Black females are considered the least attractive group within digital dating. Research conducted by professor Gerald Mendelsohn at the University of California revealed that over 80 per cent of the contacts initiated by white members were to other whites, with only three per cent to black members. The statistics on online dating back this up. At the same time I realised that the culture of online dating presents particular challenges if you’re black, whether you’re male or female. It was after this experience and other similar ones that it started to seem to me as if the new world of dating now meant that for many, connecting with black men had become like a branch of online shopping: as easy as buying a fridge on Amazon. Although she lived in London, all the people in her life were white, and so her assumptions about race had never been challenged. When I gently pointed out the racism implicit in her words, I realised it had never occurred to her they could ever be interpreted that way. In other words, she had seen a black face and unthinkingly equated it with promiscuity. She admitted she had not read the text accompanying my profile pictures. “Because I thought you’d be a playa,” she said. “Why did you swipe right on me?” I inquired as we sat in a bar on our first date.
She saw me not as a personality, but as a pastime, an object, and did not see her actions as racially insulting in the slightest.
She told me, without any embarrassment, that sex with a black man was an item on her bucket list, alongside other post-divorce “experiences”, like trekking in Nepal or zip-lining in Costa Rica. When she messaged me on a popular dating app, she wrote that she wanted to “try something different”. She was a divorced white woman in her mid 40s with two young children.