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When I relocated from my predominantly Black suburb in Dallas, Texas to an immensely diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, I didn’t expect to receive so many matches on Tinder and Hinge from non-Black men. I had always found myself in mostly white spaces — college, jobs, vacations — yet white men never took a deep interest in me before I moved to the East Coast. And while I had spent two years dating a German guy who was studying abroad at my university, it was only by transplant that a non-Black person really showed interest in courting me beyond a “you’re pretty for a Black girl” comment.

Eventually, I stopped swiping on non-Black men altogether. There had been several cases before when a white man would match with me and then DM me something obscure like my skin tone reminding him of chocolate or feeling the need to tell me he’s always wanted to fuck a Black girl. I found it ludicrous that these men actually thought that was the way to a Black woman’s heart — or panties — and would unmatch them instantly. But in New York City, the progressive melting pot of America, white men (and Asian and Latino men for that matter) wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks, probed my interests, and complimented my photos in a respectable manner.

Why was my experience on dating apps with non-Black men on the East Coast so different from my experience in the South? The Dating Divide, a non-fiction book that explores race and desire in the era of online romance, finally provided me with answers to this longstanding question.

Not all preferences are problematic

Initially when reading this book that’s out this month, I wondered if preferences were actually harmful, but the complexity of why we like what we like and choose to pursue certain people depends mostly on our race and our social position in the world of online dating. A white man saying he only wants to be with white women because he only likes light skin and light eyes is different from a Black woman who prefers men of color because she wants to avoid fetish-seeking matches and racist messages.

“Preferences have different meanings depending on where you are located in a racial and gender hierarchy, a desirability hierarchy, as well as within online dating,” said Celeste Curington, co-author of The Dating Divide.

Some women of color reported that dating white people can be challenging because they have a general lack of awareness around racial oppression and discrimination, positioning their preference as a safety net in an online dating world full of strangers.

Racist and hyper-sexualized remarks toward Black women on dating apps prove to be common, the authors found. One woman told the authors online dating became “harmful to her confidence” and that “her Blackness meant exclusion.” So it comes as no surprise that most single Black women prefer to match with Black men. Even Black men reported feeling rejected and stereotyped by non-Black women on dating apps, pushing them to mostly only contact Black women. As several op-edsand think pieceshave highlighted before, the Black, Latino/a, and Asian experience on dating apps is completely different than the experience of white people.

“Black men and women feel walled off by the demonized and hyper-sexualized images absorbed by non-Black daters. Yet their invisibility coexists with a hyper-visibility,” the book notes.

According to the research presented in The Dating Divide, which includes interviews with online daters as well as an analysis of anonymized internal data provided by a mainstream U.S. dating site, Asian, Latino/a, and white straight men and gay women are all unwilling to message Black women on dating apps. Additionally, Asian, Latina, and white straight women all refute messages from Black men, while Asian, Latino, and white gay men are also unlikely to message Black men. Does this collective anti-Blackness simply come down to an unintentional, harmless preference or is it a product of modern-day digital sexual racism derived from historical white supremacist roots?

The risible idea that Black women are not suitable for respectable dating or marriage, but instead fitting for temporary sexual relations, stems from the Jezebel image, a sexually aggressive Black woman dating back to slavery, Jim Crow, and present in the 21st century. The ludicrous belief that Black men are dangerous and aggressive stems from the 19th century (and much of the early 20th century) when intimacy between Black men and white women was considered rape, despite consensual interest. The Dating Divide dives deeper into these eras and the distinct rules and regulations that were enforced to prevent non-Black people from mating with and finding Black people attractive and worthy of respect, while simultaneously fueling anti-Blackness. These tactics were so strongly ingrained in culture that they’ve been able to persist over centuries and find a new home in the digital space, where we find ourselves avoiding, ignoring, and filtering out potential love interests simply because of their race.

Everyone’s doing it

Whether we consciously choose to or not, we’re all guilty of keeping race at top of mind when swiping through dating apps.

“Some self-identified progressive white daters, who might identify with social justice, or as progressive, or a feminist, reported having mostly homogenous romantic relationships,” said Curington. “In this self reflection, they're recognizing the incongruities between what they say publicly and what they do privately.”

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Despite holding deep interest in the issues faced by people of color, progressive white singles still swipe on and message people of their own race to a larger degree. Then comes Asians, Latinos/as, and mixed-race people, with Black people swiped on the least by white daters, according to the internal data the authors received from an online dating site. As the book claims, white daters are more likely to ignore overtures from people of color who hold a conventionally more desirable education background, height, and body type, while being responsive to those who lack those qualities, but are still white.

“We know at points in history, these preferences were codified into law, and then they became invisible. Now you suddenly have people using these apps and filling out a profile and having to say, ‘Oh wait, do I have a preference,’” said Jennifer Lundquist, co-author of The Dating Divide. “Even when two people look very similar in terms of their education, background, and their answers to their personality questions, race is still such a maker or breaker in terms of who they ultimately contact.”

According to the book’s findings, online dating benefits white people the most and favors Black people the least with other races falling in between. White daters are more likely to report having a preference for their own race than other daters. Latinas face family pressure to date lighter. Asian and Latina women associate white men with more gender egalitarian partnerships. Black and Asian men face extreme stereotypes of being sexually aggressive and insufficiently dominant and unmanly, respectively.

Meanwhile, there aren’t many harmful stereotypes that exist for white men and women. White women are unlikely to respond to non-white men, and almost every other racial group readily responds to white men more often than to men from their own racial group. Even gay Asian and Latino men prefer white men. The pervasiveness of white desire paints online dating as an effective tool for white daters to not only succeed, but enjoy.

Who’s responsible?

In order for digital sexual racism to die, awareness of its existence and how we might be perpetuating it has to be known. While many Black, Asian, and Latino/a daters are familiar with the discrimination that takes place online and the stereotypes associated with their groups, white daters who unknowingly carry them out must recognize their own faults.

“I kind of feel like white people need to read the book more than anyone else. My sense is that people of color will read it and be like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ It really patterns based on their sort of racial position in society,” said Lundquist.

But with anti-Blackness existing across all cultures, despite race — which was found in both the book’s quantitative and qualitative data — other daters could benefit from the material as well.

In addition to our own individual work in dismantling our unconscious preferences, both Lundquist and Curington place a responsibility on the platforms that uphold the divide with ethnic categories, filtering mechanisms, and algorithms that use racial data.

“There are a lot of things that online platforms can do to at least try to disrupt this or try to educate their users about this,” said Lundquist. “But then I think about those recommendations and I also kind of have to laugh because who are we kidding to think that these for-profit corporations have the best interests of society at heart?”

Instead of hoping that businesses will make moral decisions, Lundquist suggests consumers advocate for more transparency, especially in the algorithms and how race might play into them, as well as ask corporations to eliminate racial preference optionsfrom profiles altogether.

“The narrative around personal preferences tends to kind of treat it as benign, natural, individual, innate, completely out of our control and nobody's fault. Some people even relate it to tastes for foods, which is highly problematic if we're going to reject an entire group of people based on racial or ethnic background and then chalk it up to a disinterest in a certain type of food,” said Curington.

She notes that digital sexual racism is just as much an institutional issue as it is societal. The choice to opt out of viewing people based on race, coupled with algorithms that prioritize race as a factor, is a form of discrimination that our most influential institutions, not just dating apps, should be penalized for upholding. American housing, education, and employment institutions aren't supposed to make decisions based on race and ethnic background, but they often fall short of legal requirements. Dating app businesses facilitate that same sort of discrimination freely among their consumers with little consequence.

“This is a society-wide problem, and we're still grappling with the legacy of apartheid in our country. One of the most important things we can do is to be intentional and aware of it so that we are conscious of it, because as long as we just chalk it up to individual preference and decide it’s out of our control, nothing will change,” Lundquist said.

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UPDATE: Feb. 8, 2021, 10:15 a.m. PST This story was updated to clarify that data from a dating app showed progressive white daters chose to match with and message Black people the least, preferring to connect with their own race first and then Asians, Latinos/as, and mixed-race daters.