Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

When Pseudo-Science Is Used To Bolster Racist Beauty Standards

There’s almost too much awful male behavior to write about this week, from the sexual assault allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the admission by Arnold Schwarzenegger to fathering a love child to this gag-worthy article about the rise of dude editors.

But a very special prize for awfulness has to go the folks at Psychology Today. The magazine published an article about black women’s perceived attractiveness that hearkened back to the era of racism being justified by science. Seriously, the next thing I expected to see was a piece called “Phrenology: Why It Still Matters.”

Not only did Psychology Today decide to print this offensive article but instead of apologizing for the subsequent uproar, they insisted that it had been good and healthy to air the discussion so everyone could understand how upsetting and loaded this issue was — as if black women don’t already know. This is an example of both utter cluelessness about the nature of racism and also a classic Internet fail: When you smear an entire group of people on the web, it’s always a good idea to apologize profusely and abjectly first, try to have a teachable moment later. And also: Don’t tell said group of offended people that they should be thanking you for offending them.

There’s not much I can say about how appalling this kind of writing is that hasn’t been said by some of my favorite writers and colleagues already. Shark Fu has connected this story with the recent anti-choice campaign targeting black women and calling their wombs “dangerous.” Julianne Escobedo Shepherd noted everything that the article’s author failed to do :

So basically, rather than asking whether the respondents in that study were providing their answers based on internalized racism, or delving into the subjectivity of attractiveness based on each individual human (both far more interesting topics) this dude just decided that ‘black women aren’t pretty.’ So not only is he wrong, he is a bad scientist… and probably stupid.

From a Jewish woman’s perspective, I think it’s incumbent upon us to sit up and take notice of this kind of deeply hurtful writing. The parallels, as always, are far from exact, but they exist: Despite our being a hugely diverse group, our attractiveness or lack thereof has been frequently racialized. We often walk through the world feeling crushed under the weight of beauty standards that don’t include us. And as we all know, faux science has been used to justify our genocide and cruel experiments on us.

Now there’s a circulating petition on the issue over at Change.org. Psychology Today may already have a reputation that’s less than stellar, but it clearly shouldn’t even have the thin veneer of respectability.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.