Reposted with permission from the blog of Chinyere Osuji. 

When I was studying at Harvard in the early 2000s, I had a black immigrant professor who had built part of his career gas-lighting anti-black discrimination in favor of 1990s-style black cultural inferiority tropes. My grad school girlfriends and I awkwardly giggled over “the sex parts” of his book on black assimilation. He cited statistics saying that black women did not perform oral sex as often as white women, making them less desirable sexual partners. Sexual incompatibility on this sex act was part of the motor driving black men to date interracially more than black women. I was struck by how he ignored scholarship showing how white women are lauded as the essence of beauty, domesticity, and ideal womanhood. Instead, in a reversal of the Jezebel stereotype, he explained this race-gender imbalance as due to black women being prudes. I remember that when we stopped laughing, we speculated on which black woman might have hurt him and whether this was scholarly revenge porn against black women. We also questioned how his much paler wife felt about this discussion.

Over a decade later, I noticed the increasing popularity of a similar dynamic: “Black women need to be more open!”

How many black women have heard this in reference to our dating and marriage prospects?

Black women’s inability to “open up” to dating non-blacks (presumably whites) was curtailing our attempts at finding long-term love. Oprah even emphasized this point to her best friend, Gayle, trying to convince her to date non-black men. Once more, statistics showing black men being more likely to interracially marry were used to show how our actions were deficient.

According to the US Census, close to 90% of all marriages take place within the same ethnic or racial group, with whites being the least likely to inter-marry. However, black women’s intra-racial preferences, not anti-blackness and misogynoir, were the cause of our lower likelihood for marriage in comparison to other similarly situated women.

Research by demographers shows that most non-black men, even those open to interracial dating, discriminate against black women in their online dating profiles. At the 2018 American Sociological Association annual meeting, Belinda Robnett (UC-Irvine) presented research showing white men were open to dating black women for interracial sex, but not interracial dating. Together, their studies suggested that, as in all pairings, it takes two to tango and, unless it is solely horizontally, black women indeed have better odds at finding long-term romantic partnerships with black men.

In my book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race, I conducted over 100 interviews with people in black-white couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. I had the privilege of listening to men and women across racial pairings share the monotony, excitement, struggles, and joys of being married to a person on the other side of the ethnoracial hierarchy. Almost all couples seemed content in their relationships. Several were parents navigating how to raise children who were comfortable with the black, white, multiracial, and multi-ethnic sides of their extended families.

One thing that struck me about the black women whom I interviewed was how several of them complained about their white husbands who “just didn’t get it.” As people on the top of gender, racial, and often class hierarchies, these white men often could not make sense of the privileges they accrued in a society that fought very hard to occlude them. The work often fell on their black wives to teach them how they navigated the world as white middle class men. A few white husbands were “woke” to these dynamics. When I interviewed them individually, we laughed about their couple tactic of wives “tagging” them for interactions with customer service representatives and other outsiders. This strategy ensured that they used their race and gender privileges for the good of the family. Still, black women in other relationships described the emotional labor of explaining intersections of disadvantage to their oblivious white husbands.

I asked all of the husbands and wives about their experiences in their “romantic career”— how they understood their desires for spousal characteristics through prior romantic experiences. Unlike the white women whom I interviewed, black women in both Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro described the slights and microaggressions that they had experienced in the past. Several admitted to having been the “black girl in the closet” to nonblack men they had dated. For example, Lana was a 35-year old black woman whom I interviewed in Los Angeles. She recalled a previous relationship with a white guy when she was in college.

Lana: …. I don’t think he ever told his grandparents, for example, that I was black.  And when he told a group of his friends… they were like, “Oh what does your girlfriend look like?” and he kind of described me and was like “Dark eyes, dark hair, dark skin.” They were kind of like “What?” and it was very like “Oh…” like very, very surprised I guess. So there was definitely some of that and it was kind of difficult for me that if the relationship had gotten more serious that I was gonna have to worry about his family would perceive me or if they’d have – obviously they would have had a problem with me if they’d met me…. just because of me being black.  Not his parents but his grandparents because I had met his parents and I got along really great [with them] actually, but I think he was worried his grandparents just wouldn’t be very tolerant.

Lana’s story was similar to several black women that I interviewed in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. Like Lana, some black wives saw these experiences as a tactic that their previous white boyfriends used to protect them from anti-black relatives or to avoid white shock. Several black women were surprised at how long it had taken them to meet the friends and families of their white husbands. None of the white wives in either setting described similar experiences with previous same- or different-race partners. Other black wives, especially in Rio de Janeiro, described prior non-black partners being ashamed to be seen with them in public. For obvious reasons, black women who had these experiences expressed discomfort with these previous dynamics.

As Jessie Bernard famously articulated, in every (heterosexual) marriage, there are two relationships: “his” and “hers.” For this reason, it is reasonable to expect that partners were having different experiences in these relationships. When I interviewed white husbands in both places, several described having absolute autonomy to their relationships, both current and past. For them, their relationships were none of anyone’s business. As a consequence, they did not echo their black wives’ sentiments of feeling exceedingly excluded from white family and friend networks before they married. Nevertheless, when white husbands “just did not get it,” it was a source of tension in the relationships.

From a research standpoint, Boundaries of Love shows it is unrealistic and unfair to blame black women for their challenges in finding love when misogynoir is embedded in dating and marriage markets in both the United States and Brazil. In addition, this research shows that interracial dating and marriage may involve its own particular sets of issues. At the same time, since no marriage is without its issues, it also shows that black women can form happy, loving relationships with white men.

On a personal note, as someone who dates black men as well as men of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, being open-minded to love should be a goal for everyone, not just black women. Unfortunately, that is far from our social reality and may decreasingly be the case in the Trump era. Still, when it comes to interracial dating and marriage, it’s time to end arguments of black female deficiency. As Marcyliena Morgan, another black professor at Harvard, advised, it is time to love us or leave us alone.

Chinyere Osuji is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University at  Camden. In her book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (2019, NYU Press), Osuji compares how interracial couples in Brazil and the United States challenge, reproduce, and negotiate the “us” versus “them” mentality of ethnoracial boundaries.Boundaries of Love is based on over 100 interviews with black-white couples to reveal the family as a primary site for understanding the social construction of race. 

The data shown above come from the Facebook dating app, Are You Interested (AYI), which works like this: Users in search of someone for a date or for sex flip through profiles of other users and, for each one, click either “yes” (I like what I see) or “skip” (show me the next profile). When the answer is “yes,” the other user is notified and has the opportunity to respond. It’s very similar to another dating app, Tinder.

The graphic shows what percentage of people responded to a “yes,” based on the gender and ethnicity of both parties (the data are only for opposite-sex pairs of people). Unsurprisingly, most “yes’s” go unanswered, but there are patterns: For example, Asian women responded to white men who “yessed” them 7.8% of the time, more often than they responded to any other race. On the other hand, white men responded to black women 8.5% of the time—less often than for white, Latino, or Asian women. In general, men responded to women about three times as often as women responded to men.

Unfortunately the data reveal winners and losers. All men except Asians preferred Asian women, while all except black women preferred white men. And both black men and black women got the lowest response rates for their respective genders.

Perhaps most surprising is that among men, all racial groups preferred another race over their own.

AYI analyzed some 2.4 million heterosexual interactions—meaning every time a user clicked either “yes” or “skip”—to come up with these statistics. Its users skew older than Tinder’s—about two-thirds of AYI users are older than 35, according to a spokesperson.

by Ken-Hou Lin, Celeste Curington, and Jennifer Lundquist, authors of The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance

Dating apps and websites have become the most popular way Americans meet new people and the only way to do so during the pandemic. Yet, for many Black Americans, these apps never fulfill their promises. Despite hours of scrolling, clicking, swiping, or answering personality questions, they often find that they are as isolated on these apps as they were in a bar or at a party. The only difference is that they now have to serve their own drink. The green dot on the screen indicates that they are online, but their profiles appear invisible to everyone else.

Gendered racism on dating apps is not news. Yet we know rather little about how gendered racism is experienced by the daters and how online dating shapes their understanding of race. In writing our book, The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance, we conducted 77 interviews, as well as statistical analysis of how millions of daters interact (or ignore) one another, to understand how race has profoundly shaped online interaction. What we find is that race overwhelms many other variables in determining whether two people will talk to each other, and Black men and women daters were particularly discriminated compared to other minority daters.

While Black Americans experience implicit and explicit discrimination in many social settings, there’s something different on dating apps. With the abundance of options, an emphasis on visual cues, and “the need for speed,” many Black online daters feel that they are most judged based on their appearance and racial background. One of our interviewees, Sandra, a bisexual Black woman, told us:

“Even when I’m matched with others I still wouldn’t get a response. I’m a dark-skinned Black woman. Is that it? I have natural hair and have had natural hair for long before the natural hair movement. Could that be it?”

Monica, a straight Black woman, shared a similar sentiment:

“Online dating makes me feel like kind of the way that I feel in school, that I’m invisible and hypervisible. And I think it really is very much a White women’s market, so I feel like all the biases that people have outside in the real world, it just comes into effect or comes into play when you’re online dating. Like, you’re extra sexual and promiscuous. There’s so many different stereotypes about Black women that I feel like come to play in how people approach me and I guess other Black women on these platforms.”

For both Sandra and Monica, online dating does not provide an opportunity for them to be seen as who they are. Their experiences are shaped by a predictable set of racialized and gendered stereotypes that deprive them of individuality. They are seen as Black women foremost, and often ignored by others. Our statistical analysis shows that, White straight men are four times more likely to message a White woman than a Black woman, even when the two women share otherwise similar characteristics. White straight women are twice as likely to respond to White men compared to Black men.

In cases where White daters decide to message or respond to Black daters, we also found that race continued to shape each step of the encounter. Damien, a 24-year-old gay man, described to us how his sexual encounter with White men usually goes:

“Race is always brought into it. Whenever they say they want to flirt you, they always mention, for example… ‘I want your Black penis’ or something like that. They always put Black before anything. Black hands, Black muscles, things like that. Black bodies. They always do that. I’m sure within White races, when you get in bed with your partner; you don’t say ‘I want your White…'”

Michael, a straight man, has the same experience:

“There’s always this expectation of our prowess in bed. So, there’s that expectation of like, he’s kind of thug. I’m like, ‘I’m kind of a nerd.’ Some of these expectations, they’re wrong to have. It’s not like any of us see a White woman, and we’re like, ‘Yo, she could do my taxes.'”

Many Black women told us that the interest from White men is often sexual in nature. Alicia, a Jamaican American, told us:

“Certain White guys I talk to online, they’re like ‘I never had sex with a Black girl. Imagine having sex with you.’ I said to them, ‘Is that all you want?’ They respond, ‘I don’t know, maybe.’ I’m just like, okay this is uncomfortable. One guy said, ‘I don’t think we’ll date, but I just wanna have sex with you ’cause I never had sex with a Black woman.’ I felt so uncomfortable, and I was just so annoyed. It made me very upset. I was just, like, what the heck? That’s why I don’t date a lot of them online, because I get a lot of that too.”

Interactions like these hearken back to the “Jezebel,” the controlling image of the sexually aggressive Black woman that served as a powerful rationale to exclude Black women from meaningful relationships. Alicia and other Black women daters’ words are stark reminders that their online dating experiences are segmented by race and gender, and the difficulties that Black women face when utilizing dating apps is, indeed, a collective struggle.

Compared to White daters, Black daters tend to have more inclusive and progressive thinking about race and dating, and this is especially true for Black women. Our statistical analysis shows that Black women are as likely to respond to White men’s messages compared to Black men’s messages. However, this does not mean that Black women are “color-blind” when crossing the racial divide. Nena, a Black Floridian, noted:

“A couple of months ago I liked this White guy on Bumble… He tells me, ‘I love Black women.’ I could tell he’s the type that dates Black women, but… He was like, ‘I don’t like when Black people say “Black Lives Matter”; all lives matter.’ We had a discussion about it, and I didn’t like it. Then after than I was just like, yeah, that don’t make any sense to me. Then I just stepped back.”

As Nena pointed out, a willingness to date Black women often does not mean an embrace for racial justice. One can “love” Black women without seeing the struggle Black women experience on a daily basis. Alicia is also acutely aware of this difference. When sharing her experience conversing with a White men she met on a dating app, she said:

“Well, I had a conversation with him and was just like, but I’m a Black woman. If you date me, there’s certain stuff you’re gonna have to know. He was like, ‘I don’t care. I am gonna be there for your, blah, blah, blah.’ I just wasn’t convinced. You know? I just feel like when you see a red flag… I said, ‘What if we had kids together? … Do you realize because you’re White, that doesn’t mean your kids are not gonna face what I go through?'”

For Alicia, the confidence of this White man indicates little more than ignorance. Even though he sees that she’s a Black woman, he has little understanding of her lived experiences.

In 2020, many major dating services spoke out against racism, making donations, allowing their users to add “Black Lives Matter” badges to their profiles, and some removing the “ethnicity” filters from the platform. Yet, these companies never disclose whether these gestures, in fact, reduce the racism on their platforms, a place where Black daters continue to be ignored, humiliated, and objectified. These dating companies should tell us whether removing the filters indeed lessened the isolation of Black daters on their platform. Is there more they can implement to address racism on their platforms? Equally important: what can daters themselves do to really see others for who they are beyond a racial category?  It is time for us to use this technology for good, and not for reproducing centuries of racism.

A used-car mogul from Utahhas created either one blatantly racist dating site or one extremely calculated attempt to rile our collective outrage.

Sam Russell is the 53-year-old mastermind behind Where White People Meet, a dating site whose title explains its purpose. Though anyone can join Russell's site, its exclusionary title and apparent focus has irked many people on the internet. But Russell doesn't believe he's being racist.

"The last thing in the world I am is racist. I dated a black woman once," Russell told the Washington Post. "I just believe it’s hypocrisy to say ‘one group can do this, but another can’t.'"

The "groups" Russell is referring to are the primary audiences for dating websites like Black People Meet or JDate — which allow users to connect with black and Jewish singles (respectively). Russell's views and comments have fueled internet outrage, to the point that what he's doing feels a bit like performance art; he may even be saying stereotypically racist things to incite anger and draw more attention to his site.

Do white people need Where White People Meet?

The reason people are talking about the dating site is that there doesn't seem to be a need for it. White people still represent the majority of Americans, and in the dating world, there are benefits to being white.

OkCupid, one of the largest dating websites in the US, compiles data on its "matches" between its members. In 2009, OkCupid found that white men get the most responses from potential mates. It also found that white women tend to reply to white men and exclude nonwhite men. "[W]hite women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them," OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder wrote on the site's blog.

The same data was collected again in 2014, and the numbers stayed consistent:

The boxes represent people's preferences versus the average; the bottom right box, for example, shows that white women rate white men as 19 percent more attractive than the average guy. These numbers reveal a strong bias against black women and Asian, black, and Latino men. They reveal that people tend to rate their own race more highly. And they reveal that there's an attractiveness benefit to being a white man.

Rudder doesn't believe it's outright racism that drives this trend. Instead, he explains, he believes it's cultural, and because white culture is so dominant, it skews what we find attractive toward whiteness:

Beauty is a cultural idea as much as a physical one, and the standard is of course set by the dominant culture. I believe that’s what you see in the data here. One interesting thing about OkCupid’s interface is that we allow people to select more than one race, so you can actually look at people who’ve combined "white" with another racial description. Adding "whiteness" always helps your rating! In fact it goes a long way towards undoing any bias against you.

With this kind of upper hand, the concept of Where White People Meet is sort of puzzling. The thought being: Why do white people need a dating site that's specifically for them when they've already cornered so many other dating sites? The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey asked Russell just that. His reply isn't really steeped in the idea of service, but rather in the idea that because spaces for nonwhite people exist, spaces for white people should also exist.

"It’s our right to have this business," he told Dewey. "If we want equal rights in this country, it has to be equal rights for everybody."

Where White People Meet isn't even a real dating site yet

If you poke around the Where White People Meet website, it feels like the shell of something that hasn't found its footing. In a section advertising its active users, only 11 were present when I checked at midday Tuesday:

And the site's "top members" are faceless avatars:

The most active user groups are also in a sorry state. Many of them only have one member:

Where White People Meet doesn't seem to be a place where white people are meeting.

It's also worth noting that the site only allows you to perform heterosexual searches:

When you try to perform a "man seeking a man" search or a "woman seeking a woman" search, the site forces you to seek a heterosexual match. It's unclear whether this will change in the future, but it seems not all white people are free to meet on Where White People Meet.

Despite the site's apparent lack of users and interactions, Russell told the Washington Post that 100,000 people visited the site on Sunday and that 1,033 registered to browse the site for free. He wouldn't say how many of those registrants ultimatelypaid the $15 per month typically required to become a full-fledged member (there is a special $4-per-month trial offer advertised right now).

Where White People Meet is perfect bait for internet outrage

With a lack of activity on the site but plenty of mainstream news coverage of its existence (the Chicago Tribune, Time, and the Washington Post are among outlets that have written about it), it seems like Where White People Meet could very well be an attempt by Russell to cash in on outrage. Currently, there are more people talking about the ridiculousness of the site than there are active users.

It's not unlike the racist Star Wars boycott or the Starbucks red cup controversythat sparked debate toward the end of 2015. Indeed, it gives people an opportunity to prove they're smarter, more well-informed, and not as racist as Where White People Meet is.

But the outrage that's sprung up in response to the website doesn't really further the conversation about the casual racism that OkCupid has found is inherent in dating. That's probably not a topic people really want to discuss on Facebook, in 140 characters on Twitter, or, as OkCupid's data has shown, in general. It's easier to simply profess your anger over Russell's silly site. And that's something he definitely understands.

"I knew there was some potential for backlash, but I’m not going to dodge it," he told the Washington Post.

But wait. Where do white people meet if they're not on Where White People Meet?

White people. (Photo by Matt Cowan/Getty Images for Coachella)

After consulting some white people I trust, I've compiled a short list of places where white people meet:

• Coachella
• Bowling
• Starbucks
• Bakeries
• Juice bars
• Yoga class
• Comic-Con
• Silicon Valley
• CBS
• Congress
• Farmers markets
• Boarding school
• North Dakota
• Publix
• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• Everywhere

I don't date Asians — sorry, not sorry.

You're cute ... for an Asian.

I usually like "bears," but no "panda bears."

These were the types of messages Jason, a 29-year-old Los Angeles resident, remembers receiving on different dating apps and websites when he logged on in his search for love seven years ago. He has since deleted the messages and apps.

"It was really disheartening," he says. "It really hurt my self-esteem."

Jason is earning his doctorate with a goal of helping people with mental health needs. NPR is not using his last name to protect his privacy and that of the clients he works with in his internship.

He is gay and Filipino and says he felt like he had no choice but to deal with the rejections based on his ethnicity as he pursued a relationship.

"It was hurtful at first. But I started to think, I have a choice: Would I rather be alone, or should I, like, face racism?"

Jason says he faced it and thought about it quite a bit. So he wasn't surprised when he read a blog post from OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder in 2014 about race and attraction.

Rudder wrote that user data showed that most men on the site rated black women as less attractive than women of other races and ethnicities. Similarly, Asian men fell at the bottom of the preference list for most women. While the data focused on straight users, Jason says he could relate.

"When I read that, it was a sort of like, 'Duh!' " he says. "It was like an unfulfilled validation, if that makes sense. Like, yeah, I was right, but it feels s***** that I was right."

"Least desirable"

The 2014 OkCupid data resonated so much with 28-year-old Ari Curtis that she used it as the basis of her blog, Least Desirable, about dating as a black woman.

"My goal," she wrote, "is to share stories of what it means to be a minority not in the abstract, but in the awkward, exhilarating, exhausting, devastating and occasionally amusing reality that is the pursuit of love."

Curtis works in marketing in New York City and says that although she loves how open-minded most people in the city are, she didn't always find that quality in dates she started meeting online.

After drinks at a Brooklyn bar, one of her more recent OkCupid matches, a white Jewish man, offered this: "He was like, 'Oh, yeah, my family would never approve of you.' " Curtis explains, "Yeah, because I'm black."

Curtis describes meeting another white man on Tinder, who brought the weight of damaging racial stereotypes to their date. "He was like, 'Oh, so we have to bring the 'hood out of you, bring the ghetto out of you!' " Curtis recounts. "It made me feel like I wasn't enough, who I am wasn't what he expected, and that he wanted me to be somebody else based on my race."

Why might our dating preferences feel racist to others?

Other dating experts have pointed to such stereotypes and lack of multiracial representation in the media as part of the likely reason that plenty of online daters have had discouraging experiences based on their race.

Melissa Hobley, OkCupid's chief marketing officer, says the site has learned from social scientists about other reasons that people's dating preferences come off as racist, including the fact that they often reflect IRL — in real life — norms.

"[When it comes to attraction,] familiarity is a really big piece," Hobley says. "So people tend to be often attracted to the people that they are familiar with. And in a segregated society, that can be harder in certain areas than in others."

Curtis says she relates to that idea because she has had to come to terms with her own biases. After growing up in the mostly white town of Fort Collins, Colo., she says she exclusively dated white men until she moved to New York.

"I feel like there is room, honestly, to say, 'I have a preference for somebody who looks like this.' And if that person happens to be of a certain race, it's hard to blame somebody for that," Curtis says. "But on the other hand, you have to wonder: If racism weren't so ingrained in our culture, would they have those preferences?"

Hobley says the site made changes over the years to encourage users to focus less on potential mates' demographics and appearance and more on what she calls "psychographics."

"Psychographics are things like what you're interested in, what moves you, what your passions are," Hobley says. She also points to a recent study by international researchers that found that a rise in interracial marriages in the U.S. over the past 20 years has coincided with the rise of online dating.

"If dating apps can actually play a role in groups and people getting together [who] otherwise might not, that's really, really exciting," Hobley says.

"Everyone deserves love"

Curtis says she is still conflicted about her own preferences and whether she'll continue to use dating apps. For now, her strategy is to keep a casual attitude about her romantic life.

"If I don't take it seriously, then I don't have to be disappointed when it doesn't go well," she says.

Jason is out of the dating game entirely because he ended up finding his current partner, who is white, on an app two years ago. He credits part of his success with making bold statements about his values in his profile.

"I had said something, like, really obnoxious, looking back on it now," he says with a laugh. "I think one of the first lines I said was like, 'social justice warriors to the front of the line please.' "

He says weeding through the racist messages he received as a result was hard, but worth it.

"Everyone deserves love and kindness and support," he says. "And pushing through and holding that close to yourself is, I think, actually also what kept me in this online dating realm — just knowing that I deserve this, and if I am lucky enough, it will happen. And it did."

Alyssa Edes and Laura Roman contributed to this report.

You may also like

The data shown above come from the Facebook dating app, Are You Interested (AYI), which works like this: Users in search of someone for a date or for sex flip through profiles of other users and, for each one, click either “yes” (I like what I see) or “skip” (show me the next profile). When the answer is “yes,” the other user is notified and has the opportunity to respond. It’s very similar to another dating app, Tinder.

The graphic shows what percentage of people responded to a “yes,” based on the gender and ethnicity of both parties (the data are only for opposite-sex pairs of people). Unsurprisingly, most “yes’s” go unanswered, but there are patterns: For example, white men dating black women site, Asian women responded to white men who “yessed” them 7.8% of the time, more often than they responded to any other race. On the other hand, white men responded to black women 8.5% of the time—less often than for white, Latino, or Asian women. In general, men responded to women about three times as often as women responded to men.

Unfortunately the data reveal winners and losers. All men except Asians preferred Asian women, while all except black women preferred white men, white men dating black women site. And both black men and black women got the lowest response rates for their respective genders.

Perhaps most surprising is that among men, all racial groups preferred another race over their own.

AYI analyzed some 2.4 million heterosexual interactions—meaning every time a user clicked either “yes” or “skip”—to come up with these statistics. White men dating black women site users skew older than Tinder’s—about two-thirds of AYI users are older than 35, according to a white men dating black women site [https://torrent-igruha.org/3551-portal.html]

Kelechi Okafor: 'I'm not hiding my white boyfriend'

'Least Desirable'? How Racial Discrimination Plays Out In Online Dating