So I’m working on the design of a baby-related website and I need to get an image of a baby to use as a placeholder. I search for “baby” in Google Images and the results immediately jump out to me:
- In the first six pages of results (200+ images) the overwhelming majority of the babies are white, something like 92%.
- An overwhelming majority of these babies have blue eyes. Not green, not brown, blue.
- The first picture of an African American baby appears at the end of the fourth page of results.
If I search for person, man, woman, human, child, boy, girl, or elderly the results are much more varied in terms of ethnicity, but there’s something different about the word baby that seems to trigger an iconic mental image of a white, blue-eyed infant.
Not trying to derive any deep explanation from this. I just find it, well, interesting.
Update: Ron Bailey makes a great point about the blue eyes, that most caucasian kids are born with blue eyes and they change color as they grow. I’d totally forgotten about this fact, I think mainly because my own daughter, a white hispanic with brown eyes, was born with very neutral gray eyes. Thanks, Ron.
