Sure, I was interested in boys growing up, but the boys I crushed on always seemed to date girls who were virtual opposites of me: white, thin, with straight, silky hair. I gave up, for the most part, until about halfway through college.
Then I tried Tinder, the phone dating app where you swipe right for yes, left for no on online singles in the area, but I found my shyness and uncertainty allowed me to only swipe right on my friends and joke about the absurdity of looking for love or meaningless flings on the popular app. At that time, about three years ago, I talked with one of my good friends, also a black woman, about her experiences with online dating. Unlike myself, she was using Tinder and OkCupid in an actually serious manner but, instead of love, she was finding a whole bunch of casual racism.
Dasha Snow, 22, still uses Tinder occasionally, though she recently retired her OkCupid. At the time we first talked about her qualms with online dating, she lived in Eugene. Now she resides in Portland, but says not much has changed. Snow says that when she was more active on dating apps, she would receive messages addressing her race every day or every other day.
I also had assistance from my white coworker, who acted as a control for the experiment by making a nearly identical Tinder profile to determine the difference in responses we got. We created our Tinder profiles to state the same information: first name, age, journalist, Eugene.
We picked similar photos β selfies, a nicer headshot and pictures with our respective pets. From there, the rules were simple. We set our accounts to view men only, kept the generic year-old age range the app gave us, set a mile radius and right-swiped every person that came up.
