Greetings, From a "Scientifically Proven" Unattractive Black Girl

I have heard waaaay too much talk this week about how I, my black mom, sister, aunts, grandma, great aunts, great great grandma and ALL my sistagirlfriends aren't attractive. I guess I was supposed to believe this because some psychologist named Satoshi Kanazawa decided to subjectively interpret some data and then write an article titled, "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?"

Kanazawa managed to make his article look legit by getting it posted on the Psychology Today website--which, I might add, was happy to provide Kanazawa a platform for his racism until black folks got mad and wrote themselves a storm of you better check yourself before you wreck yourself blog posts and Twitter updates.

OK, keep it real. Psychology Today probably only really started caring enough to take Kanazawa's post down when some non-black folks got wind of the kerfluffle and also decided that the article wasn't cool. After all, does America EVER care if it's just black people complaining? We're just some super unattractive, lazy people with scientifically proven smaller brains and bigger penises.

Hmm... big penises...that's probably why Kanazawa said the research results indicate black men are attractive... Dangit, black women! We can't even get THAT right! Unattractive AND without big penises.

Seriously, now that we know penises are everything...

I've spent my entire life not having the right skin color, hair texture, nose or lips. I've refused to starve myself into some wack Eurocentric ideal. Most women's and fashion magazines don't have ladies who look like me on the cover. Or inside. Or in ads. Or on the back cover. Thank God my understanding of who I am doesn't come from the opinions of a society steeped to it's core in racism. If it did, I might believe some trumped up, completely subjective research about my alleged unattractiveness.

I don't even need to read that other experts are now taking the SAME data set Kanazawa used and finding that, shocker, it actually doesn't reveal that black women are less attractive. Kanazawa obviously wanted to interpret it in the way he did. I'd maybe feel a tiny bit sorry for him, since he spends his time researching and writing things that are so patently untrue, but then I think of all the black women who read the headline on that piece and felt like they'd been punched in the gut.

Kanazawa isn't the first person to try to pull this black women are unattractive schtick, and he certainly won't be the last. And now I'm going to go find a mirror, stare in it and admire just how beautiful, gorgeous, fine, fly, hot, and delovely I am with my supremely attractive black self.