Ethnicity Filter Dating App

Sexual racism isn’t simply about wanting to date people of other races or facing rejection from them

The next day, gay dating app Scruff pledged to remove its ethnic filters to “fight against systemic racism and historic oppression of the Black community”, the company wrote on Twitter. The next day, gay dating app Scruff pledged to remove its ethnic filters to “fight against systemic racism and historic oppression of the Black community,” the company wrote on Twitter. “We commit to continue to make product improvements that address racism and unconscious bias across our apps.”. Jun 03, 2020 June 03 2020 5:26 PM EDT. After years of being called out for discrimination by Black and POC users, gay dating apps Grindr, Scruff, and Jack'd have pledged to remove the ethnicity filters on.

This past June, several dating apps — responding to a public outcry against systemic racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd — removed “ethnicity filters” from their platforms. Grindr was among the first when, on June 1st, at the start of LGBTQ Pride Month, it announced its solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement across its social media accounts, adding that the company had made donations to BLM and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, and due to its “commitment” to fighting racism on the app, it would be removing “the ethnicity filter from our next release.” Jack’d and Scruff (two other popular gay “dating” apps both owned by Perry Street Software), along with others, quickly followed suit.

Although researchers at Cornell University recommended this action two years ago in a paper on addressing racial bias and discrimination in dating apps, many were skeptical this would mitigate racism on platforms that have always been inherently racist.

Ryan Wade, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois-Champaign School of Social Work, doesn’t believe removing ethnicity filters “will do much to address discrimination on the apps” but rather just sends “an implicit message” that possibly amounts to little more than virtue signaling.

Dating Apps That Let You Filter By Race

“It’s unclear whether or not users who are seemingly uninterested in people of color (POC) would now be compelled to interact with POC because they can longer remove them from their grid,” Wade explains via email. “If, for some reason, they are compelled to do so, then I would be cautious about whether or not they should, if they do indeed hold prejudicial attitudes towards POC.”

Wade also points out that people who block out people of color with an ethnicity filter are not somehow only rendered visible to white people, which could then lead them to perpetrate “overt” or “covert” discriminatory acts when responding. He does note that if, by removing these filters, “the frequency with which POC are subject to erotic objectification” is reduced, then it could actually be worthwhile.

“As for [other] potential benefits, removing ethnicity filters does implicitly promote the idea that race should not be a criteria for partner selection,” Wade adds. “But this is so subtle that it’s not immediately apparent what impact such an implicit message could have. And [it’s] really tricky when we get into questions about whether or not racially-driven partner selection practices are ‘acceptable’ for racial/ethnic groups that are traditionally oppressed, versus the majority group.”

The ethnicity feature in these apps — either built into the operating system or a bonus benefit that came with an additional subscription fee — allowed users to search for people by race, as narrowly defined by the app creators. Some folks of color were able to use this feature to find a friendly face on the apps, in what can be a sea of white torsos, or in the real world, in a town palpably lacking in visible diversity. Yet, in other hands, this feature amounted to little less than institutionalized racial profiling.

I first started using dating apps when Grindr began crawling out of the primordial sea of 2009, since they seemed like a less-scary version of flirting with a guy in a loud, dark, sweaty bar. But the scariness of the apps was in how comfortable people felt in being truly awful when there was no one publicly holding them accountable. A disturbing amount of profiles declared “WHITES ONLY,” something I hadn’t seen outside of Jim Crow photos of water fountains in the South. But this wasn’t Alabama or Arkansas; this was Brooklyn and Manhattan — and sometimes less than 100 feet away.

Ethnicity Filter Dating App Login

These modern-day sexual Jim Crows defended their stance as a “preference,” as if one’s race was mutable or a choice. As more people — particularly white dudes who were the objects of this pointed attraction — started calling out these profiles for their blatant racism, the less and less “whites only” appeared. The same for “No fats, no femmes, no Asians” (which has been around for decades, migrating from newspaper personal ads in their paid classified listings). That’s not to say there still aren’t people who, bafflingly, think that it’s OK to write that in a profile, but it seems less prevalent these days.

Still, words only go so far. It’s easy to espouse racial equality — to add a #BLM to your profile or call out racism in other people’s profiles — but it rings hollow if you don’t actually date people of color, if you don’t see them as whole people, as human beings with wants and desires and fears and insecurities, who need to love and be loved just like you. My experience on these apps has told me the opposite: that I am not worthy of love. That I am not desirable. That I am nothing unless a white man loves me. It’s what society has taught me through media representations, or lack thereof. It’s what the apps have instilled in me through my experiences and through the experiences of countless others.

In 2019, Wade and a University of Michigan professor of health behavior and health education, Gary W. Harper, published a study of more than 2,000 young black gay and bisexual men in which they developed a scale to measure the impact of racialized sexual discrimination (RSD), or sexual racism, on their well-being.

Wade and Harper categorized their experiences into four areas: exclusion, rejection, degradation, and erotic objectification. Wade and Harper hypothesized that exposure to these experiences may foment feelings of shame, humiliation, and inferiority, negatively impacting the self-esteem and overall psychological health of racial and ethnic minorities.

According to the study, while being rejected on an individual basis by white men didn’t have a significant impact on well-being, the dating app environment itself — in which whiteness is “the hallmark of desirability” — led to higher rates of depression and negative self-worth. Race-based rejection from a fellow person of color also elicited a particularly painful response.

“RSD perpetrated by in-group members — people of their same race — came up as a major point in our focus group discussions,” Wade said of the study. “Participants discussed how being discriminated against by people of their own racial or ethnic group hurt in a unique way, so we wanted to account for that too when developing the scale.”

Sexual racism, then, isn’t simply about wanting to date men of other races or facing rejection from them; it’s the culture not created by but exacerbated by these apps. Racism has always existed within the queer community — just look at the way pioneers like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were, until quite recently, pushed aside in the history of the movement for queer civil rights — but sexual racism has just become another way to marginalize and diminish members of an already marginalized group.

What, then, are the solutions? How can we fix racism? Or, at the very least, how can we fix racism on these dating apps? Well, non-white gays could play into the segregationist theory of those “whites only” profiles and migrate over to platforms that tend to cater to people of color (such as Jack’d) instead of Grindr — which has other systemic problems to address. Or we could quit the apps all together in some sort of racial boycott, although this pandemic has rendered these apps almost essential for social interaction, romantic or otherwise. But that would undercut the fact that queer people of color have as much right to occupy space, digital or otherwise, as their white peers.

More realistically, we, as in everyone who uses these apps (and is not the worst), can continue to push them to be more inclusive, to be more socially conscious, to hire people of color at all levels of their company, and to realize maybe sooner than 10 years down the road that being able to filter people by race is inherently fucked up. But one should never place trust solely in institutions to do the right thing. When it comes to dismantling racism anywhere, it has to begin with the people: We have to push each other and ourselves to do better.

I’ve had to interrogate my desires my entire dating life. Why am I attracted to this guy? Why is this guy attracted to me? What role does whiteness play in my attraction? What role does my blackness play in their attraction or aversion? It’s the burden of my blackness, but it’s time to start sharing that weight. It’s not easy work, but it has given me the tools I need to fight the programming to which I’ve been exposed all these years. It’s an ongoing fight, but there is no “fixing” the racism on these apps if we don’t address the racism of the people who use it.

From Rolling Stone US.

Dating app Grindr removes ‘ethnicity filter’ that allows users to search for potential partners by race after getting roasted online for its tweet in support of ‘Black Lives Matter’

• Singletons can pay £12.99-a-month in order to access the ethnicity filter
• But Grindr has said it will now remove the feature in the next version of the app
• Comes after app was forced to delete a post after it faced heavy criticism

Dating app Grindr has said it will remove its ‘ethnicity filter’ that allows users to search potential matches by race.

Singletons prepared to pay £12.99-a-month for the ‘premium’ service are currently able to sort users based on their ethnicity, weight, height, and other characteristics.

But less than 24 hours after its tweet supporting ‘Black Lives Matter’ received widespread condemnation over the filter, the company has said it will delete it.

Protests have rocked the US for six days following the death of George Floyd, who was filmed gasping ‘I can’t breathe’ as an officer knelt on his neck in Logan County, West Virginia.

Grindr announced the features removal in this post on Twitter yesterday

It came less than 24 hours after the dating app was forced to delete a tweet supporting the Black Lives Matter movement after it received widespread condemnation for the feature

Writing on Twitter, the app said: ‘As part of our commitment to (Black Lives Matter), we have decided to remove the ethnicity filter from our next release.

‘We stand in solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the hundreds of thousands of queer people of colour who log in to our app every day.

‘We will not be silent, and we will not be inactive.

‘We will continue to fight racism on Grindr, both through dialogue with our community and a zero-tolerance policy for racism and hate speech on our platform.’

The dating app also said it would make a donation of an undisclosed sum to Black Lives Matter and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, set up in memory of the activist and self-identified drag queen who was a prominent figure during the 1969 Stonewall uprising.

It announced the move after deleting its post, ‘demand justice. #BlackLivesMatter.’, which had sparked a barrage of criticism.

One Twitter user received more than 6,300 likes and 1,100 re-tweets when they responded saying: ‘Remove the ethnicity filter.’

Grindr has also made a donation to Black Lives Matter and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute

NEW YORK: The US has been rocked by six days of protests. Pictured above are looters smashing store windows on May 31

WASHINGTON DC: The protesters held their ground as police launched tear gas

Critics had previously slammed the dating app for having the filter, and had urged them to delete it.

But in an interview with Buzzfeed in 2016, co-creator Eric Silverberg defended it.

‘A person’s choice of partner is deeply personal, and I don’t think we would presume to judge or tilt one’s choice of sexual partner, boyfriend or husband,’ he said.

‘Ultimately each one of our own individual choices is profoundly informed by the community we grow up in, perhaps by the relationships we had with our siblings or parents.

‘I mean, to try and unpack that would probably take years for each person and so, I don’t know… I give wide latitude to other people when they talk about the kind of people they’re into.’

Thousands of protesters were arrested across the country over the weekend as major cities are the most affected areas of rioting, looting and arson

CICERO, ILLINOIS: Two people were fatally shot in the Chicago suburb of Cicero on Monday

LOUISVILLE: Kentucky State Troopers detain a man during protests against police brutality

The US has been rocked by six days of protest over Mr Floyd’s death, with thousands of demonstrators marching in Las Vegas, Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta, New York and other major cities.

Law enforcement has used rubber bullets, tear gas and officers on horseback yesterday to clear a path for President Donald Trump to walk from the White House to St John’s church.

Coroners in Hennepin County ruled yesterday that Mr Floyd’s death was a homicide by asphyxiation.

Dating Apps Filter By Ethnicity

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