Satoshi Kanazawa can get back to his other day jobs because Psychology Today has fired him and his blog ‘The Scientific Fundamentalist: a hard look at truths about human nature.’
One would think that a Japanese evolutionary scientist with a strong media following would know better than to offend black women. Lately, coming down hard on black women hasn’t worked out so well for media guys.
October 2010, AOL writer Jawn Murray tweeted that he was tired of protests from nappy headed, angry black women over Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” movie. Despite emails and protests, Murray responded with “so what and get a perm” on his Twitter page. AOL issued a statement, Murray apologized and he held onto his writing job at AOL’s Black Voices for a few more months.
Murray signed off in April and blogged about the end of the road, or the end of his job at AOL’s Black voices. So long good riddance, bud. Even though he’s not blogging on AOL anymore, Murray’s legacy for promoting European standards of beauty in African American women, and upon himself, remains.
Imus, a popular but old stringy-haired white guy lost his MSNBC AM talk show to the news program ” Morning Joe” after he called the Rutgers women basketball team a group of nappy headed hoes. Imus’s legacy is pretty much the same. He’s that guy who got fired for insulting black women.
And now Satoshi Kanazawa’s lost his blog and his profile page has been deleted from Psychology Today’s website. His article and unqualified research on unattractive black women sent off a fury of protests online. 75,000 people blew up Psychology Today via email, Twitter and Facebook. Some even rang Psychology Today’s telephones off the hook.
When all was said and done, Psychology Today sent an email to ColorofChange.org and informed the largest online African American political organization that Kanazawa’s work won’t appear on their site any longer. Psychology Today even said they’ve instituted new rules to prevent inflammatory content in the future.
People who hadn’t heard of Kanazawa were sharing the text in question, their hurt, their ire and disbelief that Psychology Today endorsed the piece. They demanded Kanazawa be fired. Students at Kanazawa’s other day job, London School of Economics, have also called for Kanazawa’s resignation.
It’s not just American Black women who were put off by the piece, every segment of the globe’s population was annoyed: white men, black men, white women, black women, academics, Asians, Indians, writers, babysitters, the mail man and mail lady. People who surf the web and browse Facebook for random stuff did not like it and this time could not dismiss it.
Kanazawa has been offensive before. He’s blogged that criminals look different from non criminals (OJ Simpson, according to Kanazawa looks like a criminal.”) He had an epiphany when he blogged that all women are essentially prostitutes. In the past, offended readers emailed Kanazawa rather than his editors.
Kanazawa’s blogs, for as long as Psychology Today has published them (a little over five years now) have always been controversial, racist, sexist, and unfounded. Most of his blogs are hypotheses on human nature (or why men and women do the the things that they do). Readers are drawn into Kanazawa’s ideologies because his notions offer one explanation for human behavior in our contemporary culture and its current setting.
As it stands, contemporary culture is obsessed with beauty and cosmetic surgery has proven itself recession proof. Celebrity lifestyles generally support many of Kanazawa’s theses and much of Kanazawa’s audience are celebrity and people watchers.
Kanazawa wrote about beauty, women, motherhood, men, and dating. All of which were big hits with contemporary online readers.