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| So happy to be white! |
You've probably heard about the "happy white woman" thing. Here it is, quantified.
I ran image searches on the following strings (without quotation marks, though using quotation marks doesn't change much!) at Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Google and recorded the first 10 results.
happy black man:
- Bing: 10 happy black men
- DuckDuckGo: 10 happy black men
- Yandex: 10 happy black men
- Google: 10 happy black men
happy Asian man:
- Bing: 10 happy Asian men
- DuckDuckGo: 10 happy Asian men
- Yandex: 10 happy Asian men
- Google: 10 happy Asian men
happy white man:
- Bing: 10 happy white men
- DuckDuckGo: 10 happy white men
- Yandex: 10 happy white men
- Google:
- 7 happy white men
- 2 happy black men (first two results!)
- 1 happy black man with a pregnant white woman
happy black people:
- Bing: 10 groups of happy black people
- DuckDuckGo: 10 groups of happy black people
- Yandex:
- 9 groups of happy black people
- 1 multiracial group of happy people
- Google: 10 groups of happy black people
happy Asian people:
- Bing: 10 groups of happy Asian people
- DuckDuckGo: 10 groups of happy Asian people
- Yandex: 10 groups of happy Asian people
- Google: 10 groups of happy Asian people
happy white people:
- Bing:
- 9 groups of happy white people
- 1 multiracial group of happy people
- DuckDuckGo:
- 8 groups of happy white people
- 2 multiracial groups of happy people
- Yandex:
- 6 groups of happy white people
- 4 multiracial groups of happy people
- Google:
- 6 groups of happy white people
- 3 multiracial groups of happy people
- 1 group of happy white people in blackface (second result!)
happy black woman:
- Bing: 10 happy black women
- DuckDuckGo: 10 happy black women
- Yandex: 10 happy black women
- Google: 10 happy black women
happy Asian woman:
- Bing: 10 happy Asian women
- DuckDuckGo: 10 happy Asian women
- Yandex: 10 happy Asian women
- Google: 10 happy Asian women
happy white woman:
- Bing: 10 happy white women
- DuckDuckGo: 10 happy white women
- Yandex: 10 happy white women
- Google:
- 4 search result screenshots
- 2 happy black men with pregnant white women
- 1 happy black man with a white woman and a mulatto baby
- 1 happy white woman with a black baby
- 1 happy black woman with a white man
- 1 happy white woman
pregnant black woman:
- Bing: 10 pregnant black women
- DuckDuckGo: 10 pregnant black women
- Yandex:
- 9 pregnant black women
- 1 multiracial group of pregnant women
- Google:
- 9 pregnant black women
- 1 pregnant black woman with a white man
pregnant Asian woman:
- Bing: 10 pregnant Asian women
- DuckDuckGo: 10 pregnant Asian women
- Yandex: 10 pregnant Asian women
- Google: 10 pregnant Asian women
pregnant white woman:
- Bing: 10 pregnant white women
- DuckDuckGo:
- 5 pregnant white women
- 4 pregnant white women with black men
- 1 pregnant white woman with a white child
- Yandex:
- 4 pregnant white women with black men
- 3 pregnant black women
- 2 pregnant white women
- 1 pregnant black woman with a black man
- Google:
- 6 pregnant white women with black men
- 3 pregnant white women
- 1 pregnant Asian woman with an Asian man
Draw your own conclusions.
13 comments:
It's not clear what you did. I infer you searched Images with this string, and you quote and analyse the first ten images? From the example picture it seems that you used the string of words, but did not put them in quotation marks - which restricts the search to that phrase and would probably be more valid?... In other words you need more detail in the Methods section!
I've never heard of this HWW thing; although I can perhaps reverse engineer what you are getting-at.
I added a parenthetical clarification that, yes, I ran the searches without quotation marks -- but using quotation marks doesn't change much. Even if you search for "happy white man" in quotation marks, the first two hits are a black man wearing a white shirt.
Notice that Google has no problem finding appropriate pictures of other races. Search for "happy black man," and you get pictures of happy black men -- not, say, white men with black women or white men wearing black clothing.
The most innocent explanation is that whiteness is linguistically unmarked -- that is, a black woman is usually called a "black woman," but a white woman is just called a "woman." The race of a white person is mentioned (and picked up by Google) only when the context makes it salient -- the context of an interracial relationship, say. In support of this theory, searching for "able-bodied woman" turns up lots of pictures of people in wheelchairs -- because people are normally designated "able-bodied" only in the context of disability.
Against this, Googling "sad white woman" just turns up lots of photos of sad white women. It's only happy or pregnant white women who are always with black men.
Also, Bing gets all these searches right, so there's nothing inevitable about Google's results. Every other engine can deal with a straightforward search like "happy white man," but not Google. What we're seeing is either incompetence or malice, and Hanlon stopped shaving a long time ago.
Indeed. It's pretty clear that Google operates under the assumption that anyone who specifies white in a search is a supremacist, and so needs a bit of 'education' on the subject.
As I once blogged, the mystery is that Google is still the best search engine, despite that it is 20plus years old and has been deliberately and incrementally made *much* worse many times over (as the above example illustrates, or the prioritizing of 'sponsored' links, or the constant in your face propaganda slogans and images etc) - so that by now it is not very good. Nonetheless, the others are even worse.
Whereas before Google a better search engine would come along every few years (the best single engine before Google was Altavista - or Dogpile as a multiple search); now we are supposed to believe that further progress in algorithms is impossible.
My inference is that Google is a high-level-protected quasi-monopoly; which fits with the fact that it was Obviously an Establishment-founded company (and that the official foundation story is a front/ fake; as with Facebook and the rest).
BTW - I laughed aloud and with a kind of joy at the Google result for Happy White People - i.e. 1 group of happy white people in blackface (true, I checked!): the joke works 'on so many levels'.
I've always thought Google's cutesy "Don't Be Evil" motto was a major tell.
As Chris Rock might put it, "You're not evil? What do you want, a cookie? You're not supposed to be evil, you low-expectation-having mutha...!"
Besides the pictures themselves, the titles of the pages the pictures are from are telling.
Top 5 Google Image Search hits for "happy black people" (no quotes):
1. Black consultants at McKinsey
2. Black group friends
3. How the black travel movement is gaining momentum
4. 87,753 happy black family photos
5. Show that #BlackLivesMatter on National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
Top 5 Google Image Search hits for "happy white people" (no quotes):
1. American white people really hate being called "white people"
2. Why white parents need to talk to their kids about racism
3. Dear white people, boycotting Netflix won't make you any whiter than you already are
4. Stop ignoring casual racism
5. Twelve types of white people I'd like to call the cops on
Couldn't the official foundation stories be true, but then the companies progressed rapidly into the establishment when investment capital began to stream in?
"American inventors"!
Hahahahahaha!
The top 10:
7 black people
2 white Americans
1 guy from Scotland!
Great job, Google!
"American novelists"
Number 1 is woman-of-color Toni Morrison -- followed by such lesser lights as Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Melville. Hawthorne, Salinger, James, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald are all outranked by someone called Sherman Alexie ("his writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several tribes" -- okay, got it).
By the way, is "Indigenous American" what we call them these days? A bit long; is a contraction acceptable?
cool white people
7 pictures of black people
1 picture of a black and a white (not together; two photos juxtaposed)
1 picture of white people being shamed for culturally appropriating dreadlocks
1 picture of a black person removing a white-person mask
And that's it! Not a single cool white person in the lot.
Okay, I could obviously go on like this forever, so I'm going to stop here. Bottom line: Google is teh suxx0rz, and it's on purpose.
Gives a whole new meaning to the expression "white is the new black" . . .
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