“We never thought we could be
attracted to each other?”). Moreover, it is short-sighted and dismissive to claim not to be attracted to an entire group of people without first seeing what the members of that group have to offer. It is one thing to say that you have a preference for brunettes or have tended to date brunettes. But to say that you are not attracted to blonds is very different from saying that you haven’t yet dated a blond, or haven’t ever met a blond that you were attracted to. Such categorical exclusions are significantly more often directed toward people of colour. For example, “No rice, no spice” is a common phrase on gay dating sites used to indicate that users do not want messages from Asian or Latino men; others will be more blunt and simply write “No Blacks or Asians.” I have yet to hear a white individual say that they are not attracted to white people.
The elevation of white beauty is not limited to white people. Growing up as a black girl with natural hair, I had few examples of beautiful celebrities who
As noted by Rudder in an OkCupid blog post, “You can actually look at people who’ve combined ‘white’ with another racial description. Adding ‘whiteness’ always helps your rating! In fact it goes a long way toward undoing any bias against you.” It’s no surprise that I had instinctively known to include my whiteness in my profile, despite its making up only one-eighth of my background. Some professional matchmakers in the US have discovered that people shared my features—no dark skin, no textured hair, no fuller lips. Even Beyoncé, in all her glory, has light skin and blond, wavy hair. In the black community, mixed hair, or hair closer to a Caucasian’s, is seen as “good” hair. Some black women have been penalized in the workplace for wearing their hair the way that it grows naturally out of their heads. Lighter skin is prized. I have had several white boyfriends, and it is routine for people to tell me how beautiful our kids would be. They don’t realize that what they are communicating to me is that they think my child would be more beautiful if they were biracial than if they had two black parents. Even I am guilty of perpetuating these messages. The words “mixed kids are the cutest” have, sadly, popped out of my mouth on more than one occasion.
My sister is significantly lighter in skin tone than me, has a more Caucasian nose, and appears biracial to outsiders. Growing up, I remember being so envious of her lighter skin and straighter hair, calling her the pretty one and myself the smart one. I internalized this messaging, often thinking that if I had just gotten the gene for light skin, or the gene for the long, wavy Indian hair of my mother, I would be considered more conventionally attractive.
As noted by Rudder in an OkCupid blog post, “You can actually look at people who’ve combined ‘white’ with another racial description. Adding ‘whiteness’ always helps your rating! In fact it goes a long way toward undoing any bias against you.” It’s no surprise that I had instinctively known to include my whiteness in my profile, despite its making up only one-eighth of my background.
Some professional matchmakers in the US have discovered that people of all races prefer white matches. A recent study of online dating among queer men in Australia found that the preference for particular races as a basis for romantic attraction correlated with general racism and that those who expressed sexual racism were more likely to agree with statements associated with bigotry. Given that logic, it makes sense to me that more exposure to unfamiliar types could help us “get used” to them and that so-called dating preferences could change if bigotry, racism, and bias were reduced.
Research by Kevin Lewis, a sociology professor at the University of California, San Diego, has demonstrated that cross-race messages in online dating are comparatively rare—individuals disproportionately message others of the same race. However, the users he studied were more likely to cross race lines if they first received a message from a user of another race. They were then more likely to initiate interracial exchanges in the near future. These findings support the idea that there is more nurture to attraction than nature. They also suggest that the lack of initial contact-making may, instead of being grounded in antipathy or lack of attraction, stem from an expectation that the other person won’t be interested—what the researchers called “pre-emptive discrimination.”
This theory may explain the fact that white male daters would look at my profile, but not contact me. After another awkward, boring date with a guy who had seemed extremely interesting on paper—a date that had taken weeks to arrange—I decided I couldn’t take playing the game any more as it was. I decided on a third strategy: putting up pictures of myself as a white person. This would help to address the ineffable idea of attraction: What
if someone just liked my friend Jessica’s pictures better? With the help of another friend, I tinted the colour of my skin and eyes in Photoshop and posed in a long blond wig. My features remained the same. I was left with pictures that really did look like me, except for the colouring. I used the text that had been up on my most recent profile and launched this blond, blue-eyed version of myself. Though Photoshop made me look more mixed than white,
16 BLawyerisH/July, 2017