The Angry Black Woman Stereotype at Work
More specifically, African-American men preferred an African-American figure that is underweight with a moderate WHR but a Caucasian figure that was underweight or normal weight with a low or moderate WHR. Also notable is that more Caucasians believed African-Americans would choose a low WHR than actually did, while African-Americans accurately predicted that most Caucasians would prefer a moderate WHR. Participants were asked questions about their current and past romantic and sexual relationships in order to assess whether or not they had flexible dating practices with regard to ethnicity.
For WHR, approximately half of the African-American subsample believed that Caucasian men would choose a moderate WHR as ideal, while the other half was split between a low and a high WHR. Caucasian men, did in fact, choose a moderate WHR as ideal for both Caucasian figures and African-American figures. Similarly, more than half of the Caucasian men believed that African-American men would choose a low WHR as ideal, consistent with cultural stereotypes. Most African-American men in this study chose a moderate WHR as ideal while some chose a low WHR as ideal.
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.
First, African-American men were expected to prefer a heavier body size and a lower WHR than their Caucasian counterparts. Furthermore, African-American men who were more acculturated to Caucasian culture were expected to show preferences more aligned with those of Caucasian men. Second, men who date inter-racially were expected to hold all women to standards of beauty similar to those of their ethnic group.
But either way, these patterns thwart Black women’s mobility in organizations and their ability to realize ambitions and secure leadership roles. And Black women are left to struggle harder to access and advance in these professions, with occupational underrepresentation and YouTube wage disparities to show for it. 3) I agree that women, in particular black women, are over sexualized in media.
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 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%).