My Dating App Matches Revealed My Subconscious Racism
It turns out I wasn’t nearly as woke as I thought
When I was single and new to Toronto, my main activities consisted of swiping on dating apps and complaining about how frustrated I was with dating apps.
I went through the familiar cycle of obsessing over photos, bios, matches, and openers, then getting frustrated and deleting every dating app on my phone, then getting bored and downloading them all again.
At the height of my swiping days, a friend told me about a disturbing study from OkCupid. It showed that people of color experience extreme bias on dating apps, receiving substantially fewer right swipes and matches than white folks. The bias significantly affects the experiences of Black people and Asian men on dating apps.
“I still felt confident that I wasn’t biased, but out of curiosity, I took a peek at the racial makeup of my matches. Scrolling through them, I felt my chest tighten. White. White. White. White.”
It was upsetting news, but I wasn’t surprised. At the time, I was fresh off a liberal arts degree, where I had read and discussed research on racial discrimination and…
