Aug 07 2008
Have Closet Racists Found Refuge on Dating Sites
Dating sites are public companies offering a specific service - to bring people together. They are not very private clubs with stringent membership rules. They are there for any member of the public who wishes to partake of their services. As such, they should aim to offer the same service to everyone, particularly through making participation inclusive. Currently, there are over 7 million users of dating sites in Britain, so any racism in the operations would be significant.
Most dating sites serving the UK have a choice of the colour of a partner. As they are predominantly white in membership, there is a virtual proliferation and promotion of racism against those who are not white, while encouraging them as members too. Yet that offensive choice is not necessary at all because everyone has the opportunity of screening out whom they do not like privately by ignoring certain approaches or politely declining any contacts from unwanted daters.
The worst culprits are Dating Direct (more than half of all males seem to use this option of choosing ‘White/Caucasian’) and the template used by the Times, Guardian and Telegraph dating sites which has the ridiculous anomaly of matching people up at a very high rate, yet without properly acknowledging the colour selected. How can someone wanting a white person match highly with a black person when the very act of being racist in choice would have negated that person from the very beginning?
As a Black woman who would have paid my money to use the service too, I would feel aggrieved to go into a profile which matches highly with me, only to see that the person has put “White/Caucasian” only. How on earth can I be a match for someone who wants a white partner? Surely, as that is an important requirement for some people, once they select that choice, it should make the match either very low or zero. I really cannot be an 84% match for a racist!
We are all entitled to the person of our choice, but in a mixed and diverse society, we have to ensure there is inclusion and fairness. There are three main reasons why such offensive choices are wrong and merely promote racism:
1. Every customer of any dating website deserves the same quality of service because they all pay the same fee to use it. The least one would expect is that they are not insulted by having to read profiles which are clearly exclusive and discriminatory of them. A customer is not being served if they are treated in any kind of offensive way.
2. Allowing people to make racist choices in a public forum belittles the users of that forum who do not match with the majority and treats them in a derogatory way.
3. It encourages racism in a public place, allowing it to be tolerated openly, when it would be against the law n other organisations.
There is no need to actually state a choice for colour on any dating site, unless that site specifically caters for a certain type of daters (like mixed relationships etc.), and that would be most obvious in its promotion and guidelines. Anything else is offensive and discriminatory and merely panders to the worst racism in users.
2 Responses to “Have Closet Racists Found Refuge on Dating Sites”
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Dating sites should not be able to ask color or race preference. That is what the sites are for, meeting new people that share the same interests. It does seem that people that use the site may just be racist themselves if they actually use this feature. In my opinion.
You are so right, blondiewrites. You have to wonder that if that feature wasn’t there? What would they have done? So they must be that way in the first place to use it.