Is Having a Racial Dating Preference Racist?

Identity politics is all around us. News bulletins, social media feeds, and broader social discussions are filled with claims and counter-claims of racism, sexism, or some other emerging forms of bigotry. With this in mind, I was interested in Channel 4’s documentary “Is Love Racist? The Dating Game”.

The documentary started innocuously enough, with a group of singletons talking about the traits and characteristics that they find attractive. However, inside the first two minutes, host Emma Dabiri, a social historian, stated that “through a series of experiments, [she would] uncover the hidden biases of ten typical young singles”.

This seemed to set the tone for the rest of the show, with these ‘biases’ being presented through a series of psychological or behavioural tasks, as well as through survey data. While trying to quantify and measure social ills is to be commended, there seemed to be a focus on implying malice in these alleged biases where alternative explanations may have served just as useful.

Same-group attraction may not be ‘racial bias’

The first ‘experiment’ involved Dabiri asking random people on a shopping street to choose which people they would be most likely to date, based only on their names (e.g., ‘Oliver’, ‘Chung’, ‘Thomas’, ‘Mohammed’)…