Getting a Little Racy: On Black Beauty, Evolution and the Science of Interracial Sex

A few weeks ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, a blogger at Psychology Today who was already notorious for his dubious claims about racial differences, especially with respect to intelligence, proclaimed on the basis of a bizarre data analysis that Black women are “objectively” the least attractive females of all the races. Objectively , mind you, which implies that it’s a matter of fact rather than his personal taste. Kanazawa, a Reader in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics (and not, incidentally, a psychologist, though he refers to himself--much to that discipline’s chagrin--as an evolutionary psychologist) and presently a visiting scholar at Cornell, scratched his head over these results. “ The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women,” explains Kanazawa, “is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and … [w]omen with higher levels have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. ”

I suspect Kanazawa is already self-flagellating in a remote cave somewhere, so I won’t address the many flaws in his disarmingly indelicate approach--that’s been done without pause, and deservedly so, in many other forums already. Neither will I revisit his troubled methodology for arriving at these strange conclusions, which have since been rebuked roundly by other researchers , one who failed to replicate Kanazawa’s controversial findings. I’ll simply say that, even if you are a racist, you must accept that Kanazawa’s assertion that attractiveness is measurable as an “objective” quality is erroneous.

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