blonde privilege

the image at left appeared on the strib's front page in 1998. the weeping blondes are so powerful a symbol of minnesota football frustration that patrick reusse was compelled to revisit them for a 10-year anniversary column. why blondes?

in american popular culture, blonde hair connotes whiteness, light(weighted)ness, innocence, and privilege. and there's clearly a blonde-by-gender interaction. men can be blonde, of course, but we are somehow ascribed only about a half-dose of the cultural traits associated with blondeness.

regarding lightweightedness, films such as legally blonde play with cultural stereotypes of blondes as agreeable, privileged, and unintelligent. regarding innocence, alfred hitchcock reputedly favored blonde heroines -- grace kelly, kim novak, eva marie saint, tippi hedren and janet leigh were all "hitchcock blondes" -- because it pushed audience buttons to see them in distress or behaving immorally. similarly, when young blonde women are crime victims or perpetrators, as appears to be the case in a recent nursing home scandal, their photographs often make the national news.

while i wouldn't be surprised to find real effects of blonde privilege in the operation of the courts or the entertainment industry, i doubt that such privilege extends to higher education. in fact, i might predict the opposite. as a blonde academic, i'm overly sensitive to the dumb blonde stereotype. nevertheless, i've heard blonde students or faculty described as "actually pretty smart" or "surprisingly quick" in much the same way that i've heard african american students described as "articulate."

nobody ever referred to a blonde male academic as "professor barbie," so i'd predict a blonde-by-female interaction in modeling the effects of hair color on academic career outcomes. of course, we needn't weep for the blondes -- discrimination on the basis of other ascribed characteristics remains a far more serious issue. nevertheless, i'd advise ambitious blonde academics to play against blonde stereotypes by playing to academic stereotypes -- a pair of thick glasses, a tattered and overstuffed bookbag, and a rumpled tweed jacket should do the trick.