I don’t need prejudice in online dating, too
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But besides that, what kind of wacky world is this where it's now frowned upon to have a preference in who you want as a partner? It's not racist to personally find one race statistically more attractive than another to you. I don't want to date gay men, does that make me homophobic?
That pretty much is the definition of being a racist. It's a rather personal and benign form of racism, to be sure, but it is very much discriminating based on a person's race.
Anyways, on the bright side, it means that there is an underserved market here for black women. That's gotta be useful somehow, I guess?
We can argue dictionary definitions, and of course I would concede, but in the real world, calling someone a racist has additional connotations. I don't think a subconscious, genetic attraction to your own race, as shown by all the evidence of all races preferring their own race, deserves the label of "racist", with all the guilt and shaming and "wrongness" that comes with that word.
Whoa, you stepped right into 'nurture vs. nature' territory.
It is like the ancient Greek comedies all over again.
Why dont we make the attractive people HAVE to sleep with ugly people first?
Make sure that the most able athletes in society mate only with those physically disabled from birth.
Those with the highest IQs mate with the mentally retarded.
The laughable thing is that you think that people should choose to go against their own personal preferences IS racist - you are asking people to change their dating decisions based upon race.
I am assuming it makes you a heterosexual male. While it is possible to be heterosexual and not be homophobic, it is not possible to exclude people based on race and not be racist. That is a form of racism, albeit one we cannot legislate out of existence because whom one wishes to sleep with is very much a private matter. You are entitled to want only female sexual partners. It doesn't make you homophobic. You are equally entitled to only want sexual partners who are not black. However, if that is a preference, you are, in fact, racist.
Like I said elsewhere, I concede that according to the dictionary definition of racism, it is racist. However, in the real world, calling someone a racist means that a person should feel guilty and ashamed for their wrong choices. Are you telling me that a person (indeed, the vast majority of all people included in those studies), because they're "technically" racist, should feel ashamed for finding one race statistically more attractive than another? If you're not saying it's a bad thing, then you're saying that that form of racism is ok, in which case I'd wonder why you're arguing this at all.
Homophobic goes well beyond "I don't have sex with people who are my gender" and into "I don't like people who do that, I think they are doing something wrong, etc.."
Just because people date a lot more of their own race doesn't necessarily and automatically mean they intentionally exclude people not of their race.
This is something I have thought a great deal about. I have a genetic disorder. I am white. It is a predominantly white disorder. I was diagnosed late in life. I did not know I had it when I was younger. I grew up in the racist deep south and I married a white man, who was a carrier, so one of our children also has the disorder. I got diagnosed in my thirties and later divorced. Following my diagnosis, during my divorce, the idea of ending up accidentally pregnant by someone who was a carrier really freaked me out and so I went through a period where I actively discriminated against white men, not because I don't like sleeping with white men but because it is a quick and dirty genetics test. (I have blogged about this, if you want the link.)
Anyway, during my divorce, I intentionally went out of my way to not signal to men what my dating/relationship history had been because I did not want to repeat the mistakes of my past and I was very aware that if I told men that my ex husband was, for example, blond, then blond men felt more confident about approaching me and non-blond men felt like I was suggesting I was not interested in them and were more reluctant to pursue me. Even with actively trying to eliminate that sort of bias from men who might be interested, I found that if you analyzed the data, I tended to date more of certain kinds of men. However, I cannot say WHY that was.
One possible explanation was that I simply had more opportunity to date men of certain categories. For example, I have tended to have more relationships to men who were in the military or former military. On the one hand, my father and ex husband were both career military, so I tend to more readily get along with people with a military association of some sort. They tend to understand me better and interpret my bluntness more positively than people without such a background. On the other hand, I was near a military base and I had friends in the military. So I happened to have a much higher opportunity to meet or be introduced to military personnel and former military members under circumstances that made getting involved with them easier.
I was not consciously and intentionally looking for military men or former military members. Nonetheless, my dating numbers did skew towards that subset of the population. I don't think it means I straight up "discriminate against" non military members.
There are other things like that in the data concerning my relationship history. Military vs civilian is not the only category I contemplated when thinking about this and concluding that you can, for example, date more of your own race without straight up being racist. But I chose that as an example in hopes that it is the least problematic example I can use.
Does that make more sense?
Seems a very dubious argument.
All preferences are prejudices in one sense, but it cheapens the politics by grouping it into that bucket.
The writer seems to imply that online dating uniquely has this problem. On the contrary: IRL, it is very easy to act on your biases and not approach the Black woman at a bar; but no-one's there to quantize such interactions and count them and graph them.
Not sure why you draw this conclusion? The OKCupid blog (as well as the linked article) are both clear in that this data on an online dating platform simply documents/mirrors a societal trend (and inclinations) already existing.
It is not a commentary on online dating or technologies, but the state of society and the role race continues to play.
I don't think she says that at all. She just says that it highlights the issue.
2. Who you date is an extremely personal matter, you should be able to set whatever standard you want.
If there is racism, it's cutting both ways, isn't it?
While it doesn't seem like focusing on online dating achieves much here - it is just reflecting real life, after all - it's still interesting to think that online dating has the ability to mask these issues (imagine a site with "blind dating"), but it would require people to actively choose to use a service that challenges their preconceptions. For what reason would someone choose to do such a thing? It's difficult to see.
> What if online dating sites called on all users to consider what it means to be a black woman or an Asian man while swiping and messaging? How would behaviors change if people were forced to recognize that you are consistently being rejected, not because of who you are but because of your race?
I'm curious if the author actively and deeply explores the profound disparity of opportunity suffered by others (men, mostly) who can't get a date, ever (as in literally their entire life), for reasons other than race.
I wonder if this would add to the friction that online dating is attempting to remove? That is to say, would there always be a market for a service lacking the 'feature' of calling on users to consider the meaning of being a black woman. Since presumably the users of a dating site are there to online date.
So what is it? Is this a technical problem, or a function of more people not wanting to date black women? Complaining about the technology or the platform in this case seemed churlish.
There may be a case for saying that people have a gut prejudice, that is easily overcome if they are introduced to people they'd really like, but not ordinarily consider. But if that's been tried and has not met with consumer interest, then it is hardly a platform problem, is it?
Iirc, the most prejudiced category in okc's dataset was level of education. That kind of prejudice doesn't seem to be an issue(?). At least not one that's untouchable. Prejudice around things one cannot change should be the problem.
Yet, I don't think wapo would publish an article like this from the perspective of a short man who is upset that dating-site-x allows filtration by height.
So maybe prejudice around things that are immutable aren't wholy unacceptable.