A Body That Does Not Compare: How White Men Define Black Female Beauty in the Era of Colorblindness Genders 1998-2013 University of Colorado Boulder



Additionally, their African-American male participants selected as ideal female figures that were larger than those chosen by African-American females of similar age in other studies (Kemper et al., 1994; Cohn et al., 1987). One limitation of this study lies in the failure of investigators to assess what participants believed members of the other ethnic group would select as ideal. The book, “Interracial Relationships Between Black Women and White Men,” includes real stories of romantic relationships – from dating, marriage to divorce – between black women and white men.

In the case of predicted averages and percents, the regression was an OLS regression. Where the variable was a dichotomy, this OLS is a linear probability model. In the case of medians, we used a conditional quantile regression.

Of course, knowing the rate at which students are hooking up does not tell us how much they have casual intercourse, because not all hookups involve intercourse. As students define the term “hookup,” a hookup may involve little or even nothing more than making out, and these data show that about 40% of hookups involve intercourse. To get at whether students had had casual intercourse, the survey asked if they had ever had sex outside of an exclusive relationship. The question didn’t clarify what was meant by “sex.” However, there is lots of qualitative evidence that heterosexual students usually take the term to mean intercourse, whereas a majority of what they call hookups do not involve intercourse. Racial groups also differ little in their ideas of the best age to do these things, with the average age seen as ideal for marriage between 25 and 28 for all groups and the average ideal age for having a first child between 27 and 29.

The social construction of whiteness as normality, as the obligatory standard, is central to how whites have framed society in racialized, gendered, and classed ways. The ways in which many whites see, understand, and analyze society and the people in it isrooted in an understanding and interpretation of society as defined by whites. Thus, white men’s deep frame understanding of beauty, skin color, body features, facial features, and culture is from a perspective that is white defined and that privileges what whites have characterized as the epitome of beauty, desirability, and rightness. Black women are at heightened risk for obesity when compared to White women and tend to weigh more than White women on average .

The men also varied in their economic situations, with annual incomes ranging from $0 to US$175,000. Finding and keeping a good Black man in a relationship has become a cottage industry. From celebrities and reality TV stars to social media influencers, for better or worse, there is no shortage of relationship advice to people seeking to figure out Black men. The table below shows the 10 states with the largest growth in the number of Black children from birth to age 4 from 2010 to 2019.

Chi-square analyses of ideal and least favorite weight for both sets of figures and Mann–Whitney tests of ideal and least favorite WHR for both sets of figures did not yield significant differences between the youngest and oldest participants. Examining what African-American men believed Caucasian men would choose, 73.5% believed that Caucasian men would choose an underweight figure as ideal in accordance with expectations. In accordance with expectations, Caucasian men chose underweight and normal figures as ideal Page for both African-American figures (92.0%) and for Caucasian figures (96.0%). For African-American figures, more Caucasian participants chose underweight figures as ideal as compared with the number who chose normal weight figures as ideal (56.0% vs.36.0%).

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