I don’t agree that all inferences based on race are racist but I can understand that as a thing reasonable people can disagree on.
However, w/r/t the topic at hand, I think that stating your racial preferences in dating is usually not racist, because it’s not necessarily as much about making assumptions about the other person as it is in being realistic about your own attractions. I know that I wish I were attracted to black women because, if nothing else, it would increase the pool of possibilities, but it has never happened yet. Just like I halfheartedly wish I were attracted to men as well for the same reason but that’s not gonna happen either. I also wish I were attracted to transexual women because there are some beautiful ones out there, just like there are beautiful black women, but no matter how pretty they are I am simply not attracted to them.
I’ve never done online dating. If there were a preferences form I would probably not fill it out, as I am attracted to basically every race and culture except African-Americans (I have not met enough women from Africa per se to know if it goes for them as well) That said I am a man and it is notoriously hard to get dates online if you are a guy so I wouldn’t want to eliminate anyone, and occasionally it’s fun to go out with a beautiful, fun person even if you have absolutely no interest in sleeping with them. But I’d feel slightly guilty unless it was on one of those “no strings attached meet n eat dates*” oriented sites.
*That sounds like a description of a hookup site, but trust me, I didn’t mean it that way!
A white man not being attracted to black women is not racist.
A white man forbidding his son from dating black women IS racist.
A white man working to forbid any white man from dating a black woman is despicably racist.
I look at it this way: even if there was a way to prevent racial screening in the dating arena, people are still going to have their “I don’t want to date <insert race>” preferences. I do agree with tonyfop when he says people who use those kinds of filters are making a statement about themselves. Personally, the people who make such statements aren’t the kind of people that I want seek out romantically, so I’m in favor of the status quo. Call it prejudice in reverse or whatever, I do not care.
It’s really simple, though. As a black woman, I don’t want to date anyone who would otherwise would have ruled me out because I’m the wrong race or ethnicity. Let’s say match.com suddenly decides to prevent racial screening, so my profile pops up in the inbox of some guy who normally would have not known of my existence. Let’s say he finds me attractive and tries to strike up conversation with me. I figure it’s highly likely he is probably going to see me as some exception to some offensive rule that I don’t want to have to spend my life trying to teach him out of; by investing emotional energy in him I’m taking a risk that he’s never really going to see me as an individual person, but as someone who is “not like those other black girls”. Otherwise, why would he have stated preference? He’d just take them as they come.
Do I really need that worry in my life? Hell to the naw. Give me someone who will not be seeing me through a stereotypical lense, please.
By the way, I experienced this before…with a black guy, no less. His profile declared a preference for practically everyone except black women. I guess in a less picky moment, he decided to do a less restrictive search and came across my profile. He emailed me expressing interest , and gosh darnit I really wanted to consider him because he was cute as all get out. But when I saw that glaring ommission in his profile (and after I asked him about it, he confessed that I wasn’t mistaken), I could not muster up the desire to meet him. Oh well. It might have been my loss, but I really don’t think so.
Some people may not be racist when they exclude people on the basis of race/ethnicity, but to completely deny the role of prejudice in our preferences by equating them to sexual orientation is not even comically silly. People are biologically wired to like men or women. I seriously doubt this is the case with ethnic/racial preferences, since as has been said ad nauseum on this board, these are social constructs. Sex is not.
If he was really that cute, you’d have told him you were Latina.
(I’m joking, obviously. But Iranian guys here in LA tell women they’re Italian to avoid the stigma of Muslim/Middle Easterner.)
But you raise an important point. Some people sign up for online dating specifically because they’re looking for someone outside of their ethnic group.
I don’t think screening based on race is equivalent to screening based on gender, but I do think it’s equivalent to screening based on age, height, or weight–purely physical concerns that have dick-all to do with someone’s personality or compatibility, but do affect attraction. And near as I can tell, you can screen for age and height on pretty much all dating services, and you can specify “no fatties” in your profile on most of them. And we don’t label people who don’t even want to bother seeing pictures of people over 40, under 5’10", or over 200 pounds as discriminatory assholes. We think they’re shallow and silly and roll our eyes, sure, but nothing like the sort of condemnation inherent in calling someone racist.
Yet you can make the same argument for hiring racism. Forcing people to have equal hiring ratios doesn’t make them less racist. (Although, there is an argument that increased mixing leads to more tolerance, which could apply equally well for “integrated dating.”) And if we let employers screen by race then you can be sure that you won’t work with overt racists.
Lots of people would rather have the choice of employment with a racist vs no employment at all. They can always quit after all.
The other thing to consider is whether software is increasing the issue by boiling things down to a categorical search issue.
Ie if they actually met the person, would the same rate of screening apply? I suspect it wouldnt myself. It would be interesting to see if dating over the internet is increasing or decreasing interracial interactions overall.
Agreed. Especially since they don’t even see pictures or descriptions of those they are crossing off.
By necessity, they must be going off of their idea of what “race x” looks and acts like.
“That Asian guy on the Mentalist is ugly, so I’ll cross off all Asian guys.” (really?)
White people don’t have to worry about that type of generalization, because it is assumed that there is a wide variety of appearances and behaviors for them.
This is why I said that the system itself, in which you eliminate an entire race without pictures or descriptions, is in effect racist.
Actually, I see no similarity. Rules that require that race or ethnicity not be a factor in excluding job applicants is only marginally similar to telling people whom they must date and marry. There have always been people with whom we would prefer to not work, (based on work habits, disposition, voice volume, language, cleanliness, smoking habits, weight, and a multitude of other causes for interpersonal conflict), but who we are expected to tolerate in the workplace. We do not insist that anyone date any person whom they find objectionable for any of those reasons. Perceived race or ethnicity is simply one more personal attribute that we consider not pertinent when hiring.
First, prove that US employers are, in general, forced to have equal hiring ratios.
I’m not speaking about the limited number of specific cases where employers must hire by quota as part of a legal penalty for proven past discrimination.
Prove that employers in the US are generally required to hire different ethnicities in equal ratios for most jobs. I’ll wait.
Moving on to a specific example:
http://www.foxreality.com/theacademy/#/index
Explain why the Orange County Fire Department had no black recruits( or women) as part of its most recent class. If equal hiring rations were required then at least some of the black and female applicants would have been included in the class. (They weren’t.)
No requirements for equal hiring rations in the OCFD. Fire fighting, and public safety jobs in general are a work category heavily impacted by EEO law and discrimination lawsuits. If equal hiring ratios were common, we would expect to find them in government firefighting jobs like the OCFD. We don’t. Therefore, requirements for equal hiring ratios are not nearly as widespread as advocates of racial discrimination would claim.
BTW, your Trojan horse argument about ethnic dating preferences is much more interesting than your silly attempt to advocate for employment discrimination.
Most stereotypes have some sort of reflection in reality. Many (most?) Americans believe the following things:
[ul]
[li]Jews tend to make more money than gentiles.[/li][li]East Asians tend to be shorter than white people.[/li][li]Black people tend to commit more violent crimes than white people in the United States.[/li][li]Old people tend to have more health problems.[/li][li]Immigrants tend to be less skilled with the English language than natives.[/li][/ul]
So long as stereotypes have some reflection in reality, using them in one’s selection strategy cannot be dismissed as irrational. There are lots of other facts which might not be considered stereotypes but that people nevertheless consider in their dating strategies:
[ul]
[li]Women tend to get less attractive as they age.[/li][li]Women tend to want powerful men. Money helps.[/li][li]Men care about looks a lot more than women do.[/li][li]Dating is more of a marketplace than a jigsaw puzzle: people say that they want the right “fit”, but this “fit” generally includes all of the things that men and women typically want in a partner.[/li][/ul]
Knowing what people want and how groups differ is part of any real-world strategy. People use it all the time while dating; how could they not?
One might counter-argue that it is irrational to judge individuals on the basis of general trends, but this misses a critical point: knowledge of likelihoods is part of day-to-day functioning. I think that a guy who is dressed like a hipster probably is a hipster. I believe that because people who dress like hipsters tend to be hipsters. I assume that people who dress like b-boys tend to be b-boys. I assume that people who wear yarmulkes are Jewish.
There are exceptions to these rules, but the point is that it is rational, not irrational, to use knowledge of generalities when making decisions. There are thousands (millions?) of people using online dating sites. Unless you have time to look at the profiles of all of them (and go on dates with all of them), it is rational to use your knowledge of social trends when making decisions. Is it irrational for me to wager that a Jewish woman makes more money than a Hispanic woman? Not in a million years.
But you’ve simply restated the way things are by custom (rules for jobs vs no rules for dating which is arbitrary) instead of articulating a source of consistent morals to apply to both jobs and sex partners.
But why not? If I prefer a to hire a Norwegian receptionist instead of a Brazilian one, what difference does that make? The EEOC comeback is that ethnicity should have no relevance to answering the phone and welcoming office visitors. Yes, that may be true, but so what? I still have to interact with her 8 hours a day and maybe I’d prefer to look at Scandinavian vs Latin American skin when I’m talking to her? How’s that different from preferring a Norwegian on a dinner date for 2 hours? It’s all arbitrary, right?
To be consistent:
If we legislate anti-discrimination for the job, then we can legislate anti-discrimination for dating and marriage.
If we allow racial preferences for dating, then we should allow racial preferences for employers. (We already allow employees to racially discriminate against potential bosses.)
This assumes that stereotyping is accurate when making judgments about an individual as opposed to a population, and that stereotyping is accurate in general.
Research doesnt really support either. The less experience a person has with a group, the stronger the stereotyping tends to be. Rather than a ‘rational’ process, this actually reduces the potential mating pool unnecesarily.
So I guess you could argue evolutionarily theres a pressure here for people who arent so picky to get better mate choice and over time the problem will fix itself in say 20000 years or so.
Federal EEO law doesn’t apply to employers with a small number of employees. Unless you’re dating and/or marrying fifteen women at once, you’re in compliance.
We haven’t in fact been able to legislate fairness.
Any employer can get away with discrimination as long as they’re careful about it.
Having absolutely no members of a given minority group when that group is well represented in both the population at large and in the potential hiring pool can be bring uncomfortable government scrutiny, but it isn’t particularly burdensome to hire one or two minorities with the proper credentials in order to avoid this.
Many companies are all, or nearly all, white.
EEO law makes blatant discrimination difficult, but large organizations almost always have ways of hiring the people they like. In practice, hiring for desirable jobs is still very similar to dating, and just as discriminatory.
I’m not so sure legislation has led to fairness and diversity in the workplace. I’ve not seen a black man waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant. Maybe there are black guys at a national chain like PF Changs.
