Table of Contents for Not My Type
Introduction
The Introduction sets up the argument that readers can expect throughout the rest of the book: algorithms that influence our intimate and dating lives are fraught with limitations that translate to gendered hierarchies of power and lived experiences of racism for people of color. Next, I familiarize readers with ongoing cultural conversations about interracial dating in popular culture—probing the discourse on racialized preferences in dating, mating, and marriage. Last, I invite readers to think about our collective evaluation of online dating, suggesting that it must include a close and critical examination of the technologies that are automating sexual racism as well as the social forces that guide our interactions with each other and influence our private behavior on dating platforms.
1.A New Sexual Racism?
This chapter explores the societal underpinnings of sexual racism, connecting de jure and de facto sexual racism of the past with contemporary beliefs about racial preference in dating, intimate relationships, and marriage. This chapter presents a socio-historical account of the legal history of interracial relationships in the United States as these social factors influence our contemporary views about attraction and acceptable gender performance as they relate to desirability. I question the prevailing social logics and biological arguments around attraction and attractiveness and encourage readers to think about their own personally held beliefs about race, gender, femininity, and masculinity. This chapter concludes with an overview about how online dating platforms expand arenas of sexual racism.
2.Automating Sexual Racism
Chapter 2 illustrates how covert racism and gender bias operate in online dating systems. The chapter discusses how algorithm-driven dating platforms automate sexual racism through structured gamified interfaces, automated eugenics, and racist beauty hierarchies. I present an in-depth review of patented algorithmic systems from Match Group, the company with the largest ownership of online dating platforms. I find that racially biased facial recognition algorithms pair with misogynistic ethos that pervades dating logics to reproduce sexual racism in online dating environments. Further, I argue that a lack of transparency about the use of racialized sorting algorithms in online dating platforms encourages the myth that racial preference in dating is a neutral biological impulse.
3.I'm Just Not Comfortable with Them: The Myth of Neutral Personal Preference
This chapter is an in-depth examination of the myth of neutral personal preference regarding racialized beliefs about interracial dating. The chapter presents data from interviews with twenty-seven self-identified White/Caucasian users of online dating platforms. These interviews present an unfiltered view of the logics of sexual racism, demonstrating that sexual racism is not simply a product of algorithmic dating technologies but an individual belief system that converges with covert (and at times, overt) White supremacist logics. Additionally, this chapter offers practical advice on how to be anti-racist when engaged in online dating because algorithms do not create bias in online dating; rather racism already exists in both individuals and in the minds of programmers and developers who write the code that drives the algorithms that automate sexual racism.
4.I've Always Wanted to Fuck a Black or Asian Woman: Being Racially Curated in the Sexual Marketplace
Chapter 4 amplifies the voices of users of color as they describe encounters with racism, discrimination, xenophobia, and fetishization. This chapter presents data from seventy-three interviews conducted with frequent users of online dating platforms who identify as Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, Indigenous/Native, and Asian to demonstrate how intimate racialized views, choices about interracial dating, and racial bias in automated sorting systems converge to produce lived experiences of sexual racism for users of color. This chapter also explores how race-based violence and harassment is an everyday experience for women of color, specifically focusing on fetishization of Black and Asian women.
5.Safety Thirst: Who Gets to Be Safe While Dating Online?
Chapter 5 is my response to incidents of violence of racial fetishization discussed by those I interviewed for this book. In this chapter, I focus on safety mechanisms available to users of dating and intimacy platforms and call for an expansion of safety to include protections that minimize harm for all users, not just normative White users. This chapter puts the onus on dating companies for creating racially curated sexual marketplaces where users routinely encounter racial fetishization and racial harassment. Hence, I present an examination of community guidelines and algorithmic safety tools used by online dating platforms and call for greater vigilance and responsibility on the part of corporate stakeholders.
Conclusion: All You Need Is Love (and Transparency, Trust, and Safety)
In this final word, my hope is that my critical evaluation of the technologies that automate sexual racism will cause readers to reflect on greater hidden truths of the tech industry—neoliberal capitalism drives the industry with little regard for ethics of care or effort devoted to harm reduction. Users must think about the implications of widespread use of unregulated automated matching, ranking, and sorting system that bear the mark of eugenics science. How might these systems continue to guide our private interactions with each other and influence race relations in the United States? I invite readers to question if the ease and convenience of online dating is worth the harms caused by the processes that are automating sexual racism. Finally, I invite readers to reimagine a world where sexual racism is not allowed to thrive.