title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Fair skin is a beauty ideal in contemporary Sri Lankan society but has its roots in ancient Sri Lankan beauty ideals. Fairness products and other products that include whitening agents are commonly sold in Sri Lanka and are popular among females. Fair skinned actors and actresses feature prominently in Bollywood films and Korean dramas both of which are widely popular and influential in Sri Lanka.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: During the European colonial period, travelers in Africa emphasized and added to a European discourse of black womanhood that attributed a big body to all black women. This was a symbol of 'otherness', their inferior phenotype, and backward culture and intellect.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Although, today the thick Black female body is celebrated but it does not negate the fact of white colonialist views and the prevalence of white beauty standards. "The voluptuous black female body is still perceived as unattractive, ugly, and grotesque—the opposite of beautiful—when seen through the prism of white supremacy."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: In some parts of Africa, women with lighter skin are thought to be more beautiful and likely to find more success than women with darker skin tones. Often this barrier leads to women turning to skin lightening treatments, many of which are harmful to the body.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Historically, the cause of skin lightening dates back to European colonialism, where individuals with lighter skin received greater privilege than those of darker tones. This built a racial hierarchy and color ranking within colonized African nations, leaving psychological effects on many of the darker skinned individuals.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Colorism affects both women and men in African countries, but it has taken hold of the beauty standards associated with a woman's ability to find success and marriage. The number of women across African countries using bleaching products have gone up with 77% of Nigerian women, 52% of Senegalese women, and 25% of Malian women using lightening products. "Der Spiegel" reports that in Ghana, "When You Are Light-Skinned, You Earn More" and that, "Some pregnant women take tablets in the hopes that it will lead their child to be born with fair skin. Some apply bleaching lotion... to their babies, in the hopes that it will improve their child's chances."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Research reveals that police practices, such as racial profiling, over-policing in areas which are populated by minorities and in-group bias may cause disproportionately high numbers of crime suspects among racial minorities in Europe. Research also suggests there may be discrimination by the judicial system, which contributes to a higher number of convictions for racial minorities in Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Denmark and France.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Several meta-analyses find extensive evidence of ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring in the North American and European labor markets. A 2016 meta-analysis of 738 correspondence tests in 43 separate studies done in OECD countries in 1990-2015 finds that there is extensive racial discrimination in hiring decisions in Europe and North America. Equivalent minority candidates need to send around 50% more applications to be invited for an interview than majority candidates.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2014 meta-analysis found extensive evidence of racial and ethnic discrimination in the housing market of several European countries. These include being discriminated against in the rental market, a lack of ability to successfully integrate into society, discrimination based on foreign origin, and preferential hiring based upon being a native citizen.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2017 experimental study found that the Dutch discriminate against non-Western immigrants in trust games. A 2021 study found discrimination against parents with Muslim names in the Danish education system.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Brazil has the world's largest population of African descent outside Africa. Racially mixed individuals with lighter skin generally have higher rates of social mobility than racially mixed people with darker skin. There is a disproportionately higher number of people among the mostly European descended elites than there is among those elites whose members are of visible African descent. There are large health, education and income disparities between the races in Brazil. A recent study even finds that skin color is a stronger predictor of social inequality in Brazil than 'race' (i.e. 'race-color' categories used on the Brazilian census); and highlights that socially perceived skin color and 'race' are not the same thing. Even though browns/mixeds and blacks comprise more than 50 percent of the population, they comprise less than 25 percent of all of the elected politicians.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2016 study, using twins as a control for neighborhood and family characteristics, found that the nonwhite twin is disadvantaged in the educational system. A 2015 study on racial bias in teacher evaluations in Brazil found that Brazilian math teachers gave better grading assessments of white students than equally proficient and equivalently well-behaved black students.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 paper found that discriminatory hiring and retention policies accounted for 6-8% of the overall racial wage gap.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: In Chile, there is a wide range of diversity from other cultures and ethnic backgrounds. The diversity in Chile sees colorism through social-economic status, accommodating the preexisting notion that darker skin complexions are less valued. A 2016 study found that Chilean schoolteachers expected less from their dark-skinned students ("morenos") than they expected from their light-skinned students ("blancos"). Even the differences between being dark and being tanned carry different types of status, being tanned means that people have more money because they have time to go to the beach and buy tanning products, but due to the history of colonization, being darker skinned means that people are automatically considered members of the lower classes. Current studies have revealed that many Chileans want to have a lighter pigmentation and they even consider themselves White despite the fact that they have a mixture of skin tones.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2017 study revealed a 45% gap in educational achievement between the darkest- and lightest-skinned White Mexicans and that wealth in the country similarly correlated to skin color.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: European colonizers created a system of racial hierarchy and a race-based ideology, which led to the formation of a structural system of oppression that benefited individuals of European descent over individuals of African descent. Biological differences in skin color were used to justify the enslavement and oppression of Africans and Native Americans, leading to the development of a social hierarchy that placed people of European descent at the top and placed people of African descent at the bottom. Enslaved people with lighter complexions (usually stemming from the sexual assault of enslaved African women), were allowed to perform less strenuous tasks, like domestic duties, while darker-skinned enslaved people were forced to engage in hard labor, which was usually performed outdoors.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: African-Americans with greater European ancestry and a lighter skin color were considered smarter than and therefore superior to their darker-skinned counterparts. As a result, they were given greater opportunities for education and the acquisition of land and property. Colorism was a device used by European colonists, to create division between enslaved Africans and further the idea that being as close to white as possible was the ideal image. One of the first forms of colorism was slave owners deciding that only light-skinned enslaved people would work in the house while the darker-skinned ones were subjected to the harsh conditions of the fields. This practice led to a clear division between the slaves, undermining their solidarity against the slave owners.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A variety of specific cutoff tests for skin color emerged, the most famous one was the brown paper bag test. If people's skins were darker than the color of a brown paper bag, they were considered "too dark". While the origin of this test is unclear, it is best attested to in 20th-century Black culture. During the time when African Americans were forced into slavery, slave owners would use the "paper bag test", which compared their skin color to a paper bag to distinguish whether their complexion was too dark to work inside of the house. African Americans' desire for lighter complexions and European features goes back to slavery. Enslaved people that had lighter complexions would have the privilege of working indoors while enslaved people with darker skin were required to work outside in the fields. The complexions of African American slaves reflected how they got treated and the severity of their punishments if they did not comply to the lifestyle that they were forced into. The access to and resources to purchase skincare products or services impacted the notions of colorism among African American women, since enslaved and impoverished black women were more limited in their grooming, which affected the way they were treated by their masters. For example, light-skinned black women were marketed as "Negroes fit for domestic service" in their masters' homes.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: In addition to the bag test, the comb test and the door test were also used. The comb test was used to measure the kinkiness of a person's hair. The objective was for the comb to be able to pass through the hair without stopping. The door test was popular in some African American clubs and churches. The people who were in charge of those clubs and churches would paint their doors a certain shade of brown, similar to the brown paper bag test, and if people's skins were darker than the color of the doors, they were not admitted into the establishments. These tests were used to measure what level of "blackness" was and was not acceptable in the world. Due to lighter-skinned slaves being allowed to work in the house, they were more likely to be educated than darker slaves were. Hence the stereotype that dark people were stupid and ignorant. Scholars predict that in the future, the preferred color of beauty will not be black or white, but mixed. Scholars also predict that the United States will adopt a "multicultural matrix" which will help bridge the racial gap in efforts to achieve racial harmony, termed by some a coming "Browning of America". The matrix has four components: the mixed race will help fix racial issues, it serves as a sign of racial progress, it suggests that racism is a thing and it also suggests that the focus on race is racist due to the lack of racial neutrality. At the same time, some Americans view this "browning" as a sort of demographic replacement, which has led to anxiety among some white Americans who feel that their identity and culture are under attack and will be displaced without changes to the US immigration system. Eric Peter Kaufmann explored these views among American whites and internationally in the 2018 book "Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities".


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A parallel as well as an opposite critique of this theory is made by black scholars, who state that racial neutrality will not eliminate discrimination based on skin color as long as some races continue to be negatively perceived and unfairly treated. As such, racial "browning" would just be another way to erase dark skin without correcting the bad way in which it is perceived. From this point of view, racial harmonization is not a valid response to racism at all. In his 2008 book "The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice", Ronald R. Sundstrom writes,


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2014 meta-analysis of racial discrimination in product markets found extensive evidence of minority applicants being quoted higher prices for products. A 1995 study found that car dealers "quoted significantly lower prices to white males than to black or female test buyers using identical, scripted bargaining strategies." A 2013 study found that eBay sellers of iPods received 21 percent more offers if a white hand held the iPod in the photo than a black hand.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2014 study in the "Journal of Economic Growth" found that anti-black violence and terrorism, as well as segregation laws, reduced the economic activity and innovation of African Americans.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: African-Americans have historically faced discrimination in terms of getting access to credit. A 2020 audit study of 17 banks found that black business owners who sought loans under the Paycheck Protection Program got substantially worse treatment than white business owners. Bus drivers engaged in substantial discrimination against black passengers relative to white passengers.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Research suggests that police practices, such as racial profiling, over-policing in areas which are populated by minorities and in-group bias may all result in disproportionately high numbers of racial minorities among crime suspects. Research also suggests that there is discrimination by the judicial system, which contributes to a higher number of convictions and unfavorable sentencing for racial minorities. Further research indicates that even when controlling for income and all other factors, children from father-absent families (mother only, mother-stepfather, and relatives/other) were much more likely to be incarcerated The disproportionate single-parent households of black youths to those in white family structures is respectively 64% to 24% as of 2019


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2019 study, which made use of a dataset of the racial makeup of every U.S. sheriff over a 25-year period, found that "ratio of Black-to-White arrests is significantly higher under White sheriffs" and that the effects appear to be "driven by arrests for less-serious offenses and by targeting Black crime types."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: In-group bias has also been observed when it comes to traffic citations, as black and white cops are more likely to cite out-groups.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2019 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that facial-recognition systems were substantially more likely to misidentify the faces of racial minorities. Some ethnic groups, such as Asian-Americans and African-American, were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" found that tall young black men are especially likely to receive unjustified attention by law enforcement. The authors furthermore found a "causal link between perceptions of height and perceptions of threat for Black men, particularly for perceivers who endorse stereotypes that Black people are more threatening than White people."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Analysis of more than 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina showed that blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be pulled over by police for traffic stops, and that blacks were more likely to be searched following the stop. There were no significant difference in the likelihood that Hispanics would be pulled over, but Hispanics were much more likely to be searched following a traffic stop than whites. When the study controlled for searches in high-crime areas, it still found that police disproportionately targeted black individuals. These racial disparities were particularly pronounced for young men. The study found that whites who were searched were more likely to carry contraband than blacks and Hispanics. A 2020 study in the journal "Nature" found that black drivers were stopped more often than white drivers, and that the threshold by which police decided to search black and Hispanic drivers was lower than that for whites (judging by the rate at which contraband was found in searches). A 2021 study in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics" found similar results. A 2021 study in the "American Economic Review" found that minorities were significantly less likely to receive discounts on their traffic tickets than White drivers; the study estimated that 42% of Florida Highway Patrol officers practiced racial discrimination.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2013 report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that blacks were "3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession," even though "blacks and whites use drugs, including marijuana, at similar rates."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Racism is also present in policing. For instance, the United Kingdom's 'stop and search' laws have been disproportionately used against black people, specifically black men. Excessive force against black people is also common in the United States. Police in the United States disproportionately killed unarmed black Americans compared to unarmed white Americans. These discrepancies led to the creation of the 'Black Lives Matter' (BLM). The movement began in the US in 2012, after the killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old unarmed African-American, by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed self defense and was acquitted of murder at trial. The movement skyrocketed after many high profile killings of unarmed African Americans by the police, including the murder of George Floyd. However, BLM also faces criticism and the 'All Lives Matter' (ALM) emerged as a response. Thus, there is an ongoing debate on the motifs of the ALM. Former US president, Donald Trump and some other Republicans declared the BLM as racist and the ALM as more inclusive and color-blind.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2016 study by Roland G. Fryer, Jr. of the National Bureau of Economic Research () found that while overall "blacks are 21 percent more likely than whites to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn" and that in the raw data from New York City's Stop and Frisk program "blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force" after "[p]artitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings." The study did find bias against blacks and Hispanics in non-lethal and less-extreme lethal violence, stating that "as the intensity of force increases (e.g. handcuffing civilians without arrest, drawing or pointing a weapon, or using pepper spray or a baton), the probability that any civilian is subjected to such treatment is small, but the racial difference remains surprisingly constant", and noted that "[u]ntil recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident".


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: After the NBER study was published in the peer reviewed "Journal of Political Economy", a comment on it by Steven Durlauf and (Nobel Prize in Economics recipient) James Heckman of the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago said, "[i]n our judgment, this paper does "not" establish credible evidence on the presence or absence of discrimination against African Americans in police shootings." The NBER study's author, Roland G. Fryer Jr., responded by saying Durlauf and Heckman erroneously claim that his sample is "based on stops". Further, he states that the "vast majority of the data... is gleaned from 911 calls for service in which a civilian requests police presence."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study in "American Journal of Public Health" found the mortality rate by police per 100,000 was 1.9 to 2.4 for black men, 0.8 to 1.2 for Hispanic men and 0.6 to 0.7 for white men. Reports by the Department of Justice have also found that police in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, systemically stop, search (in some cases strip-search) and harass black residents. A January 2017 report by the DOJ concluded that the Chicago Police Department had "unconstitutionally engaged in a pattern of excessive and deadly force" and an independent task force created by the mayor of Chicago stated that police "have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color." A 2018 study found that minorities were disproportionately killed by police, but that white officers were no more likely to use lethal force on minorities than minority officers. A 2019 study in the "Journal of Politics" found that police officers were more likely to use lethal force on blacks, but that this "most likely driven by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the application of lethal force."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2019 study in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" found that blacks and American Indian/Alaska Natives are more likely to be killed by police than whites, and that Latino men are more likely to be killed than white men. According to the study, "for young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death." A separate "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" ("PNAS") study found that there were no racial disparities in police shootings by white police; the findings of the study were disputed by Princeton University scholars who argued that the study's method and dataset made it impossible for the authors to reach that conclusion. The authors of the original "PNAS" study corrected their article following the criticism by the Princeton scholars. A study by Texas A&M University economists, which rectified some problems of selection bias identified in the literature above, found that white police officers were more likely to use force and guns than black police, and that white officers were five times as likely to use gun force in predominantly black neighborhoods. A 2020 "American Political Science Review" study estimated that 39% of uses of force by police against blacks and Hispanics in New York City was racially discriminatory.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study in the "Journal of Empirical Legal Studies" found that law enforcement officers in Texas who could charge shoplifters with two types of crimes (one more serious, one less so) due to a vaguely worded statute were more likely to charge blacks and Hispanics with the more serious crime.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2017 report by the Marshall Project found that killings of black men by whites were far more likely to be deemed "justifiable" than killings by any other combination of races.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2019 audit study found that lawyers are less likely to take on clients with black-sounding names than white-sounding names.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics" found that bail judges in Miami and Philadelphia were racially biased against black defendants, as white defendants had higher rates of pretrial misconduct than black defendants. A 2022 study in the "American Economic Review" found that New York City judges engaged in racial discrimination against black defendants in bail decisions.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2012 study found that "(i) juries formed from all-white jury pools convict black defendants significantly (16 percentage points) more often than white defendants, and (ii) this gap in conviction rates is entirely eliminated when the jury pool includes at least one black member."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research experiment found that law students, economics students and practicing lawyers who watched 3D Virtual Reality videos of court trials (where the researchers altered the race of the defendants) showed a racial bias against minorities.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: DNA exonerations in rape cases strongly suggests that the wrongful conviction rate is higher for black convicts than white convicts.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Research has found evidence of in-group bias, where "black (white) juveniles who are randomly assigned to black (white) judges are more likely to get incarcerated (as opposed to being placed on probation), and they receive longer sentences."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study in the "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics" found that judges gave longer sentences, in particular to black defendants, after their favorite team lost a home game.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2014 study in the "Journal of Political Economy" found that 9% of the black-white gap in sentencing could not be accounted for. The elimination of unexplained sentencing disparities would reduce "the level of black men in federal prison by 8,000–11,000 men [out of black male prison population of 95,000] and save $230–$320 million per year in direct costs." The majority of the unexplained sentencing disparity appears to occur at the point when prosecutors decide to bring charges carrying "mandatory minimum" sentences. A 2018 paper by Alma Cohen and Crystal Yang of Harvard Law School found that "Republican-appointed judges give substantially longer prison sentences to black offenders versus observably similar non-black offenders compared to Democratic-appointed judges within the same district court."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: In criminal sentencing, medium to dark-skinned African Americans are likely to receive sentences 2.6 years longer than those of whites or light-skinned African Americans. When a white victim is involved, those with more "black" features are likely to receive a much more severe punishment.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2016 report by the "Sarasota Herald-Tribune" found that Florida judges sentence black defendants to far longer prison sentences than whites with the same background. For the same drug possession crimes, blacks were sentenced to double the time of whites. Blacks were given longer sentences in 60 percent of felony cases, 68 percent of the most serious first-degree crimes, 45 percent of burglary cases and 30 percent of battery cases. For third-degree felonies (the least serious types of felonies in Florida), white judges sentenced blacks to twenty percent more time than whites, whereas black judges gave more balanced sentences.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2017 report by the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) found, "after controlling for a wide variety of sentencing factors" (such as age, education, citizenship, weapon possession and prior criminal history), that "black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2014 study on the application of the death penalty in Connecticut over the period 1973–2007 found "that minority defendants who kill white victims are capitally charged at substantially higher rates than minority defendants who kill minorities... There is also strong and statistically significant evidence that minority defendants who kill whites are more likely to end up with capital sentences than comparable cases with white defendants."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2016 analysis by the "New York Times" "of tens of thousands of disciplinary cases against inmates in 2015, hundreds of pages of internal reports and three years of parole decisions found that racial disparities were embedded in the prison experience in New York." Blacks and Latinos were sent more frequently to solitary and held there for longer durations than whites. The "New York Times" analysis found that the disparities were the greatest for violations where the prison guards had much discretion, such as disobeying orders, but smaller for violations that required physical evidence, such as possessing contraband.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: According to a 2011 "ProPublica" analysis, "whites are nearly four times as likely as minorities to win a pardon, even when the type of crime and severity of sentence are taken into account."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) that integrated, equal schools be accessible to all children unbiased to skin color. Currently in the United States, not all state funded schools are equally funded. Schools are funded by "federal, state, and local governments" while "states play a large and increasing role in education funding." "Property taxes support most of the funding that local government provides for education." Schools in lower income areas get less funding than schools in higher income areas, because all funding for education is based on property taxes. The U.S. Department of Education reports, "many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding, leaving students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools which are attended by their wealthier peers." The U.S. Department of Education also says this fact affects "more than 40% of low-income schools". Children of color are much more likely to suffer from poverty than white children.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2015 study which used correspondence tests "found that when they are considering requests from prospective students who are seeking mentoring in the future, faculty were significantly more responsive to White males than they were to all other categories of students, collectively, particularly in higher-paying disciplines and private institutions." Through affirmative action, elite colleges consider a broader range of experiences for minority applicants.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2016 study in the journal "PNAS" found that blacks and Hispanics were systemically underrepresented in education programs for gifted children where teachers and parents referred students to those programs; when a universal screening program which was based on IQ was used to refer students, the disparity was significantly reduced.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: The phrase "brown paper bag test", or paper bag party, along with the "ruler test" refers to a ritual which was once done by certain African-American sororities and fraternities which would not let anyone into the group if his or her skin was darker than a brown paper bag. Spike Lee's film "School Daze" satirized this practice at historically black colleges and universities. Along with the "paper bag test", guidelines for acceptance among the lighter ranks included the "comb test" and the "pencil test", which tested the coarseness of one's hair, and the "flashlight test", which tested a person's profile in order to make sure that their features measured up or were close enough to those of the Caucasian race.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2013 study used spectrophotometer readings to quantify the skin color of respondents. White women experience discrimination in education, with those women having darker skin graduating from college at lower rates than those women with lighter skin. This precise and repeatable test of skin color revealed that white women experience skin color discrimination in education at levels which are consistent with the levels of skin color discrimination which are experienced by African-Americans. White men are not affected in this way.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2019 review of the literature in the "Annual Review of Public Health" found that structural racism, cultural racism, and individual-level discrimination are "a fundamental cause of adverse health outcomes for racial/ethnic minorities and racial/ethnic inequities in health."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 1999 study found that doctors treat black and white patients differently, even when their medical files were statistically identical. When shown patient histories and asked to make judgments about heart disease, the doctors were much less likely to recommend cardiac catheterization (a helpful procedure) to black patients. A 2015 study found that pediatricians were more likely to undertreat appendicitis pain in black children than white children. A 2017 study found that medical staff which was treating anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries perceived black collegiate athletes as having higher pain tolerance than white athletes. A study by University of Toronto and Ohio State University economists found substantial evidence of racial discrimination against black veterans in terms of medical treatment and awarding of disability pensions in the late 19th and early 20th century; the discrimination was substantial enough to account for nearly the entire black-white mortality gap in the period. A 2019 study in "Science" found that one widely used algorithm to assess health risks falsely concluded that "Black patients are healthier than equally sick White patients", thus leading health care providers to provide lower levels of care for black patients. A 2020 study found that "when Black newborns are cared for by Black physicians, the mortality penalty they suffer, as compared with White infants, is halved."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 ProPublica analysis found that African Americans and Native Americans were underrepresented in clinical trials of new drugs. Fewer than 5% of patients were African-American, even though they make up 13.4% of the total US population. African-Americans were even underrepresented in trials involving drugs intended for diseases that disproportionately affect African-Americans. As a result, African-Americans who had exhausted all other treatments have weaker access to experimental treatments.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Studies have argued that there are racial disparities in how the media and politicians act when they are faced with cases of drug addiction in which the victims are primarily black rather than white, citing the examples of how society responded differently to the crack epidemic than it responded to the opioid epidemic.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2014 meta-analysis found extensive evidence of racial discrimination in the American housing market. Minority applicants for housing needed to make many more enquiries to view properties. Geographical steering of African-Americans in US housing remains significant. A 2003 study found "evidence that agents interpret an initial housing request as an indication of a customer's preferences, but also are more likely to withhold a house from all customers when it is in an integrated suburban neighborhood (redlining). Moreover, agents' marketing efforts increase with asking price for white, but not for black, customers; blacks are more likely than whites to see houses in suburban, integrated areas (steering); and the houses agents show are more likely to deviate from the initial request when the customer is black than when the customer is white. These three findings are consistent with the possibility that agents act upon the belief that some types of transactions are relatively unlikely for black customers (statistical discrimination)." Real estate appraisers discriminate against black homeowners. Historically, there was extensive and long-lasting racial discrimination against African-Americans in the housing and mortgage markets in the United States, as well as massive discrimination against black farmers whose numbers massively declined in post-WWII America due to local and federal anti-black policies. Government actions in part facilitated racial discrimination in the housing market, leading to substantial and persistent racial residential segregation, and contributing to the racial wealth gap .


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: According to a 2019 analysis by University of Pittsburgh economists, blacks faced a two-fold penalty due to the racially segregated housing market: rental prices increased in blocks when they underwent racial transition whereas home values declined in neighborhoods that blacks moved into. A 2016 study found that industrial use zoning in Chicago tended to be allocated to neighborhoods which were populated by racial minorities.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A report by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed that when the department sent African-Americans and whites to look at apartments, African-Americans were shown fewer apartments to rent and fewer houses for sale than whites were. A 2017 study found "that applications [for Airbnb housing] from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively white names." A 2020 audit study of Boston found that prospective white renters were 32 percentage points more likely to be shown an apartment than similar prospective black renters.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2017 paper by Troesken and Walsh found that pre-20th century cities "created and sustained residential segregation through private norms and vigilante activity." However, "when these private arrangements began to break down during the early 1900s" whites started "lobbying municipal governments for segregation ordinances". As a result, cities passed ordinances which "prohibited members of the majority racial group on a given city block from selling or renting property to members of another racial group" between 1909 and 1917.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Government policies have contributed significantly to the racial gap in homeownership, because various government policies and benefits have made it easier for whites to become homeowners relative to blacks. A 2017 study by Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economists found that the practice of redlining—the practice whereby banks discriminated against the inhabitants of certain neighborhoods—had a persistent adverse impact on the neighborhoods, with redlining affecting homeownership rates, home values and credit scores in 2010. Since many African-Americans could not access conventional home loans, they had to turn to predatory lenders (who charged high interest rates). Due to lower home ownership rates, slumlords were able to rent out apartments that would otherwise be owned. A 2019 analysis estimated that predatory housing contracts targeting African-Americans in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s cost black families between $3 billion and $4 billion in wealth.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2017 study in "Research & Politics" found that white supporters of Donald Trump became less likely to approve of federal housing assistance when they were shown an image of a black man.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study in the "American Sociological Review" found that housing market professionals (real estate agents, housing developers, mortgage appraisers and home value appraisers) held derogatory racial views about black and Latino individuals and neighborhoods whereas white individuals and neighborhoods were beneficiaries of widely shared, positive racial beliefs.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 experimental study by University of Illinois and Duke University economists found that real estate agents and housing providers systematically recommended homes in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates, greater pollution, higher crime rates, fewer college educated families, and fewer skilled workers to minority individuals who had all the same characteristics as white individuals except ethnic differences.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study in the "American Political Science Review" found that white voters in areas which experienced massive African-American population growth between 1940 and 1960 were more likely to vote for California Proposition 14 (1964) which sought to enshrine legal protections for landlords and property owners who discriminated against "colored" buyers and renters.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study in the "Journal of Politics" found extensive evidence of discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in the New York City rental market. A 2018 study in the journal "Regional Science and Urban Economics" found that there was discrimination against blacks and Arab males in the U.S. rental market. A 2018 study in the "Journal of Regional Science" found that "black households pay more for identical housing in identical neighborhoods than their white counterparts... In neighborhoods with the smallest fraction white, the premium is about 0.6%. In neighborhoods with the largest fraction white, it is about 2.4%."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2022 study found that ethnic minority hosts on Airbnb charge lower prices due to discrimination by consumers.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Several meta-analyses find extensive evidence of ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring in the American labor market. A 2017 meta-analysis found "no change in the levels of discrimination against African Americans since 1989, although we do find some indication of declining discrimination against Latinos." A 2016 meta-analysis of 738 correspondence tests – tests where identical CVs for stereotypically black and white names were sent to employers – in 43 separate studies conducted in OECD countries between 1990 and 2015 finds that there is extensive racial discrimination in hiring decisions in Europe and North America. These correspondence tests showed that equivalent minority candidates need to send around 50% more applications to be invited for an interview than majority candidates. A study that examine the job applications of actual people provided with identical résumés and similar interview training showed that African-American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records. A 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found evidence of racial bias in how CVs were evaluated. A 2020 study found that there is not only discrimination towards minorities in callback rates in audit studies, but that the discrimination gets more severe after the callbacks in terms of job offers. A 2022 study involving 83,000 job applications sent to the 108 largest U.S. employers found that employers consistently favored applications by distinctively white names over black names. A 2021 study found discrimination among Swiss job recruiters against immigrant and minority groups.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Research suggests that light-skinned African American women have higher salaries and greater job satisfaction than dark-skinned women. Being "too black" has recently been acknowledged by the U.S. Federal courts in an employment discrimination case under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In "Etienne v. Spanish Lake Truck & Casino Plaza, LLC" the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, determined that an employee who was told on several occasions that her manager thought she was "too black" to do various tasks, found that the issue of the employee's skin color rather than race itself, played a key role in an employer's decision to keep the employee from advancing. A 2018 study found evidence suggesting discrimination towards immigrants with darker skin colors.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2019 experimental study found that there was a bias against blacks, Latinos and women in hirings of postdocs in the fields of biology and physics. A 2020 study, which used a natural experiment with sun exposure and tans found that darker-skinned individuals are discriminated against in the labor market.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2008 study found that black service providers receive lower tips than white service providers. Research shows that "ban the box" (the removal of the check box asking job applicants if they have criminal records) leads employers to discriminate against young, black low-skilled applicants, possibly because employers simply assume these applicants have checkered pasts when they are not able to confirm it.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Colorism in movies, print, and music can take place in several forms. It can be the representation of people of color in an ill light, the hiring of actors based on their skin color, the use of colors in costumes with the intention to differentiate good and evil characters, or simply failing to represent people of color at all.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Cultural products represent societal values and offer an approach to see transitions in those values. Children's stories investigate cultural products for cultural motifs and values, which according to Bettelheim (1962) are major ways by which children integrate in the culture. Children's stories are very important to examine value constructs such as beauty ideals. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fairy tales taught girls and young women to integrate into the patriarchal culture. Women were supposed to be domesticated, respectable, and attractive to get married. Boys and girls were assigned gendered roles and attitudes in the fairy tales. Research by Pescosolido, Grauerholz, and Milkie (1997) found "that during periods of intense racial conflict and significant political gains by African Americans", Black characters almost vanished from children's books. Thus, children's media imitates and is formed by the changing social and power relations within different groups. As a result, children's literature can reflect important political and social transitions in the past. The Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century, echo how the extensiveness of the feminine beauty ideal has transitioned over time. The tales that survive today are read by children from different social classes and racial groups. Moreover, it continues to incorporate symbolic imagery that preserves existing, race, class, and gender system.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Characters' physical appearance is regularly quoted in the fairytales. There is a particular emphasis on fair skin tone of the 'princesses'. Young women's beauty is highlighted more than older women and men's appearance. There is a strong link between beauty and goodness and ugliness and evil. One story for example, says, "A widow had two daughters, one who was beautiful and industrious, the other ugly and lazy". It shows how ugliness is punished while beauty is rewarded. Beauty is also linked to race and class. "In "The White Bride and the Black Bride", the mother and daughter are "cursed" with blackness and ugliness". Thus, black color is automatically associated with not being pretty. As a result, beauty is connected not only with goodness but also with whiteness and economic privilege. Stories such as 'Snow White' emphasizes how fair skin tone would lead to marrying a princess because he would be attracted to her 'beauty'. The aspect of 'fairness' is deeply ingrained with beauty in these fairytales, that it is difficult to imagine any without glorifying it.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2017 report by Travis L. Dixon (of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) found that major media outlets tend to portray black families as dysfunctional and dependent while white families are portrayed as stable. These portrayals may give the impression that poverty and welfare are primarily black issues. According to Dixon, this can reduce public support for social safety programs and lead to stricter welfare requirements. A 2018 study found that media portrayals of Muslims were substantially more negative than for other religious groups (even when controlling for relevant factors). A 2019 study described media portrayals of minority women in crime news stories as based on "outdated and harmful stereotypes".


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: African Americans with lighter skin tone and "European features", such as lighter eyes, and smaller noses and lips have more opportunities in the media industry. For example, film producers hire lighter-skinned African Americans more often, television producers choose lighter-skinned cast members, and magazine editors choose African American models that resemble European features. A content analysis conducted by Scott and Neptune (1997) shows that less than one percent of advertisements in major magazines featured African American models. When African Americans did appear in advertisements they were mainly portrayed as athletes, entertainers or unskilled laborers. In addition, seventy percent of the advertisements that features animal print included African American women. Animal print reinforces the stereotypes that African Americans are animalistic in nature, sexually active, less educated, have lower income, and extremely concerned with personal appearances. Concerning African American males in the media, darker-skinned men are more likely to be portrayed as violent or more threatening, influencing the public perception of African American men. Since dark-skinned males are more likely to be linked to crime and misconduct, many people develop preconceived notions about the characteristics of black men.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2021 study found that U.S. media portrayals of Muslims and Muslim Americans was substantially more negative than media coverage of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Colorism was, and still is, very evident in the media. An example of this is the minstrel shows that were popular during and after slavery. Minstrel shows were a very popular form of theater that involved white and black people in black face portraying black people while doing demeaning things. The actors painted their faces with black paint and over lined their lips with bright red lipstick to exaggerate and make fun of black people. When minstrel shows died out and television became popular, black actors were rarely hired and when they were, they had very specific roles. These roles included being servants, slaves, idiots, and criminals.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: The absence of people of color in media, in settings they can normally should be present, is also called erasure.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2011 study found that white state legislators of both political parties were less likely to respond to constituents with African-American names. A 2013 study found that in response to e-mail correspondence from a putatively black alias, "nonblack legislators were markedly less likely to respond when their political incentives to do so were diminished, black legislators typically continued to respond even when doing so promised little political reward. Black legislators thus appear substantially more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Some research suggests that white voters' voting behavior is motivated by racial threat. A 2016 study, for instance, found that white Chicago voters' turnout decreased when public housing was reconstructed and 25,000 African Americans displaced. This suggest that white voters' turnout decreased due to not living in proximity to African-Americans.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Voter ID laws have brought on accusations of racial discrimination. In a 2014 review by the Government Accountability Office of the academic literature, three studies out of five found that voter ID laws reduced minority turnout whereas two studies found no significant impact. Disparate impact may also be reflected in access to information about voter ID laws. A 2015 experimental study found that election officials queried about voter ID laws are more likely to respond to emails from a non-Latino white name (70.5% response rate) than a Latino name (64.8% response rate), though response accuracy was similar across groups. Studies have also analyzed racial differences in ID requests rates. A 2012 study in the city of Boston found that black and Hispanic voters were more likely to be asked for ID during the 2008 election. According to exit polls, 23% of whites, 33% of blacks, and 38% of Hispanics were asked for ID, though this effect is partially attributed to black and Hispanics preferring non-peak voting hours when election officials inspected a greater portion of IDs. Precinct differences also confound the data as black and Hispanic voters tended to vote at black and Hispanic-majority precincts. A 2010 study of the 2006 midterm election in New Mexico found that Hispanics were more likely to incur ID requests while early voters, women, and non-Hispanics were less likely to incur requests. A 2009 study of the 2006 midterm election nationwide found that 47% of white voters reported being asked to show photo identification at the polls, compared with 54% of Hispanics and 55% of African Americans." Very few were however denied the vote as a result of voter identification requests. A 2015 study found that turnout among blacks in Georgia was generally higher since the state began enforcing its strict voter ID law. A 2016 study by University of California, San Diego researchers found that voter ID laws "have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of Hispanics, Blacks, and mixed-race Americans in primaries and general elections."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Research by University of Oxford economist Evan Soltas and Stanford political scientist David Broockman suggests that voters act upon racially discriminatory tastes. A 2018 study in "Public Opinion Quarterly" found that whites, in particular those who had racial resentment, largely attributed Obama's success among African-Americans to his race, and not his characteristics as a candidate and the political preferences of African-Americans. A 2018 study in the journal "American Politics Research" found that white voters tended to misperceive political candidates from racial minorities as being more ideologically extreme than objective indicators would suggest; this adversely affected the electoral chances for those candidates. A 2018 study in the "Journal of Politics" found that "when a white candidate makes vague statements, many [nonblack] voters project their own policy positions onto the candidate, increasing support for the candidate. But they are less likely to extend black candidates the same courtesy... In fact, black male candidates who make ambiguous statements are actually punished for doing so by racially prejudiced voters."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study found evidence of racial-motivated reasoning as voters assessed President Barack Obama's economic performance. The study found that "Whites attributed more responsibility to Obama under negative economic conditions (i.e., blame) than positive economic conditions (i.e., credit)... Whites attributed equal responsibility to the President and governors for negative economic conditions, but gave more responsibility to governors than Obama for positive conditions. Whites also gave governors more responsibility for state improvements than they gave Obama for national ones."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study examining "all 24 African American challengers (non-incumbents) from 2000 to 2014 to white challengers from the same party running in the same state for the same office around the same time" found "that white challengers are about three times more likely to win and receive about 13 percentage points more support among white voters. These estimates hold when controlling for a number of potential confounding factors and when employing several statistical matching estimators."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2019 study found that whites are less supportive of welfare when they are told that blacks are the majority of recipients (as opposed to whites). However, when informed that most welfare recipients eventually gain jobs and leave the welfare program, this racial bias disappears.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: An analysis by MIT political scientist Regina Bateson found that Americans engage in strategic discrimination against racial minority candidates out of a belief that they are less electable than white male candidates: "In the abstract, Americans consider white men more "electable" than equally qualified black and female candidates. Additionally, concerns about winning the votes of white men can cause voters to rate black and female Democratic candidates as less capable of beating Donald Trump in 2020."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2019 paper found, using smartphone data, that voters in predominantly black neighborhoods waited far longer at polling places than voters in white neighborhoods.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2021 study in the "American Political Science Review" found that black protestors were perceived to be more violent in protests than white protestors when they were protesting for the same goals.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Studies have shown that due to societal influences, many people associate beauty with lighter skin. This is especially evident in children. This belief has led dark-skinned children to feel ashamed of who they are and it also causes them to feel inferior whenever they are compared to people with lighter skin. African American women believe that they would have better luck dating if they had lighter skin, especially when they date African American men.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Globalization has always put women at the receiving end of the spectrum. Beauty pageants are held across the world to evaluate women in terms of the feminine beauty ideal. Beauty pageants are merely sites of female, patriarchal, and sexist objectification of women. Women are excessively judged with regards to the male defined impression of beauty which is tremendously limited. Such competitions emphasize on the appearance of women and executing the ideal standards of beauty, neglecting the diversity between them. Despite the fact that the pageants have tried to diversify their criteria of evaluating beauty standards, the racial, gender and class norms still incorporate the white middle class femininity. There are academies that train women for such pageants which ruins their mental and physical health.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: But, it is accepted that the feminine beauty ideal is oppressive and a result of the patriarchal system which objectifies women. It is, however, a reality that many women willingly participate in it and consider beauty as empowering, instead of oppressive. Attaining the 'beauty ideal', i.e. light skin tone, continues to be one of the main ways by which adolescent girls and women achieve social status and self-esteem. Value constructs such as "nice girl" or "feminine beauty" operate as normative restrictions by limiting women's personal freedom and laying the "groundwork for a circumscription of women's potential for power and control in the world". A study shows that most women feel good if they look good. Thus, in today's world self-confidence revolves around the feminine beauty ideal. Dellinger and Williams (1997) found that women who use makeup every day to work are considered as heterosexual, superior, and more skilled than those who do not. On the other hand, the women who fail to meet the beauty standard of achieving a lighter skin through makeup, are seen more negatively. Therefore, women experience workplace discrimination based on their looks, and particularly enhanced skin tone.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Jones and Shorter-Gooden (2003) presented the Lily Complex as a method that modifies and hides the original facial features. This is done to assimilate in the mainstream post-colonial culture and to be accepted according to the Eurocentric standards of beauty. The lily complex stresses that the pressure to follow the feminine beauty ideal that is fake and mostly unachievable can make black women insecure. Their self-esteem is shattered because of the criticisms on their natural appearance. Thus, they consider themselves as undeserving of safety, health and success.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: Advertisement campaigns and cosmetic brands also enforce a certain sense of superiority with being white and fair skin tone, encouraging the fairness creams. In India, skin whitening products have been the highest selling with increasing consumers. A print media brand in India published a collage which also organizes the annual beauty pageant. The collage included 30 women with the same skin tone which is towards the fairer end. The limited diversity in the poster imitates India's obsession with a fair skin tone. Moreover, Bollywood films also play a vital part in idealizing fair skinned heroines.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: European beauty standards continue to have a long lasting impact within American society — and not only limited to African American women, children, and men, but also on those from different nations. In an article written by Susan L. Bryant, she mentions a study by Kenneth and Mamie Clark referred to as the "Doll Test" which became more widely known because of the Supreme Court Case "Brown v. Board of Education". In her article, Bryant states that the European beauty standard is "the notion that the more closely associated a person is with European features, the more attractive he or she is considered; these standards deem attributes that are most closely related to whiteness, such as lighter skin, straight hair, a thin nose and lips, and light colored eyes, as beautiful."


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: The study was an experiment where 253 black children of ages three to seven were shown two identical dolls, one black and one white, in a nursery and public school located in Arkansas and Massachusetts. Two-thirds of the children indicated that they liked the white dolls better in spite of those children being black. Over the years, the experiment has been repeated and still results in a clear preference for the lighter-skin doll and an internalization of self-hate among black children because of unaddressed European beauty standards. It also found that a child's environment and family life can serve as the biggest influence on their ideals of what is acceptable or unacceptable as to what they define in terms of beauty.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2018 study found evidence that non-black voters in Heisman Trophy voting were biased against non-black players. A 2021 study found that Black NBA players were 30% more likely to exit the league in any given season than white players with similar player statistics. A 2019 study found that after controlling for objective measures of performance, broadcast commentators were "more likely to discuss the performance and mental abilities of lighter-skinned players and the physical characteristics of darker-skinned players" in the Men's Division I Basketball Tournament.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2020 report found that football commentators were more likely to praise white players for their intelligence and leadership qualities, while criticizing black players for lacking those attributes. Black players were four more times likely to be praised for their strength, and seven times more likely to be praised for their speed.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2017 study found that racially resentful Whites become less likely to favor salaries for college athletes when they are primed to think about African Americans.


title: Discrimination based on skin color

text: A 2021 audit study found substantial discrimination against individuals with foreign names who asked if they could participate in training sessions with amateur clubs in 22 European countries.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Toys in the Attic is the third studio album by American rock band Aerosmith, released on April 8, 1975 by Columbia Records. Its first single, "Sweet Emotion", was released on May 19 and the original version of "Walk This Way" followed on August 28 in the same year. The album is the band's most commercially successful studio LP in the United States, with nine million copies sold, according to the RIAA. In 2003, the album was ranked No. 228 on "Rolling Stone"s list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album's title track and their collaboration with Run-DMC on a cover version of "Walk This Way" are included on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame list of the "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll".


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: For Aerosmith's previous album, "Get Your Wings", the band began working with record producer Jack Douglas, who co-produced that album with Ray Colcord. In the liner notes to the 1993 reissue of "Greatest Hits", it was said by an unnamed member of the group that they "nailed" the album.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: According to Douglas, "Aerosmith was a different band when we started the third album. They'd been playing "Get Your Wings" on the road for a year and had become better players - different. It showed in the riffs that Joe [Perry] and Brad [Whitford] brought back from the road for the next album. "Toys in the Attic" was a much more sophisticated record than the other stuff they'd done." In the band memoir "Walk This Way", guitarist Joe Perry stated, "When we started to make "Toys in the Attic", our confidence was built up from constant touring." In his autobiography, Perry elaborated:


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Aerosmith's third album includes some of their best-known songs, including "Walk This Way", "Sweet Emotion" and the rollicking title track. "Walk This Way" starts with a two-measure drum beat intro by Joey Kramer, followed by the well-known guitar riff by Perry. The song proceeds with the main riff made famous by Perry and Brad Whitford on guitar with Tom Hamilton on an early 1960s Fender Jazz bass. The song continues with rapid-fire lyrics by Steven Tyler. The song originated in December 1974 during a sound check when Aerosmith was opening for the Guess Who in Honolulu, Hawaii. During the sound check, Perry was "fooling around with riffs and thinking about the Meters"; guitarist Jeff Beck had turned him on to that group. Loving "their riffy New Orleans funk, especially 'Cissy Strut' and 'People Say'", he asked the drummer "to lay down something flat with a groove on the drums." The guitar riff to what would become "Walk This Way" just "came off [his] hands." Needing a bridge, he:


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: When singer Steven Tyler heard Perry playing that riff he "ran out and sat behind the drums and [they] jammed." Tyler scatted "nonsensical words initially to feel where the lyrics should go before adding them later." When the group was halfway through recording "Toys in the Attic" in early 1975 at Record Plant in New York City, they found themselves stuck for material. They had written three or four songs for the album, having "to write the rest in the studio." They decided to give the song Perry had come up with in Hawaii a try, but it didn't have lyrics or a title yet. In 1997, Perry recalled that the idea for the funky, James Brown-influenced "Walk This Way" was inspired by the film "Young Frankenstein", which the band had gone to see around the time they were working on the track:


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: At the hotel that night, Tyler wrote lyrics for the song, but left them in the cab on the way to the studio next morning. He says: "I must have been stoned. All the blood drained out of my face, but no one believed me. They thought I never got around to writing them." Upset, he took a cassette tape with the instrumental track we had recorded and a portable tape player with headphones and "disappeared into the stairwell". He "grabbed a few No. 2 pencils" but forgot to take paper. He wrote the lyrics on the wall at "the Record Plant's top floor and then down a few stairs of the back stairway". After "two or three hours" he "ran downstairs for a legal pad and ran back up and copied them down". The lyrics, which tell the story of a high-school boy losing his virginity, are sung quite fast by Tyler, with heavy emphasis being placed on the rhyming lyrics.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Bassist Tom Hamilton came up with the main lick on "Sweet Emotion". In 1997, during a band interview with Alan Di Perna of "Guitar World", the members discussed the evolution of the song, which owes a debt to the Jeff Beck composition "Rice Pudding" from the album "Beck-Ola". Hamilton recalled:


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Many Aerosmith fans believe that Tyler wrote all of the lyrics to "Sweet Emotion" about the tension and hatred between the band members and Joe Perry's wife. Tyler himself has said that only some of the lyrics were inspired by Perry's wife. It was stated in Aerosmith's autobiography "" and in an episode of "Behind the Music" that growing feuds between the band members' wives (including an incident involving "spilt milk" where Elyssa Perry threw milk over Tom Hamilton's wife, Terry) may have helped lead to the band's original lineup dissolving in the early 1980s.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Hamilton and Tyler also collaborated on "Uncle Salty", with Tyler recalling in his 2001 autobiography, "Here I was thinking about an orphanage when I wrote those lyrics. I'd try to make the melody weep from the sadness felt when a child is abandoned." Of the title track, Tyler added, "Joe was jamming a riff and I started yelling, 'Toys, toys, toys...' Organic, immediate, infectious... I just started singing and it fit like chocolate and peanut butter. Joe plays his ass off on that song."


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Perhaps the most ambitious recording on the album is "You See Me Crying", a complex piano ballad that was heavily orchestrated. Jack Douglas brought in a symphony orchestra for the song, which was conducted by Mike Mainieri. The song itself was written by Tyler and outside collaborator Don Solomon. Some of the band members became frustrated with the song, which took a long time to complete, due to the many complex drum and guitar parts. The band's label, Columbia Records, was nonetheless very impressed with the song and the recording process. Bruce Lundvall, then-president of Columbia Records, walked in on the recording sessions for "Toys in the Attic" when the band was working on the song, and remarked: "You guys got an incredible thing going here. I just came from a Herbie Hancock session and this is much more fun." While Aerosmith were planning the "Back in the Saddle" concert tour and recording the "Done with Mirrors" album during 1984, a radio DJ played the song. Tyler, who was suffering memory loss at the time from years of drug use, liked "You See Me Crying" so much, he suggested his group record a cover version, only to be told by his bandmate Perry, "It's "us", fuckhead."


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: The album also features a cover of Bullmoose Jackson's "Big Ten-Inch Record", an R&B hit recorded in 1952 and first heard by the band on a tape of Dr. Demento's radio show on KMET. Rather than produce a rock reimagining, Aerosmith's cover largely stays true to the original song, down to its jazz-style instrumentation. In the liner notes to "Pandora's Box", Tyler insists that he sings ""'cept" on my big ten inch..." not "suck" on my big ten inch," but laments that no one on earth believes him.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: In the 1997, Tyler shared his memories about writing and recording several of the LP's tracks with author Stephen Davis:


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: At the beginning of 1975, the band started working at The Record Plant in New York City for the album that became "Toys in the Attic". The sessions for "Toys in the Attic" were produced by Douglas without Colcordthe album was engineered by Jay Messina with assistant engineers Rod O'Brien, Corky Stasiak and Dave Thoener. The songs for "Toys in the Attic" were recorded with a Spectrasonics mixing board and a 16-track tape recorder.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Perry has stated that he wanted to call the LP "Rocks", which would be used for their next studio album.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Contemporary reviews were mixed. "Rolling Stone"'s Gordon Fletcher compared the album unfavourably to "Get Your Wings", which, in his opinion, was "testimony to the band's raw abilities". He criticised Douglas's production and wrote that, despite "good moments", the band did not avoid "instances of directionless meandering and downright weak material". Robert Christgau was more positive, and remarked on the progress Aerosmith had made in a short time, musically and lyrically. Greg Kot called the album a landmark of hard rock.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Opinions have become more positive over time. AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine remarked how Aerosmith "finally perfected their mix of Stonesy raunch and Zeppelin-esque riffing", thanks to "an increased sense of songwriting skills and purpose", creating a new style that "fully embraced sleaziness" in Tyler's lyrics, backed by "an appropriately greasy" music. In "Blender", Ben Mitchell found "Aerosmith firing on all coke-clogged cylinders". He lauded all the songs in the album and called the arrangement of "You See Me Crying" "a typical ’70s rock extravagance."


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: After "Toys in the Attic" was released in April 1975, it eventually peaked at No. 11 on the US "Billboard" 200 chart, 63 positions higher than "Get Your Wings". Released as a single, "Sweet Emotion" became a minor hit on the "Billboard" Hot 100 reaching No.36 in 1975, and "Walk This Way" reached No.10 on the Hot 100 in 1977.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: The album would gain renewed attention in 1986, 11 years after its release, when hip-hop group Run-DMC covered "Walk This Way" with Aerosmith. This helped revive the latter’s flagging career and helped propel rap rock to the mainstream.


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: Aerosmith refer to the album and its lyrics in the song "Legendary Child" recorded in 2011. The line "But we traded them toys for other joys" refers to the title of the album and their struggles with addiction. It may also be referring to the title track of the same name. The line "I took a chance at the high school dance never knowing wrong from right" references lyrics from "Walk This Way" and "Adam's Apple".


title: Toys in the Attic (album)

text: British band Caravan's "Cunning Stunts" was to be titled "Toys in the Attic", before Aerosmith beat them to it.


title: Latha Rajinikanth

text: Latha Rajinikanth (born Latha Rangachari; 2 March 1958) is an Indian film producer and playback singer. She is the wife of actor Rajinikanth.


title: Latha Rajinikanth

text: Latha was born in Chennai, India in a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family. She graduated with degree in English literature from Ethiraj College for Women, Chennai.


title: Latha Rajinikanth

text: During the 1980s, Latha worked as a playback singer in Tamil cinema. She sung a few songs in films such as "Tik Tik Tik" (1981) "Anbulla Rajinikanth" (1984). She also contributed to "Rajini 25" (1999), a musical album that commemorated Rajinikanth's 25 years of his career.


title: Latha Rajinikanth

text: Latha is the sister-in-law of Tamil playwright and film actor Y Gee Mahendran. She is also related to former film actress Vyjayanthimala. Latha's brother Ravi Raghavendra is also an actor who is the father of music director Anirudh Ravichander. She married Rajinikanth, whom she met during an exclusive interview, on 26 February 1981 at Tirupati. The couple has two daughters, Aishwarya and Soundarya. Her elder daughter, Aishwarya married actor Dhanush in 2004 and they have two sons, Yathra and Linga. Her younger daughter Soundarya married Chennai based civil engineer Ashwin with whom she has a son named Ved Krishna; the couple divorced in 2017 and she remarried businessman Vishagan in 2019.


title: Latha Rajinikanth

text: An FIR had been filed in Bangalore against Latha for allegedly forging documents to obtain a court order, restraining media from publishing news about her dispute with a commissioned producer over selling of rights of "Kochadaiiyan" on 15 June 2015.


title: Latha Rajinikanth

text: Latha operates a shop on CP Ramaswamy Road. Operating from a building owned by Chennai Corporation, Latha has for the past 25 years run a travel agency called "Travel Exchange India". The city Corporation recently increased the rent from ₹ 3702 to ₹ 21,160 per month. Latha filed a petition in the Madras High Court challenging the decision of the Greater Chennai Corporation. The Madras HC dismissed the petition filed on Latha Rajinikanth's behalf and ordered the corporation to take ownership of the property in a month if the due rental was not received.


title: Latha Rajinikanth

text: A school run by Latha Rajinikanth in Chennai was locked up by the landlord of the building in August 2017, who claimed he had not received two rent of ₹ 2 crore. The owner said in 2002 he leased out the school ground to be used. He said that over a year ago he had filed a case against the management of the school because they had not paid the rent amounting to ₹ 10 crore. In December 2020, the Madras High Court has ordered Latha to vacate the school by 30 April.


title: Reno Wilson

text: Roy "Reno" Wilson (born January 20, 1969) is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Howard in the sitcom "The Cosby Show", Officer Carl McMillan in "Mike & Molly" and Stan Hill in "Good Girls", Wes in "The Chronicle" (2001–2002), and as Detective Tom Selway in "Blind Justice" (2005). He is also known for providing character voices in the "Transformers" film series, Bailey in "She Creature" (2001), and Louis Armstrong in "Bolden" (2019).


title: Reno Wilson

text: Wilson has appeared in a number of television programs and films. His first television role was on the NBC's "The Cosby Show", where (on a recurring basis) he portrayed Theo Huxtable's college friend Howard during Seasons 5 and 6 of the series. His most recent film roles were that of Orlando in "Crank" and "". He was also a main cast member on the CBS sitcom "Mike & Molly" (Wilson frequently works with good friend and fellow actor Billy Gardell), and has also acted in "Prison Break". Wilson is known as the voices of Frenzy, Mudflap and Brains in the "Transformers" film series. He is also the voice of Sazh Katzroy in "Final Fantasy XIII" and its sequels, Final Fantasy XIII-2 and "".


title: Reno Wilson

text: Wilson was born in Brooklyn, New York City. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife Coco and two children.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Robin Byron Lopez (born April 1, 1988) is an American professional basketball player for the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was selected with the 15th pick in the 2008 NBA draft by the Phoenix Suns, was traded to the New Orleans Hornets in 2012 and was traded to Portland in 2013. He played college basketball for the Stanford Cardinal alongside his twin brother Brook Lopez.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez was born in North Hollywood, California, to Heriberto Lopez, a Cuban baseball player, and Deborah Ledford, a swimmer. He attended San Joaquin Memorial High School in Fresno, California, where he was named a McDonald's All-American in 2006. In His Senior Year, He would average 10.4 points, 8.8 rebounds, and 5.7 blocks.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez was one of just three players for the Cardinal team to start all 31 games in the 2006–07 season. He averaged 7.5 points and 5.5 rebounds per game, while averaging 24 minutes. He led the team with 73 blocked shots, breaking the Stanford record for a freshman and recording the second highest single season record in Stanford history. This mark also was the highest in the Pacific-10 conference. With his twin brother, Brook, the two blocked more shots than seven Pac-10 teams. Lopez also had two double-doubles on the season.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez had his 100th career block in a game versus Santa Clara University on December 19, 2007. In his sophomore season, Lopez achieved All-Pac-10 Defensive Team honors while also being named an Honorable Mention to the All-Pac-10 team. He was second in the Pac-10 in blocks for the season. With 83 blocks in his second season, Lopez moved into second place all time for career blocks by a Stanford player.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez declared that he would enter the 2008 NBA draft on March 31, 2008 after just two seasons at Stanford.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez was selected with the 15th overall pick by the Phoenix Suns in the 2008 NBA draft. After being drafted by the Suns, Lopez said: "I was hoping I'd drop. I think I was the only person in the draft that was hoping he'd drop."


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez joined a Suns team already featuring one of the all-time great centers in Shaquille O'Neal, and thus was not expected to get many minutes during his rookie season. He got the first start of his career on November 7, 2008, against the Chicago Bulls in place of the injured O'Neal; he played 30 minutes, scored 14 points, grabbed 7 rebounds and had 2 blocks. For his rookie season, Lopez only saw an average of 10.2 minutes per game, with 3.2 points and 2 rebounds. At the end of the season, Shaq was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers, making Lopez the assumed starting center.


title: Robin Lopez

text: During the 2009–10 regular season, Lopez averaged 8.4 points, 4.9 rebounds, and 1.0 block per game. During the end of the season, however, Lopez was injured, and was replaced by Jarron Collins until the Western Conference Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, where the Suns eventually lost, 4 games to 2.


title: Robin Lopez

text: After the 2009–10 season, Lopez went into a major decline, despite starting and playing more games. During December 2010, he was injured again, and he was temporarily replaced by Earl Barron. This eventually resulted in decreased production from Lopez, which forced the Suns to trade for Marcin Gortat. While Lopez was still starting for the Suns, his stats were quickly declining, while Gortat's stats were improving. This forced Lopez to eventually become a bench player again. Robin Lopez would average 6.4 points and 3.2 rebounds at an average of 14.8 minutes per game.


title: Robin Lopez

text: In the shortened 2011–12 NBA season, Lopez wouldn't even produce a single start for the Suns. Because of Gortat's increased production at center, Lopez was forced to become a back-up center once again. He averaged 5.4 points with an average of 14 minutes per game there.


title: Robin Lopez

text: On July 27, 2012, the New Orleans Hornets acquired Lopez in a three-team sign-and-trade deal involving the Minnesota Timberwolves. It was during this time that Lopez would produce his best results yet, starting for every game of the season and gaining new career highs in almost every field in the process.


title: Robin Lopez

text: On July 10, 2013, New Orleans traded Lopez to the Portland Trail Blazers as a part of a three-way trade that also involved the Sacramento Kings. In his first season with the Trail Blazers, he recorded 29 double-doubles and set the franchise single season record for offensive rebounds.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Due to his presence in the Portland community, as well as his consistent and blue-collar style of play, Lopez was a fan favorite amongst the Portland faithful. He was honored with the Maurice Lucas Award in March 2014 for his efforts in his "Read Big" literacy campaign with Portland Public Schools.


title: Robin Lopez

text: On December 16, 2014, Lopez was ruled out for a month after breaking his hand against San Antonio the night before.


title: Robin Lopez

text: On July 9, 2015, Lopez signed with the New York Knicks. In February 2016, Lopez had two 26-point, 16-rebound games, both season highs. On March 20, 2016, he recorded 23 points and a career-high 20 rebounds in an 88–80 loss to the Sacramento Kings.


title: Robin Lopez

text: On June 22, 2016, Lopez was traded, along with José Calderón and Jerian Grant, to the Chicago Bulls in exchange for Derrick Rose, Justin Holiday and a 2017 second-round draft pick. On March 17, 2017, he scored a season-high 25 points in a 112–107 loss to the Washington Wizards.


title: Robin Lopez

text: On July 12, 2019, Lopez signed with the Milwaukee Bucks, putting him on the same NBA team as his twin brother.


title: Robin Lopez

text: On November 22, 2020, Lopez signed with the Washington Wizards. During his Wizards stint, his signature hookshot made him a good scoring option off the bench. On May 6, 2021, Lopez scored a season-high 24 points against the Toronto Raptors. Lopez had the third best field goal percentage in the whole league in the 2020–21 NBA season.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez has three brothers: Chris, Alex, and twin brother Brook. Alex played college basketball for Washington and Santa Clara, and professionally in Japan, New Zealand and Spain, while Brook also plays in the NBA for the Milwaukee Bucks.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez maintains his offseason home in Portland, Oregon, even though he no longer plays for the Trail Blazers.


title: Robin Lopez

text: Lopez is an avid comic book enthusiast and also participated in theater productions at Stanford in California.


title: Ahmed Khan (choreographer)

text: Ahmed Khan (born 3 June 1974) is an Indian choreographer, producer, director, and writer. After a period of acting, he has moved into film choreography, as well as writing, producing, and directing various Bollywood projects. In 2019, Khan also was on the judging panel of the celebrity dance show "Nach Baliye 9" on Star Plus.


title: Ahmed Khan (choreographer)

text: Khan was born in Pune, Maharastra on 3 June 1974. He performed as a child actor in "Mr. India" before pursuing a career as a choreographer.


title: Ahmed Khan (choreographer)

text: After "Mr. India", Khan choreographed the films "Taal", "Ghajini", and "Kick". During this period, he also directed "Lakeer – Forbidden Lines", and worked on the comedy "Fool n Final". He wrote and produced "Paathshaala" and "Ek Paheli Leela". His latest directing venture, "Baaghi 2", was a success at the box office.


title: Ahmed Khan (choreographer)

text: Khan served as judge on "Dance India Dance Lil Master" during its third season, and was popular among contestants, who referred to him as "Pappi King".


title: Ahmed Khan (choreographer)

text: Ahmed Khan is married to model Shaira Khan, who is a producer with Paperdoll Entertainment. Together, they have produced the films "Paathshaala" and "Ek Paheli Leela".


title: Ahmed Khan (choreographer)

text: Ahmed Khan has narrowly escaped death twice. The first time occurred while he was filming at the World Trade Center in New York City only two days before the September 11 attacks. His second brush with death happened in 2004, when he was set to stay at a hotel that was destroyed in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Khan had cancelled his reservation at the last minute.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Olympic Stadium () is a multi-purpose stadium in Montreal, Canada, located at Olympic Park in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district of the city. Built in the mid-1970s as the main venue for the 1976 Summer Olympics, it is nicknamed "The Big O", a reference to both its name and to the doughnut-shape of the permanent component of the stadium's roof. It is also disparagingly referred to as "The Big Owe" in reference to the high cost to the city of its construction and of hosting the 1976 Olympics as a whole. The tower standing next to the stadium, the Montreal Tower, is the tallest inclined tower in the world with an angle elevation of 45 degrees.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The stadium is the largest by seating capacity in Canada. After the Olympics, artificial turf was installed and it became the home of Montreal's professional baseball and football teams. The Montreal Alouettes of the CFL returned to their previous home of Molson Stadium in 1998 for regular season games, but continued to use Olympic Stadium for playoff and Grey Cup games until 2012. Following the 2004 baseball season, the Expos relocated to Washington, D.C., to become the Washington Nationals. The stadium currently serves as a multipurpose facility for special events (e.g. concerts, trade shows) with a permanent seating capacity of 56,040. The capacity is expandable with temporary seating. CF Montréal (formerly known as Montreal Impact) of Major League Soccer (MLS) has used the venue when demand for tickets justifies the large capacity or when the weather restricts outdoor play at nearby Saputo Stadium in the spring months.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The stadium has not had a main tenant since the Expos left in 2004. Despite decades of use, the stadium's history of numerous structural and financial problems has largely branded it a white elephant.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Incorporated into the north base of the stadium is the Montreal Tower, the world's tallest inclined tower at . The stadium and Olympic Park grounds border Maisonneuve Park, which includes the Montreal Botanical Garden, adjacent to the west across Rue Sherbrooke (Route 138).


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: As early as 1963, Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau sought to build a covered stadium in Montreal. A covered stadium was thought to be all but essential for Drapeau's other goal of bringing a Major League Baseball team to Montreal, given the cold weather that can affect the city in April, October and sometimes even September. In 1967, soon after the National League granted Montreal an expansion franchise for 1969, Drapeau wrote a letter promising that any prospective Montreal team would be playing in a covered stadium by 1971. However, even as powerful as he was, he did not have the power to make such a guarantee on his own authority. Just as Charles Bronfman, who was slated to become the franchise's first owner, was ready to walk away, Drapeau had his staffers draw up a proposal for a stadium. It was enough to persuade Bronfman to continue with the effort.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The stadium was designed by French architect Roger Taillibert to be an elaborate facility featuring a retractable roof, which was to be opened and closed by cables suspended from a huge tower – the tallest inclined structure in the world, and the tenth tallest structure in Montreal. The design of the stadium has been likened to that of the Australian Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan, although Taillibert had previously explored the concept of an umbrella-style roof for a theatre in Cannes (1964) and Piscine Carnot in Paris (1967). Soon after Montreal was awarded the 1976 Games, Drapeau struck a secret deal with Taillibert to build the stadium. It only came to light in 1972.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Olympic swimming pool is located under this tower. An Olympic velodrome (since converted to the Montreal Biodome, an indoor nature museum) was situated at the base of the tower in a building similar in design to the swimming pool. The building was built as the main stadium for the 1976 Summer Olympic Games. The stadium was host to various events including the opening and closing ceremonies, athletics, football finals, and the team jumping equestrian events.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The building's design is cited as a masterpiece of Organic Modern architecture. Taillibert based the building on plant and animal forms, aiming to include vertebral structures with sinews or tentacles, while still following the basic plans of Modern architecture.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The stadium was originally slated to be finished in 1972, but the grand opening was cancelled due to a strike by construction workers. The "Conseil des métiers de la construction" union headed by André "Dédé" Desjardins kept the construction site in "anarchic disorder" until the Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa bought him off in a secret deal. In his 2000 book "Notre Cher Stade Olympique", Taillibert wrote "If the Olympic Games took place, it was thanks to Dédé Desjardins. What irony!" Further delays ensued due to the stadium's unusual design and Taillibert's unwillingness to back down from his original vision of the stadium even in the face of escalating costs for raw materials. It did not help that the original project manager, Trudeau et Associés, seemed to be incapable of handling some of the most basic construction tasks. The Quebec provincial government finally lost patience with the delays and cost overruns in 1974, and threw Taillibert off the project.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Additionally, the project was plagued by circumstances beyond anyone's control. Work slowed to a snail's pace for a third of the year due to Montreal's typically brutal winters. As a result, the stadium and tower remained unfinished at the opening of the 1976 Olympic Games.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The roof materials languished in a warehouse in Marseille until 1982, and the tower and roof were not completed until 1987. It would be another year before the 66-tonne, Kevlar roof (designed and built by Lavalin) could retract. Even then, it could not be used in winds above . Ultimately, it was only opened and closed 88 times.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: When construction on the stadium's tower resumed after the 1976 Olympics, a multi-storey observatory was added to the plan, accessible via an inclined elevator, opened in 1987, that travels along the curved tower's spine. The elevator cabin ascends from base of the tower to upper deck in less than two minutes at a rate of , with space for 76 persons per trip and a capacity of 500 persons per hour. The cabin is designed to remain level throughout its trip, while providing a panoramic view to its passengers.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The elevator faces north-east, offering a view to the north, south and east. It overlooks the Olympic Village, the Biodome, the Botanical Gardens and Saputo Stadium. The Olympic Park, the stadium's suspended roof and downtown Montreal can be viewed from the south-west facing Observatory at the top of the tower.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Despite initial projections in 1970 that the stadium would cost only C$134 million to construct, strikes and construction delays served to escalate these costs. By the time the stadium opened (in an unfinished form), the total costs had risen to C$1.1 billion.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Quebec government introduced a special tobacco tax in May 1976 to help recoup its investment. By 2006, the amount contributed to the stadium's owner, the Olympic Installations Board (OIB) (fr: Régie des Installations Olympiques), accounted for 8% of the tax revenue earned from cigarette sales. The 1976 special tobacco tax act stipulated that once the stadium was paid off, ownership of the facility would be returned to the City of Montreal.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In mid-November 2006, the stadium's costs were finally paid in full, more than 30 years after it opened.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The total expenditure (including repairs, renovations, construction, interest, and inflation) amounted to C$1.61 billion, making it—at the time all costs were paid off—the second most expensive stadium built (after Wembley Stadium in London). Despite initial plans to complete payment in October 2006, an indoor smoking ban introduced in May 2006 curtailed the revenue gathered by the tobacco tax. By 2014, the stadium's expense ranking had fallen to fifth, with the construction of costlier venues like MetLife Stadium, AT&T Stadium, and the new Yankee Stadium. Perceived by many to be a white elephant, the stadium has also been dubbed "The Big Owe" due to its astronomical cost.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The stadium has generated on average $20 million in revenue each year since 1977. It is estimated that a large-scale event such as the Grey Cup can generate as much as $50 million in revenue.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Although the tower and retractable roof were not completed in time for the 1976 Olympics, construction on the tower resumed in the 1980s. During this period, however, a large fire set the tower ablaze, causing damage and forcing a scheduled Expos home game to be postponed. In 1986, a large chunk of the tower fell onto the playing field prior to another Expos game August 29 vs. San Diego Padres forcing a doubleheader on August 30.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In January 1985, approval was given by the Quebec government to complete the project and install a retractable roof, financed by an Olympic cigarette tax in the province. The tower construction and installation of the orange-coloured Kevlar roof were completed by April 1987, a decade later than planned. The roof experienced numerous rips, allowing rain to leak into the stadium.