were they selected i.e. were they all from the same family or country? How did Kanazawa’s biases of what he thinks the ‘black women’ are affect how he chose black women? Moreover the Japanese UK based social scientist argued that Asian women ranked the highest but what did he mean by Asian, i.e. South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern? Essentially we must ask what biases were at play, in order to test how valuable his findings are.

Dr Scott Barry Kaufman and Dr. Jelte Wicherts have since conducted an independent analysis of the same study that Kanazawa used and found that amongst other errors of Kanazawa’s analysis, black women were not rated as least attractive. Their study showed “there is no difference between the ethnicities in terms of ratings of physical attractiveness.” The percentage of black women and Caucasian women who were deemed ‘very attractive’ and ‘attractive’ were exactly the same. And Asian women had a slightly higher rating, in the same way that black men had a higher rating than men of other racial groups in the study Kanazawaa conducted (indeed the fact that Kanazawaa’s study was not entitled ‘why black men are more attractive than other races’ or ‘why Asian men are the least attractive of all the races’ shows us more about his own prejudices than any objective facts such a study could show). Now of course this independent study shows Kanazawaa’s research to be ‘scientifically’ false. And yet I would argue that Kanazawaa’s research was not research, it was not valuable, it was a weird parody of the BBC 3 make over programme ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’; and any repeat of such research is also that. A necessary repeat perhaps but a repeat nonetheless and so we must not attach much value to such findings. Or should we?

For if Satoshi’s findings are right it seems that we can say good bye to the millions of black women, who indeed by 2012 will surely become an endangered species. We can say goodbye to figures like Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Iman, Grace Jones, and Beyonce who are valued in other terms of attractiveness i.e. their talents, their intelligence, and their iconism as well as their ‘beauty’. Indeed Oprah Winfrey has been listed as the most influential women in the world (and yet I would argue that Michelle Obama is giving her a run for her money) although since Kanazawaa’s ‘research’ was published I’m sure that her influence has started to wan. Scared, I count the days until she is kicked of the Forbes list. I count the days until lots of other black women start disappearing…including myself. Let’s hope that women, whoever they may be, can finish the revolution Beyonce sings about. But please hurry….the light has gone off and I can’t see myself (being black and all).

By Clarissa Pabi

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