flirting put to the test of racist clichés

Christelle has decided to uninstall her dating apps. Until then, when the 26-year-old Parisian opened them and started a conversation, she didn’t cut it. “More than half the time”, racist messages from the first contacts. Sometimes explicit; often veiled behind pseudo-compliments, in reality laden with stereotypes. “Sometimes people tell me clearly ‘I don’t want to date [rencontrer] black”, because for example we would be “too aggressive”, or else people tell me “I prefer lighter girls”. » And then there are those who say they don’t want to meet ” that “ black women, “and it’s not much better”sighs Christelle, who tells how the “match” of the applications can then quickly turn to sexual innuendo, without her having asked for anything.

“Guys have told me before, without any context, ‘I’ve always dreamed of sleeping with a black girl, I know you’re savages in bed’, laments the young woman. This formula, we have all heard it. This comes up very often. »

During face-to-face meetings or on their Tinder messaging system, number of young people perceived as “non-white” told us that they very regularly come up against this type of degrading stereotypes which interfere with flirting. Real “scourges” for those concerned, in particular at ages when affective life is being built, racist clichés and behaviors are deployed all the better in contexts of seduction as they are easily hidden under the pretext of a simple personal “preference”.

On applications, ethnoracial biases that influence “swipe left” or “swipe right” (thumb slide by which the user selects the profiles that interest him or dismisses those that he does not like) are beginning to be well documented. In the book The Dating Divide. Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (University of California Press, 2021), American researchers Celeste Vaughan Curington, Jennifer Lundquist and Ken-Hou Lin analyzed a mass of data from a large dating site. They show that if online flirting had the potential to widen the field of encounters, its impersonal and anonymous aspect actually amplifies racist behavior and reflexes.

“Fantasms”

Their survey shows a clear ” advantage “ white people on this type of site, much more contacted – and this regardless of the skin color of the users. On the contrary, groups are particularly rejected. First of all black women, strongly excluded from this new love market. In 2014, another study by the American dating site OkCupid went in this direction, revealing that the profiles of black women and Asian men were almost systematically ignored on its application.

You have 70.57% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.