Swiping Right and Dating White

I’m not ashamed to admit that I find my relationships on apps. As someone who grew up with a computer mouse in my hand, technology is comforting to me. It’s relatively predictable. Interacting with a screen is often easier than interacting with other humans face to face...because people are unpredictable. However, they seem to become a bit more predictable behind a screen. I have never met a love interest organically out in the real world. The couple times I’ve found love, I’ve found it by swiping. It works for me. Besides, swiping can add a fun element to an otherwise awkward or slow process, especially if you’re honest with yourself about how much you value physical attractiveness in a relationship. But although apps make the prospect easier and more fun on the surface for some, it’s not always a pleasant experience for others. In general, women of color face more safety concerns, passive discrimination, fetishism, and sexual racism on dating apps and in interracial relationships than White users. In her research article titled “‘It’s not something I can shake’: The Effect of Racial Stereotypes, Beauty Standards, and Sexual Racism on Interracial Attraction,” Molly Silvestrini explains that in conducting her study, she found that “racial stereotypes, media representations of beauty, and sexual racism significantly influence interracial attraction, damage the self-esteem and self-worth of students of color, and contribute to racist and harmful ideologies in this community” (308). Unfortunately, I can speak to this phenomenon with my own experiences.

Now, I can’t comment on the struggles of being an LGBTQ+ user of dating apps and if they’re any different from my own, but I am very familiar with how it is for straight cisgender people from personal experience and anecdotes from others. Being a straight woman certainly makes the dating app experience different from that of a straight man in both positive and negative ways. For example, women get much more attention on these apps than their male counterparts, meaning that they can more or less take their pick. Women also don’t have to deal with bots or fake profiles, which I know is something that bothers male users. I almost consider it a fair trade for the diminished level of safety that women feel when meeting up with the men they meet on apps. However, being a woman of color alters that experience even further.

My experience with using dating apps has been a relatively pleasant one, all things considered, which is why I continue to use them. I have not been murdered or physically assaulted. I have never feared for my life on a date. I have never even been stood up. In fact, the most negative short-term things I’ve experienced are ghosting, mild pushiness, and miscommunication about what the other person is looking for in a relationship. These are mere annoyances in comparison to what I could encounter. Some Black women have trouble even getting matches. The authors of the book Dating While Black: Online but Invisible explain that Black women’s dating 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” (Curington, et al.). I have also felt the pain of being ignored and lost in the void at times. One annoyance that does tend to bother me more than others, however, is the feeling of getting to know someone on or off an app, and yet not being truly seen for who I am.

Growing up in my black skin, especially in a conservative, majority-White suburb, I always harbored feelings of inadequacy when it came to my looks and racial identity. Never mind that I didn’t fit the typical Black stereotypes—I was often approvingly told that I was the “whitest Black girl” that someone had ever met. Despite everyone’s satisfaction with how White I apparently was on the inside, I simply wasn’t popular amongst my peers, much less attractive to the boys at my high school.

I didn’t have my first boyfriend until I was 18. Of course, I had to use an app to find him (I had to branch out further than my hometown). When I found him, I was over the moon. It wasn’t particularly difficult to find him, but looking back, I know that that was because I wasn’t as discerning as I should have been. After all, I was an 18 year old with low self-esteem. I was just ecstatic that a guy was actually paying attention to me—and a White guy at that. White men being attracted to Black women was an entirely new concept to me back then. I had never seen an interracial couple with that dynamic in real life, or even on TV or in the media. Therefore, of course I didn’t recognize that my boyfriend's infatuation with my skin color was abnormal.

It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that he didn’t simply like the rainbow of skin tones, he specifically had a fetish for Black women. I should have known by the comments he’d constantly make about my general Blackness, which always made me uncomfortable, but I thought that I was supposed to be flattered. In her article, Silvestrini includes an interview with a young half- Japanese, half-White woman who had a similar experience: “When individuals became aware of Mia’s ethnicity, they began treating her differently based on how they believed she should be treated as an Asian woman. I asked her how that made her feel, and she said that at first, it made her feel special, but now, she thought it was ‘kind of weird to talk about it that much’” (312). No one talks about the odd aspects of being a woman of color dating a White man. Even if I had realized that this was fetishism at the time, I wouldn’t have understood why that was harmful, and I wouldn’t have cared. I was young, I had my first boyfriend, and I was in love.

Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last. When I called it off after almost three years, I knew that many of his qualities were ones I wanted to avoid like the plague in my next relationship, but especially the fetishism. The search was on yet again, but his time with more experience and self-love under my belt. I previously had no idea how common the “Black girl” fetish was, but at least now I knew the signs of it and was able to better avoid the guys who exhibited these signs.

Unfortunately, this was also about a year into Donald Trump’s presidency at a time when his followers were more emboldened to stir up racial tension. My mom advised me to exercise extreme caution in dating White men. She sent me news articles about White men seeking out women of color on dating apps specifically to harm them. That horrified me.

As a result, I stuck with dating men of color for a bit, which was a nice experience, but the next guy I really connected with happened to be White. Thankfully, he was also genuine. But I was still having that feeling of not being seen. If my previous boyfriend focused too much on my Blackness, this one more or less ignored it. He described himself as “colorblind,” which I understood to be a defense from White people who were afraid of being seen as racist. They would go so far as to remove themselves from the subject of race entirely, which is unnecessary (and also harmful). Even though I didn’t want my Blackness to be the only thing someone liked about me, I didn’t want that part of me to be ignored completely. Race should be acknowledged, inequities should be discussed, and our differences in culture should be celebrated. Explaining this to him was more difficult than it should have been.

Although that relationship ultimately didn’t last either, it was one experience that I wouldn’t trade. I often wonder whether things would be different if I did meet someone in person for a change. Is there a benefit to spontaneously meeting men in the real world? Then again, why would men who use dating apps be any different than men who don’t? I find solace in the fact that I know what I want in a relationship now more than I ever did, and that I am secure enough in my racial identity to sniff out anyone who may threaten it. I still have hope that my person is out there, and I’m still willing to use an app to find him.

*****

Works Cited:

Curington, Celeste, et al. “Dating While Black: Online, but Invisible.” University of California Press, 14 Feb. 2021, www.ucpress.edu/blog/54733/dating-while- black-online-but-invisible/. Accessed 5 November 2021.

Silvestrini, Molly. “‘It’s not something I can shake’: The Effect of Racial Stereotypes, Beauty Standards, and Sexual Racism on Interracial Attraction.” Sexuality & Culture, vol. 24, no, 1, 2020, pp. 305-325.