Women prefer good-looking men to high-earning men.

Women prefer physically attractive men to high-earning men:

White people are different from people.

In Gutsell and Inzlicht’s study showing physical evidence that white people have difficulty empathizing with non-white people, the researchers studied only white people and made a generalization about “people”:

Our research suggests that people do not mentally simulate the actions of outgroups. That is, those neural networks underlying the simulation of actions and intentions—most likely part of the ‘‘mirror-neuron-system”—are less responsive to outgroup members than to ingroup members.

The Clark Doll Experiment showed that black children prefer white dolls to black dolls during the time of de jure racial segregation. If the researchers instead tested only white children as representative of “children” and found that white children preferred white dolls to black dolls, they might have concluded that all children during Jim Crow prefer dolls of their own race, which would have been completely wrong.

In studies on implicit race bias, white people unconsciously prefer white people to black people, even when they do not consider themselves racist. If the implicit race bias researchers tested only white participants, they might conclude that the preference is due to “people’s” ingroup bias. However, they would be completely wrong, since the same implicit race bias studies on blacks show that blacks prefer whites and blacks equally.

White people lack empathy for brown people, brain research shows.

New research from the University of Toronto-Scarborough shows that white people’s mirror-neuron-system fires much less, if at all, when they watch people of colour performing motor tasks, and I’m not at all surprised. For years, I just assumed that this was true, and that someone just had to do a study to prove it.

After the United States invaded Iraq and massacred tens of thousands of Iraqis, worldwide terrorist recruitment skyrocketed, as well as terrorist attacks targetting the U.S. and coalition countries. Terrorist leaders cited the Iraq invasion and the deaths of Iraqis as the reason for the attacks. However, White Americans did not buy it, believing it to be a smokescreen for some other reason. It must be Islam, they reasoned, as they grasped at straws.

I then realized that the vast majority of White Americans could not empathize with brown people at a very basic level. For most White Americans, the death and violence of thousands of brown bodies was just part of some abstract ethical argument to position oneself as morally superior to the United States. For most White Americans, brown people dying just meant flickers on the television screen about something happening far away. They didn’t feel the overwhelming anger and sadness they would normally feel when someone they know dies without reason. They couldn’t see the full reality of what death means, when the people who die are brown.

I have seen white people complain online that they cannot see the facial expressions of (East) Asian faces. For many white people, East Asians are like emotionless robots who are efficient at machine-like things like number crunching. Some white people argue that while East Asians may be able to play musical instruments beautifully, they play music without soul.

Black Coolness is higher-status than Asian Dorkiness.

The Racialicious post, Talking About The Things We Do To Each Other, is an important intra-POC conversation about tensions between black people and (East) Asian people (or rather between non-Asian black people and non-black Asian people). This is an incredibly complex topic, and I will have to respond to this issue through multiple posts.

Firstly, however, I must strongly disagree with Thea Lim’s characterization of East Asians:

I had a long convo with my friend L about this last week, where he said that East Asian students always gravitate towards white students, whereas African American students will usually stick together. The more we talked about it, the more I realised that he thought East Asian students do that because they aspire to whiteness, and because they can – economic privilege or light skin privilege allows them to do so. I was surprised to realise that he didn’t get it – East Asian students gravitate towards white students as a means of protection from the particular kind of racism that East Asians experience; where they are always made to feel as if they are from somewhere else.

Not only does this not apply to me as a (non-black) Chinese Canadian, but this whole situation does not apply to the schools I attended growing up. Perhaps it is a class difference and/or regional demographic difference, but the situation that Thea describes would be impossible at the public schools I attended.

Discussing sexism in geek communities is more important than discussing gender imbalance.

Some female geeks use the discourse of increasing female representation in science, technology, engineering, and math (the “STEM” fields) as a proxy for addressing sexism in geek communities. Because countering sexism against women does not directly benefit men, some women reframe the issue of sexism by appealing to capitalist values. They argue that if women are better represented in STEM fields, it would lead to economic growth and technological innovation (and that this can be achieved through efforts to reduce gender bias).

However, this strategy backfires when male geeks interpret the movement to increase female representation in STEM fields as “social engineering”, i.e., feminists forcing women to do what we purportedly “dislike” (science, tech, engineering, and math). The subtext of this movement—which is that female geeks who love STEM topics have to endure sexism from male geeks or get out, and this is a Bad Thing^TM that needs to be fixed—is lost entirely.

Observe this Digg comment on the Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences submission: