Race, Sweat, and Oprah

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, Media Praises and Critiques, Pop Culture, Race and Racism, Sociology by Rachel

Ok, I’m watching what is liking a re-run of Oprah, but she has some guy on–Dr. Oz–and this fool said Asians don’t sweat because they don’t have many sweat glands.? Then he followed it up with “African Americans” sweat a lot.

You can’t make this crap up.? Notice how white people as usual are with absent from the discussion or indirectly placed in the middle.? Reminds me of the race and intelligence debate, where racists say Asians are the smartest, whites are somewhere in the middle, and blacks are the dumbest.?

Well on the Oprah show, they have replicated this discussion using sweat.? I need the sweaty Asians to represent!!? And the unsweaty Blacks, where ya at?

Comments

22 Responses to “Race, Sweat, and Oprah”

luckyfatima on June 13th, 2007 6:43 am

Dr. Mehmet Oz is a Turk. A non-practicing Muslim as far as I can tell. I really hate the Oprah show. I didn’t catch that episode but I have seen him on before. Oprah’s racist bullshit “around the world” episodes put me off of her so much.

I agree that when produced for mainstream white audiences, stuff like this often serves to otherize. It reminds me of hearing things as a child like “black people have an extra muscle in their legs and that’s why they are good at sports.” Blegh.

Many of us are prone to certain physical problems, traits, etc based on ethnicity. For example, ppl of certain ethnic backgrounds have higher rates of, say polycystic ovarian syndrome, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Taysachs disease, thalassemia, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or whatever. Another example, unless there is a hormone problem present, most ppl have similar hormone fluctuations during puberty, but ppl of certain ethnicities have a higher sensitivity to androgoneous hormones and develop hirsutism, while others are less sensitive to the same hormones. (like more ppl from meditarranean regions will become “hairier” while fewer East Asians will grow “excess” hair from the same amount of pubescent androgens—i put two words in quotations because what is considered excessive hair is culturally relative). So I think there IS something to ethnic/racially associated physical differences and relationship to illnesses, etc,

I didn’t see the show and I don’t know how this sweat gland info was presented. Knowing it was on Oprah makes me think it was surely done in a really irritatingly racist way, even if it may be factual, because in reality our differences may be reflected in physically manifested trends/tendencies, but they occur on a broad spectrum within particular ethnic communities.
Anthony on June 13th, 2007 8:46 am

Actually Rachel, representing at least one black man, I do sweat a lot! (Come to think of it, most black people I know do as well.)

Of course, I appreciate your cynicism. But do you have any medical evidence to support it; i.e. to rebut this Doctor’s (em, er, “fool’s”) diagnosis?
WillyWop on June 13th, 2007 10:38 am

Trust me…Asians sweat plenty. I taught in Japan for three years and it was very unpleasant to have a class of 40 middle-schoolers in the summertime (especially after PE). They sweat just like the rest of us.
Changeseeker on June 13th, 2007 11:08 am

“You can�t make this crap up.”

LOL! No you cannot. And then people (even professionals, even academics want to drag this stuff out and use it to “explain” things. Gorp!
Laura Vivanco on June 13th, 2007 11:13 am

I did find some discussion of scientific research into earwax and sweat, from The New York Times:

earwax type and armpit odor are correlated, since populations with dry earwax, such as those of East Asia, tend to sweat less and have little or no body odor, while the wet earwax populations of Africa and Europe sweat more and so may have more body odor. Several Asian features, like small nostrils, are conjectured to be adaptations to the cold. Less sweating, the Japanese authors suggest, may be another adaptation to the cold in which the ancestors of East Asian peoples are thought to have lived.
gandalf mantooth on June 13th, 2007 3:36 pm

I’m sweaty, but because I’m hairy, which is not necessarily “African” (as luckyfatima suggests). TMI, yes. If that wasn’t enough for you, I can, through random observation of an impossibly small sample in scientific terms, the earwax question vis a vis Japanese folks.

Willywop, I don’t think the doctor, however wrong, was suggesting that Japanese people don’t ever sweat. Not being able to sweat is considered a serious medical condition.

So, “Sweating alot” is just another way of saying your body has a much more active cooling system. In the doctor’s exhuberance to communicate with what he percieved as a lay audience he may have come off sounding like a dumb ass, which he may well be.

When you’re talking about differences in rates of illnesses or other somewhat irrelevant physiological differences between ethnicities, you have to tread lightly. We don’t know how closely related the genes that determine “race” and those which determine other biological indicators are. It’s only a step away from Bell Curve territory.
Rachel on June 13th, 2007 7:22 pm

Let’s say, for the sake of argument that the NYT piece is accurate science. If it is then whites and blacks, are really racially the same on the sweat issue. Therefore, the geogrpahic distribution of sweatiness would not correlate with race as we have socially constructed it.

I think this is where people mess up they confuse geograpahic distribution of certain traits with race.

I’m sure there are plenty of stinky sweating east Asians, but they may have some study that indicates that people from the far East are slightly less likely to some trait associated with sweatiness, and then it gets turned into–Asians don’t sweat when its on Oprah.

Now for Gandolf the sweaty hair African….

See there are hairy Black folks.
Tariq Nelson on June 13th, 2007 9:32 pm

I have to look this one up. I actually don’t sweat very much - only after very rigorous exercise and/or extreme heat.
Angela on June 14th, 2007 12:08 pm

I very rarely sweat. Maybe they should have had me on the panel…
Wendi Muse on June 14th, 2007 1:40 pm

i did not see the episode, so bear this in mind as you read my comment. . .

when i read this entry, i wondered whether or not there may have been an overanalyzation of what the doctor said (don’t write me off just yet…keep reading)

there may be scientific evidence out there that shows that people of african descent are likely to sweat more than people of asian descent. fine. why is that a problem?

mainly because of how our society is conditioned to see every comment regarding race/ethnicity as offensive or at least considered with suspicion, even if there is scientific proof backing it, because of how people have distorted scientific information in the past (i.e. phrenology). i don’t blame the people who may have heard the doctor’s statements and thought he was being racist or overly general. . . i blame our society and its history of misuse of information to oppress others. i also think more negativity was applied when considering the doctor’s comments because, plain and simple, sweating is viewed as a bad thing in the united states. it’s one of those chicken-or-the-egg issues. . . do we consider sweating more to be a bad thing because of social conditioning? maybe we see it as such because it was associated with hard work . . . and hard labor was associated with blacks historically . . . and that was bad because of all the negative connotations of blackness and menial labor and enslavement . . .
and so on and so on

so what if black folks, on average, sweat more? why is that a bad thing? it’s not…but in the wrong hands, I can see how the doctor’s entire message could be distorted and used against certain groups and of course used to fortify minority hierarchies as well (the model minority myth continues…see? they don’t sweat so they are superior to you!, etc). . . people can use a simple scientific truth and turn it into a monster…
Rachel on June 14th, 2007 1:57 pm

I should have added a little context here. The whole show was about body functions, and particular segment was about a black male gym teacher whose wife was complaining about how much he stinks.

This was one reason cited for why he was stinky. The doctor also pointed out that it was not sweat that stinks, but bacteria that interacts with sweat.

My reaction would have been–good lord, my man is runnung around after children all day long. He’s sweating a lot because of that. If he had a desk job and was smelly like that, it would have been different.

The idea that black people smell bad has a long history and is connected to the notion that blacks are unclean. When the doctor makes a statement like this, he is unfortunately encouraging that belief.
Wendi Muse on June 14th, 2007 2:25 pm

gotcha…thanks for the follow up with more info from the show!
Terrence on June 14th, 2007 4:57 pm

As a black man, I don’t sweat a lot unless I am exercising like most humans. I love to sweat, but not in certain places. TMI

Also, I have a friend who is African-American and when he eats, he has to have a towel nearby. He sweats profusely as if he is working out more than his jaws and teeth.
Anthony T. on June 15th, 2007 6:36 am

I am an African American. I do sweat quite a lot. I can see how African people would have larger sweat glands. The reality of the situation is that Africa is HOT! Larger sweat glands would prove beneficial for such a climate as a way to regulate temperature. I am ok with having large sweat glands. That’s not the real problem.

However, we’re not out of the clear here just yet. The problem came up when he was describing why people stink from sweat. He began by saying that it’s not the sweat that stinks. It’s the bacteria that exists on the body naturally that begins to multiply because of the sweat. For some people, sweat may cause bacteria to multiply or may cause an opposite effect.

As he was tying sweat glands into scent, he created a concept: big stinky sweat glands. This is what a lot of people did NOT catch - the bridge. He proceeded to say that African Americans have big stinky sweat glands. This is where the problem was caused. I found that amazing. How could a doctor go from supposedly unscented sweat to stinky sweat glands?

A word on Oprah. She’s such a sellout. She absolutely caters to a totally white audience. She has no problem perpetuating falsehoods about the black community. It’s sad because as an African American male who puts up with these social ills, all I ask is that you simply talk to someone and learn. Then, you see Oprah, a black person who white people are comfortable with, does everything in her power to disenfranchise African American people on her show. She’s a sad woman!

If Oprah’s life were a movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Devil had the contract to her soul.
Kai on June 16th, 2007 5:36 am

Well I might as well chime in and answer Rachel’s call for sweaty Asian representation. As far as I know, I sweat as much as the next guy when I work out or sit in the sauna. However I remember at some point when I was growing up I asked my parents about this “deodorant” thing I heard about and they told me that we Chinese don’t need it. So I’ve never touched deodorant in my life and don’t smell even when very sweaty, for what it’s worth. I also suspect that diet plays a role in all this, since I know that I sweat more if I was drinking or eating lots of meat the day before a work out.

Anyway my sense is that the discussion on Oprah sounds rather reckless. If you’re going to go into this kind of territory, it must be done with careful framing and emphatic precision. Otherwise it’s too easy for it to simply feed existing stereotypes.
Donna Darko on June 16th, 2007 5:17 pm

I sweat and smell sweaty.
Acanthus on June 21st, 2007 7:17 am

Wet puppies. That’s all I’m saying.
Rebecca Poulos on March 29th, 2008 6:12 pm

Actually, asians do tend to have less sweat glands. That’s not racist, it’s just a tendency. Like is it racist to say that 90% of Asians are lactose intolerant? Because they are! It’s just science. I think that it’s an interesting study to see how people have adapted due to different environments of genetically or whatever. It’s not racism, it’s science.
Rebecca Poulos on March 29th, 2008 6:20 pm

By the way, I don’t want to take this in another direction, but I just remembered that I’ve gotten jumped on when bringing up that fact… I think that it’s racist the importance that we put on dairy, especially in the food pyramid… but it’s not racist to say “90% of Asian (Americans? I’m rusty… google it if you want) 75% of Africans, Virtually all Native Americans and 5% Caucasians are lactose intolerant.

…

yeah…
Juan on March 30th, 2008 1:35 am

*headdesk*
Ron on March 30th, 2008 4:12 am

I think when you talk about African people you have to be very careful. Unlike other groups, African represent the most diversity genetically.

For example, Africans are represented as the fastest runners and the best long distance runners. Usually, people of West African descent are the sprinters and people of East African descent are the long distance runners.

However, migration of groups from east to west and south to north and vice versa has mixed up the pot to a large extent in Africa.

Whites are the descendants of East Africans and share many genetic traits with them. East Africans are not mixed but represent the closet African ancestor to whites.

I tell people all the time. Africans represent the tree and everyone else represents branches from that tree.

East Africans on average sweat less than West Africans but probably more than whites. This is why they do not suffer from dehydration like their Europeans counterparts do during marathons. Thus, sweating may cool these East Africans off and thereby actually creates an advantage.

Blacks on the whole consider non-blacks to be more likely to smell. So, I would not worry about blacks being labeled as more likely to smell than whites. Those sterotypes work both ways.

Blacks at this point can protect themselves
from these futile attempts at dehumanization.
Aqualus on January 10th, 2009 8:09 pm

I love it when White people (especially professors for god sakes) complain about being over looked in discussion or research, when nearly every research study overlooks other every race accept White people. Or, the study is or comment in question is generalized to everyone when the actual sample included a majority of White participants. This is akin to White people asking why there is no “White History Month.”

I’m not even sure why someone would be offended to be placed in the middle of a discussion on racial biology. The evolutionary truth is that Asian and Black people evolved (yes) in very disparate parts of the world. And White people evolved in places somewhere in between. It is logical that in many matters (such as sweat) the White race falls somewhere in the middle. Of course there are large within group variations and this model doesn’t apply to every person of a designated race.

I am no expert of the biological differences between races…But I’m Black, I sweat a bunch, my family members sweat a bunch, and I was pretty sure I’d noticed a pattern with my friends of various races. In truth, I found your blog when I was looking for evidence to confirm my suspicion. I’ll take Oprah’s word for it.

Aqualus Gordon
University of Texas Doctoral Student
–Counseling Psychology