Not a myth. This is something I noticed for myself in junior-high-school locker rooms long before I learned it was a racial stereotype. Blacks – not all, but many – have a smell I find highly unpleasant, and which I never whiff off any white person, however sweaty. No doubt I, as a white person, smell bad to blacks. Why is that? We’re all the same species, we have the same basic biochemistry, and I’ve often read there is less genetic variation among humans than among chimpanzees.
I remember reading years back that before Japan became as Westernized as it is now, many Japanese found caucasian Westerners to have an offensive body odor, because of the high concentration of meat in our diet as compaired to theirs. No cite - this was before Gore invented the internet.
When I was a teenager I used to play basketball with a black buddy. He did have an unusual odour, but I attributed it to his choice of deodorant. It certainly wasn’t odious.
In my early 20s I had a short term sexually heated relationship with a black girl. I detected no unusual odour whatsoever. ( a bad smell can really turn you off). I wonder what Jefferson would have to say about that.
Everybody smells different. Any dog can tell you that.
Snakes, I can’t tell if you’re being witty or not, but since we’re fighting ignorance… Gore never claimed to invent the internet.
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
I don’t know what smell you’re talking about, BG. I’ve had white and black lovers, and have noticed no big difference in odor at all. Perhaps the black guys you know have a pungent diet or something. I doubt its racial.
I don’t have a factual answer but I’ll put my anecdotal evidence up against your anecdotal evidence anytime.
I have noticed a distinctive note in the body odor bouquet of some people belonging to a common ethnic group and I think that diet plays the biggest role, especially when the diet consistently includes certain pungent spices and flavors. But it’s not everyone in that group. So there may be a cultural element but I wouldn’t call it racial.
I’ve never noticed an offensive odor, but I have defintiely noticed distinctive odors among different groups. However, I have generally associated the odors with diet not ethnicity. When I lived in Europe, the locker room at my dorm was permeated with an odor that was quite different from the odor of the lockers at a nearby college that was 99% American. And while the American college had Belgian cooks fixing Belgian foods, the diet was much more “Americanized” than the cafeterias or the apartment kitchens throughout the rest of the city and campus.
That might carry over to the situation in North America where different groups tend to have somewhat different food preparation (and where people who were eating somewhat more generic diets might have less noticeable body odors even among the same ethnic groups).
Just so the OP isn’t left hanging, I’ll throw in my own anecdotal “yes” vote. Definitely not every black person, or even many, but I remember two distinct examples (from elementary school and high school) who smelled very similar.
My guess would be the diet. Dunno what diet would produce that smell, and it would be difficult to hazard a guess without racial stereotyping (hell, we’re doing it already!).
(Note: I don’t mind one bit if other people think I smell bad, though maybe I’d want to know about it so I could double-up the deodorant!)
Another anecdote. When my mom and her sisters where kids, they had their car stolen (well, my grandma’s car). A few weeks later the police recovered it and it was given back to them. Upon entering, my aunt (who was probably just 3 or 4 at the time) said “It smells like black people.”
If such an identifiable difference does exist, it pretty certainly isn’t “racial” in the classical sense. However, I would not exclude the possibility that there might be genetic differences between populations in the chemicals associated with body odor (since there are obviously other differences in epidermal characters, such as skin color or hair type); or conversely that there may be non-genetic differences between ethnic groups due to diet. I am not, however, aware of any research that establishes that such differences occur, let alone what their basis might be.
In this article, Cecil discusses the topic of whether Chinese lack sweat glands in their armpits. Evidently at least East Asians have fewer apocrine sweat glands than other groups.
In my work in West and Central Africa I have sometimes noticed what seems to me to be a distinctive body odor in some of my local field assistants. I have not noticed this among American blacks or East or South African blacks, but then, I haven’t gone camping for weeks on end with any of the latter. Whether the perceived differences are due to population characteristics or to cooking with palm oil I have no idea.
Another anecdote: When a friend of mine who is half English and half Chinese went to visit his mother’s family in China for the first time, they told him he “smelled like a white person.” Again, it would be difficult to sort out whether this might have been due to genetics or to diet.
Sure, diet can affect the way people smell, but let’s not get carried away.
Sir Thomas Browne , who fought the valiant fight against ignorance in the 17th century, dedicates one of the chapters of his Vulgar Errors to refuting the general opinion "that the Jews stink naturally, that is, that in their race and nation there is an evil savour …".
My high school chemistry teacher (who was about 80 years old in 1986) used to tell every class that black people smell different because their fatigue toxins are butyric acid instead of lactic acid.
Even then, as a slightly gullible sophomore, I had a few :dubious: at that one…
As far as I know, there were never any protestations at my chemistry teacher’s announcement…it was a small Catholic school with ONE African-American family attending. I wasn’t close with the single student from that family in my grade level, so I don’t really know if they considered it a problem.
This occurred to me immediately as well. Korean people’s sweat frequently betrays the predominance of garlic in their cuisine. Many Indian people in my experience smell like curry – or it’s ingredients: turmeric, cardamom, etc.
I know a number of black people who’ve told me they don’t wash their hair nearly as often as white folks because it tends to dry it out and it breaks off. I wonder if that could be the reason you notice a difference. I know that my husband (a white guy) washes his less than I do in the winter months and I notice a distinct odor in his hair if he goes more than two days without shampooing.
Going along with this: hair products. Most hair product has a chemical smell that can be made worse after exercising or lack of frequent hair washing. Blacks tend to use more product in their hair than whites (straightener, dreadlock wax, etc), which may lead to a smell. I know that in my more punk days when I wore a lot of hair gel and spray, my hair would smell if I didn’t wash it every day (which I didn’t). I’m white, BTW.
Anecdotally, I have not noticed any differences between the smells of different racial groups, probably because I try not to take a whiff of anyone, especially after they’ve been exercising. Everybody stinks in the locker room.
