Contents:
Look no further than Where White People Meet, a new dating website marketed toward you guessed it white people. Com," founder Sam Russell says on the website. There are various dating websites that promote and cater to just about every origin, race, religion and lifestyle out there.
So again, why not Where White People Meet. The website became the target of mockery after the Salt Lake Tribune wrote a story about it, accompanied by a photo of a promotional billboard showing a white couple embracing. Reactions varied from amused to bewildered.
Doesn't majority-white America offer opportunities for white people to meet each time they leave home? Amid debate over its offensiveness, the billboard came down on Tuesday, the company said on Twitter. Will have another soon," the company said.
Data indeed suggest that users of online dating sites tend to favor people of their own race -- and not just white people. Hence the popularity of dating sites targeting niche interests and lifestyles -- farmers, pet-lovers, Democrats, Christians, baby boomers, divorcees and millionaires -- as well as various races and ethnicities. The trend continues in marriage.
It may not sound like much, but those numbers are a good sign "considering we're talking about couples that face more marginalization than the rest of the population," said H. Colleen Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology at Mississippi State University whose research focuses on interpersonal relationships and social influence.
What's more, the numbers are changing rapidly. Despite the odds, an emerging body of research shows that interracial couples report significantly higher relationship satisfaction compared with those in intraracial relationships.
He is now considering suing Grindr for racial discrimination. For black and ethnic minority singletons, dipping a toe into the water of dating apps can involve subjecting yourself to racist abuse and crass intolerance. Racism is rife in society – and increasingly dating apps such. Research shows that online dating coincided with an increase in black women as less attractive than women of other races and ethnicities.
All of which makes Where White People Meet puzzling to psychologists, social scientists and relationship experts. As long as whites are the majority race in America, the odds favor them in just about any dating scenario. It could be a byproduct of racial tensions in the United States, Sinclair said, with "competitive victimhood" playing out among parts of the white population as minorities gain ground in arenas such as politics and corporate America.
Social segregation, also called social homogeneity, is a universal American experience, whether you're white, black or Latino, and it has a greater impact on who you're likely to end up with than personal choice, Sinclair said. Would I rather be alone, or should I, like, face racism?
Online dating services experience controversy in this context as debate is cast over whether statements such as "no Asians" or "not attracted to Asians" in user profiles, are racist or just signify individual preference. Others are coming round to the same belief — albeit more slowly. Racial fetishism as a culture is often perceived, in this context, as an act or belief motivated by sexual racism. Journal of Black Studies. Jason is earning his doctorate with a goal of helping people with mental health needs. The story of Emmett Till.
Jason, a year-old Los Angeles resident, says he received racist messages on different dating apps and websites in his search for love. 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 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. The OkCupid data resonated so much with year-old Ari Curtis that she used it as the basis of her blog, Least Desirable, about dating as a black woman. 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: Curtis describes meeting another white man on Tinder, who brought the weight of damaging racial stereotypes to their date.
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.
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. 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. She also points to a recent study by international researchers that found that a rise in interracial marriages in the U. Curtis says she is still conflicted about her own preferences and whether she'll continue to use dating apps.