I described myself as white on my profile.
The first White Hadiya, created with the help of a body double, had been popular. The new version was even more so, receiving sixty-four messages in her first three days online. In the course of a week, she received messages from ninety-three users, some of them the same people I had messaged from my black profile and never heard back from. My black profile had gone up around New Year’s, a time when online dating usage traditionally spikes; even so, the new version of Hadiya was outpacing her by a ratio of six to one. Here was more evidence, to my mind, that my features were not the problem; rather, it was the colour of my skin.
In a Facebook community group whose members are Indigenous, black, and people of colour, I learned that my online dating difficulties are not unique. I asked some black women who are members of the group about their experiences. Joy Henderson, a thirty-eight-year-old Torontonian, joined OkCupid for a month, creating what she thought was a witty profile. She found herself subject to stereotypes and fetishization; few messages came in that weren’t about casual sex. Tacha Wilks, a twenty-seven-year-old biracial woman of white and Jamaican descent, describes her online dating experience—on OkCupid in particular—as having been very negative. ,One white man submitted a long, detailed passage about what he wanted to do to her “on the hood of a car.” Black men who wrote would want to know more about what “kind” of biracial woman she was.
What has this overall experience taught me? First, it caused me to abandon online dating. I just didn’t feel good when I logged in. It is one thing to be passed over on a dating site because of a hairstyle, or braces, or acne—or for a postgraduate degree or an addiction to Tim Hortons coffee. Race is different: there’s a reason we have institutionalized protections in our human rights code and have preached anti-discrimination principles for decades. Our supposedly post-racial society is meant to have left this behind, to acknowledge that race is a social construct and that we are all just human beings. I realized that in order to overcome bias, people needed to interact with me in person, to see the person free from the stereotype and its underlying assumptions. Online dating dehumanizes me and other people of colour.
I was lucky enough to find someone. My boyfriend and I met through our mutual love of Radiohead after he posted on a Facebook group
On the other hand, maybe online dating dehumanizes everyone. It promises objectivity, and yet it also asks us to make snap decisions based on a photograph or a conversation spanning the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. I am a multilayered human, and it takes time for me to be able to break through stereotypes or stereotypical expectations associated with blackness; I expect to have greater success when someone gets to know me and sees me as me, not as Random Black Girl #2
I was lucky enough to find someone. My boyfriend and I met through our mutual love of Radiohead after he posted on a Facebook group, looking for bandmates. After a few exchanges, and after getting confirmation from a mutual friend that he was not an axe murderer, I found myself spending time with this handsome man. He was keen to learn about my thoughts, my interests, and my passions—and I his. What started out as a series of cover-song jam sessions has blossomed into a romance filled with laughter, cheese puffs, music, and conversation. We both dream of a life of simple pleasures, enduring friendships, and occasional escapes to a cabin in the woods.
I attribute this success to meeting face to face: he saw me as a person, not a stereotype. Now more than ever, I believe in the magic of a real-life encounter—not just for black women, but for everyone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hadiya Roderique (@deeroderique) is a writer and a co-host of the Canadaland Commons podcast. A former Bay street lawyer and CABL Board member, she is currently a PhD student at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto studying race and gender diversity in professional service firms.
17 BLawyerisH/July, 2017