You must log in or register to comment.
what’s… what’s going on here?
New type of cat just dropped
but what is the source of the “white guy” controversy? where are people reading about this new cat and commenting on the race and gender of the discoverer?
Some people online have started to either seriously or jokingly equate headlines saying “Scientists discovered” with “white guys found out something the natives have known about for years”
This is a specific type of callout post with justifiable ire about that, but to the tone of “for fucks sake not all scientists are white guys. Behold; the scientist who discovered the new cat.”
Did it land on its feet?
Most under-rated question. Purrfect.
I feel like this isn’t about a cat
People were assuming that the biologist that discovered the new cat species was a white guy. She’s a Bolivian biologist who is decidedly not a white guy.
Just your average casual sexism weaving it’s way through social media as usual.
People were assuming that the biologist that discovered the new cat species was a white guy.
where?
I’m answering what the OG post is talking about. I can dig up examples just as well as you can, but I’m not at my desk at the moment.
The OP says “this site” and it looks like maybe Tumblr?
So why is tumblr’s issue our problem?
If you didn’t assume she was a white guy, then this isn’t targeting you. You can put your pitchfork down.
I did not, I actually did not think about the scientist at all. I was distracted by the tiny cat. CAT!
The tiny super cute cat.
so cute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilcayo#/media/File:Leopardus_tilcayo_(5x3_cropped).jpg
Look at this tiny house cat in a leopard costume
Wasn’t this cat discovered a year ago?
One was taken in in 2016, then taken to a sanctuary. Then they studied it, did genetic testing, looked for and studied them in the wild. The new thing is the official designation and the publication of the research from the last ten years.
I don’t know a lot of people who assume the name Paola is male. This feels like a strawman argument.
yeah I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone confusing who the scientist is. I also don’t get why anyone would think an event happening in Bolivia would include white people
It’s about the story: scientists discovered a new cat species and named it Tilcayo, after the name the locals call it.
Reactions were:- So it hasn’t been discovered, just put on an official list
- Do you mean discovered for white guys?
- Finally someone asked the locals!
Second type of reaction is probably what caused OPs post
This is definitely a self-tell. They will see an article or comments that only refers to her as a “scientist” with no gender and assume the article or person is referring to them as male because that’s what they think when they see “scientist”.
For context, there is a trend of correcting people saying scientists to “white man”, because articles frame discoveries as “scientists discover x” when “x” had been widely known by the local population since that population got there.
However, this argument is fucking stupid because science has, famously, not categorized and described everything that exists, even if non scientists already know about it.
And most importantly, major publications are specifically not framing this as a discovery, but as a documentation.
Jane Goodall? Isn’t she well known.
She didn’t identify the cat. She is pretty famous, tho. Also that woman who’s all radioactive.
“That super famous lady whose name I can’t seem to remember” is probably not the best way to defend your post about women being dismissed in science. Marie Curie was a badass, and her husband, who was also a scientist and notable in his field, was lucky to have her. I unironically couldn’t remember his name. I just checked, thinking it might be Pierre but dismissing that as too stereotypical, and it is.
*Marie Skłodowska Curie. People often shorten her name (and I’ll be honest, “Marie Curie” is fun to say) but she used both surnames.
Hey some of us can’t tell races easily, she just looks like any white woman
She doesn’t look white to me. She looks hispanic to me.
A person being not black doesn’t make them white.
There’s still disagreement on whether Hispanic means white or not.
People from Hispania (you know where the word HIspanic derives from) aka Spain are considered white. To me it’s weird that the label Hispanic automatically means not white.
I think there’s added confusion because Caucasian ≠ White either. Indians are caucasians (look up pictures of albino Indian people and they just look like white Europeans).
I’ve always chuckled at African American = Black too. My wife went to school with a kid whose parents were African immigrants. Kid entered an African American art contest, won, then had his award taken away because he was white.
Elon Musk is African-American. I went to high school with a guy who was a Muslim from Africa. Guess what, also white and from South Africa.
(Yeah I know white South Africans are anthropologically generally more recently from Europe than Africa; this is just a criticism of the term “African-American”.)
Who is considered white changes depending on the attitudes of the day.
We discover a new species. what’s the first thing we do? We put it in a cage.
Humanity in a nutshell.
I think the cat ended up in a shelter (I don’t know the reason though) and then they discovered it didn’t match the other cat species known about. So it happened the other way around.
It was apparently found as a kitten by someone who thought it was a standard cat, then after a year of what I can only assume was murder kitty behaviour, they took it to a shelter
It really is peak cat when it takes a full year with a wild, feral animal to notice it’s behaviour isn’t just cat being cat.
Ive heard stories about people taking in bobcat kittens before realizing. But the story that takes the cake is someone raising a dog for years before realizing it was a fucking bear.
https://abc11.com/pets-animals/woman-unknowingly-rescues-bobcat-thinking-it-was-kitten/5570293/
https://people.com/pets/pet-dog-is-bear-not-tibetan-mastiff/
.jpg){kind=link}