David Mills, AKA the Undercover Black Man has a regular feature called "Misidentified Black Person". Whenever he finds that someone confuses two black people, no matter how dissimilar they may look, he writes about it. It's a regular enough feature that he can pull up three or four a month. Interestingly enough, there's studies showing that the saying "y'all look alike to me" has truth to it. People have more trouble telling others apart when they are outside their racial group.

Frog Princess Concept Art

And since I first posted about Disney and The Princess and the Frog (formerly: The Frog Princess), they've already stumbled out of the gate. The film has been preemptively declared racist, which has sent Disney scrambling to make changes and clarify matters.

Economists Roland G. Fryer of Harvard and Steven D. Levitt of the University of Chicago analyzed a data set that contained measures of mental abilities for more than 10,000 babies 8 months to 11 months old and born in 2001. . . .

When they looked at the data, they found there was no difference in mental ability between black and white babies -- and, if anything, Asian infants did slightly worse.

Preliminary research shows even the mention of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test can contribute to the achievement gap.

Last spring, two University of South Florida-St. Petersburg professors tested high school students to see whether expectations could foreshadow performance. What they found prompted a fall return to see whether certain methods could calm students for test-taking.

In their spring study of 81 students at Boca Ciega High School in Gulfport, Brett Jones and Tom Kellow investigated "stereotype threat," a phenomenon in which students worry their failure might confirm a negative belief about their race.

"People have been talking about the achievement gap so much over the last few years that that could make the stereotype threat worse," said Jones, a professor of educational psychology at USF-St. Petersburg.

The pair selected ninth-grade students, divided them into two groups and gave each group the same test of math skills.

They told members of the first group their performances would show how well they might do on the 10th-grade math FCAT but said nothing about how students of different races might score.

For the second group, the researchers did not mention the FCAT, instead suggesting students' scores would not vary by race.

Black students in the first group scored far worse than white students. In the second group, without any mention of the high-stakes test, black students and white students scored nearly the same.

The results call into question the validity of high-stakes tests because the tests may fail to show how well black students have learned, the researchers wrote.

Scientists Find DNA Change That Explains White Skin

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 16, 2005; Page A01

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology's most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity's greatest sources of strife.

The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person's offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world's races.

Teen People nixed a story about Hitler-loving teenybopper twins Prussian Blue - amid outrage that the glossy had promised to avoid the words "hate," "supremacist" and "Nazi" in its piece on the racist singing sisters.

A Web-based teaser for the February story originally called the hatemongering duo "aspiring musicians" and compared them to wide-eyed sensations Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

There's an article today on WashingtonPost.com about ethnic beauty pagents, but what I'm really doing is looking for a reason to post the above picture. I've been short on girl pictures for this journal, and the Spring Street Network of personals have been sold off to a company (FastCupid) that now seems to require a paid subscription to view the personal ads. Maybe its one of those extra features of TimesSelect.

This girl was suspended
for wearing cornrows
while white

Sometimes, I hate being black.

Over at that island where they have queens and princes, a large clocks, and guards who stand absolutely still, this girl pictured was kicked out of school for having her hair done in this frightening weird style called cornrows. Actually, it was the combination offense of being white and having cornrows that scared the administration, and landed the girl into hot water. Presumably it's safe to attend school while having cornrows or being white, as other students managed to attend school without incident while afflicted with either malady. Only the combination of the two threatened to shatter the precarious balance of safety and conformity that the school strives to maintain.

Quite rightly, this school is getting a flogging in the media for this asinine policy. However, the discussion is revealing how depressingly little knowledge people have about African hair. Here's looking at the discussion over at Fark. There's row after row after row of comments stating how no one should wear cornrows or dreadlocks. That they look ugly, stupid, etc. etc. etc. It's not being limited to saying the hairstyle on white people looks terrible(though I will disagree — The girl looks rather cute with her hair done like that), but no one should do their hair like that, not even blacks. Frankly, I'm sure many blacks would love to oblige that request, and many do spend hours each week trying to tame our hair with various stinging concoctions and scary Star Trek type equipment, but our hair doesn't wish to cooperate. Our hair is different.

Frankly, I wish my hair was nice and straight. It would spare me a hour of frustration each day. I'd never, ever have to deal with Ultra Sheen, or other greasy and nasty smelling products like it. I would love to get away with going to bed without having to wear a cap or stocking. Dealing with dandruff would be easier, as the hair wouldn't knot around each flake. And I'd gladly accept the day where I'm guaranteed that a comb would not painfully yank out tufts of hair that had decided without my consent to exchange vows and tie the knot -- with the dandruff being the wedding ring of sorts. There would be much rejoicing in my house if my hair was like everyone else's.

But no, it's not. Most of us blacks don't have hair that is straight, or even curls gracefully. Our hair winds itself up tighter than Woody Allen after a cup of coffee. As it grows, it does not out finely like strands of silk down to our shoulders. It puffs up like cotton (I use that description when I'm charitable), or knots up like a tumbleweed (when charity is gone). The Afropuff is our hair's natural state.

Thus, the market for hair care chemicals with toxicity that is best compared to that of New Jersey's waterways continues. Women get to pay to either have such sludge used to perm their hair, or to have fake straight hair sewn into their real hair. Men get to buy various oils of varying viscosities to try to achieve various levels of manageable hair, as long as they promise to not swim off of the coast of Alaska. And our hair will fight us each and every step of the way.

If you understand all of the pain straightening our hair causes us, you can understand the attractiveness of hairstyles like afros, dreadlocks and cornrows. Such styles are generally less maintenance than trying to force our hair to behave in ways it does not wish to. (Though dreads take a lot of work to start.) This is not an attempt by us to look foolish or to confuse and scare the white population. We just want to have a hairstyle that doesn't take a degree in cosmetology to maintain.

Look at it this way: We don't ask all of you to make your hair look like this.

I've yet to find any information as to whether or not she is back at school, and if she is allowed with the cornrows.

White Americans who believe that people shouldn't be judged by their skin color can still subconsciously exhibit racial bias, according to new research from a Northwestern University psychologist.

In one study, Professor Galen Bodenhausen found that even well-meaning whites look at identical facial expressions on African Americans and white Americans and see greater hostility in the African-American faces.

And, in another experiment, whites were more likely to describe a racially mixed face as African-American if it displayed a hostile expression.

Bodenhausen attributes these perceptions to a subconscious, or "implicit," bias that is not reflected in answers to direct questions about racial attitudes. "Together," he said, "these experiments suggest there is a kind of stereotypic association between hostility and African-American faces for individuals who possess this kind of implicit prejudice."

The two studies, which measured the responses of 24 white university students, do not necessarily demonstrate how common such implicit bias might be in the general population. But, says Bodenhausen, the studies are important because they provide insight into how racial stereotypes are perpetuated and the potential challenges of interracial communication.

"If you assume you're seeing hostility in another person's face when you're interacting with that person," Bodenhausen said, "it's going to affect the way you respond. It's going to affect the degree of warmth or coldness you will display to that person. And, of course, the individual will notice that treatment and respond to it."