The ability to navigate white spaces—what gives someone like me a non-threatening quality to outsiders—is a learned behaviour. Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale, has noted: “While white people usually avoid black space, black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.” I’m not sure exactly where and how I, the child of immigrant Caribbean parents, learned to navigate so well. Perhaps I accumulated knowledge in the form of aggregated lessons from TV, media, and my mostly white environments—lessons reinforced by reactions from others about what was “right.” Much of the time, this fluidity affords me at least the perception of relatively better treatment as compared to straight-up, overt racism and classism.
So when I first started online dating, I was optimistic that my blackness and multiracial identity would have a minimal impact on my success. I didn’t seem to get as many of the fetishizing messages reported by some black women. The giveaway terms “black,” “white,” “Nubian,” “goddess,” and “queen” showed up in only seven of the messages I received. No dick pics were sent my way. My relative lack of single black female friends meant that I didn’t hear very much about others’ experiences. If anything, I was suffering from a small sample size. Given the promise of online dating, I thought that here, in multicultural Toronto, someone might read my profile, note our high level of compatibility, and be interested in me as a living, breathing, human person.
I chatted with men and went on some dates, ultimately seeing a few different prospects for a month or two over the next fourteen months. Race rarely seemed to be a factor for any of the men I went out with, but the majority of them were white (OkCupid states that its user demographics “reflect the general Internet-using public”). When I was on dates with these men, the issue of race would come up in that it forms a part of my experience, and it would come up if I brought it up, but it was rarely mentioned by them. Online dating reminded me of the experience of otherness that had long been running through me and that I had decided to put aside. At the party where my friend said I’m not really black, I remember answering, “Do you mean because I have an education and sound like you, and like Radiohead?” I have been called an Oreo in such circumstances before, when projecting my natural self is considered to be “acting white.”
I have been told that because I am educated and have non-stereotypical interests, I am not black enough— that to be black should be equivalent to being poor, poorly spoken, or downtrodden. I have been made to feel that I am an exception to my race, rather than an example of it.
After I had been thinking for a while about the slow message count, my instincts as an academic kicked in. I decided that an objective test would be the best way to assess the impact of my brown skin on my dating prospects. After all, such strategizing is one of the oldest playing-field levellers in the dating world: people routinely lie up front about their height, weight, age, and income level.
I had also heard of others trying on different racial personas before. As I sat in a coffee shop with my friend Jessica, I hatched a plan to see how well a white Hadiya might do. Jessica, who is of similar height, weight, and attractiveness, agreed to let me create a new profile that used my existing profile information, but her image. We staged a photo shoot where she dressed in my clothing, and we did our best to recreate some of my pictures. She noted that the pictures looked like her channelling me, and not just like her. expected Jessica to receive more messages than I did—perhaps twice as many. In fact, in her first three days, White Hadiya received nine times more messages—forty-seven messages to the five I had received in a comparable time frame. By the end of this experiment, which lasted approximately seven weeks, White Hadiya was on track to receive more than 2,000 messages in the same amount of time that I had received 708 (with allowance for the spike in views a new user typically receives in their first days online)
14 BLawyerisH/July, 2017