What If There Weren’t So Many White People?

March 15th, 2011 by Christian Rudder

As far as I've been able to tell, America has three Big Ideas about race relations:

#1: Pistols.

#2: Chumpriding.

and #3, which kind of follows from the other two: American race relations suck.

Obviously, this post isn't going to change that, but we are going to do something a little different, a thought experiment. Since most thinking about race hinges on the fact that one particular race predominates, what if, using statistical models, you could make that predominance disappear?

Right now, even on a per capita basis, whites gets more messages than non-whites on OkCupid:

But how much of this reflects whites' "popularity" and how much reflects their population? What would this graph look like in a racially-balanced world? How would people's choices change, if the people to choose from weren't mostly of one race?

This post is based on 82 million messages sent on OkCupid over the last few months. Here's what we found.

Our data set

OkCupid is actually less white than the rest of the U.S. Internet, though it's hard to make direct group-to-group comparisons because Quantcast (our national demographic source) doesn't have multiracial data.

For this post, to keep the discussion streamlined and accurate, I'll only include OkCupid's largest single-race groups: whites, asians, blacks, and latinos.

Where To Start

When you look at the messages sent by each of our four biggest racial groups, it's actually kind of amazing how much white people are flooding the market. In raw terms, everybody, whites and non-whites alike, sends white people most of their messages. Broken down by the race of the sender and the recipient, here's what we have:

The above chart actually undersells how much attention whites get, because I assigned equal widths to the four vertical bars representing the message senders. To properly present reality, we should adjust those widths according the size of each population, like so:

You can think of that whole square up there as the dating "pie", and, as it stands, whites get 89% of it. But let's look deeper into the numbers. Thus, our experiment begins.

Here's the data for Asians.

  • As the chart above shows, Asians send about 3 times as many messages to whites as they send to other Asians:
  • However, as we saw before, whites outnumber Asians 19:1 on the site:
  • Putting this messaging and population information together, we get these ratios:
  • Well, what if we rescale these ratios? What if there were 10 whites and 10 Asians instead? How many message would go to each?
  • Our experiment tells us that, given equal numbers, Asians would actually overwhelming prefer to message other Asians.

It turns out that if you bust out your mechanical pencil and use it to punch the "on" button on your laptop and then, with that computer, extend the same kind of analysis to the other groups, you get a fresh sense of American race preferences.

In a world without so many white people, where everyone has an equal choice, that first graph we saw—the average monthly messages people get—would look like this:

And, going for a little more detail, this is how it would break out by age.

I built an interactive visualization of how the Who People Are Messaging chart we were looking at before changes when there aren't so many white people. You can toggle between states and get a sense for yourself.

supposing racial bias:
is like today—the chart will reflect people's current racial messaging preferences
didn't exist—the chart will suppose people are race-blind when deciding who to message
supposing racial composition:
is like today—the chart will reflect the population's current racial composition
is equal—the chart will suppose there are equal numbers of each race
by whites
by asians
by latinos
by blacks
Total area for each group—a measure of their relative popularity:

Here's the by-age analysis for each of the four groups:

Back to reality

"What ifs" are an important part of any researcher's toolkit:

but "what ifs" are only worthwhile if they tell you something relevant in the real world. And here's the value in our thought experiment.

The kind of messaging imbalance that currently exists has observable effects on how people think about race and dating. Search for "interracial couple" on a stock photo site: you'll find a rainbow of Asians, Latinos, Black, and Indians, all hanging out with their white significant others. Or just start typing into Google and see how it completes your sentence:

But as we've seen, in a scenario where people have an equal choice of messaging options, things are very different.

In other words, person for person:

Asians are the most desired racial group in the country.

Then Latinos. Then whites, sort of. As we're seeing it now, the data is being distorted: a huge part of the country is white, and white people mostly like to talk amongst themselves. Intentionally or not, minorities are left out in the cold.

Nonetheless, people prefer their own race

Given equal choice, every race strongly prefers itself:

And white people actually prefer themselves the least, but right now there's just so many of them. It's interesting to think what things would be like if the shoe was on the other foot; if another race outnumbered whites 19:1. We ran a simulation with Asians in whites' role as the dominant group and everyone else was really on the outside looking in then.

You can actually see groups' insularity in real life when you look at cities with larger non-white user bases. Minorities tend to become more and more inward-looking as their numbers increase. The dots on the graph below represent the 150 towns with our largest black populations:

For every 1% increase in the black population, blacks send 2.5% more messages to each other. In Baltimore, for example, 1 in 5 users is black, but half the messages from black people go to other black people. The rate is over twice what you'd expect. Other groups show a similar pattern.

For white people, there are also some places where a relatively smaller population still sends a disproportionately high number of messages to themselves—aka the most racist towns in America. The white people in Greenville, MS, for instance, comprise only 59% of our user base there. However, 95% of their messages go to whites; that's 14× the expected rate.

Cities with the most white-loving white people
#1 Greenville, MS
#2 Jackson, MS
#3 Montgomery, AL
#4 Memphis, TN
#5 Atlanta, GA

The most segregated city north of the Mason-Dixon line is a surprising one: New York. White New Yorkers message other white New Yorkers at about 2× the national rate, probably about Animal Collective.

Soon, there won't be so many white people

Finally, I just want to point out that the hypothetical we chose for our title isn't going to be a hypothetical for much longer. The Census Bureau has concluded that around 2050, whites will no longer be the majority in the U.S.

This is from their website:

Along with this news, I think there's an assumption that at some point all the races will just kind of come together as one, like during Michael Jackson's "Black Or White" video or like during a lawsuit against the estate of Michael Jackson.

The data we're seeing, however, just doesn't support a post-racial future, because even as the races mingle more, people still like to date someone who looks like they do. Asians strongly prefer Asians; Latinos, Latinos, and so on.

Even when white people aren't the majority, society will be as divided as ever.

Endnote: reading level analysis

We analyzed the grade-equivalent reading level of each message in our dataset, and here's a table of how it changes, race to race, message to message.

It seems that generally, people of all races write down to blacks and Latinos and up to Asians and whites. This is a pretty crazy result: proof that race not only affects the quantity of the contacts between people, but the quality as well. For example, the average black person writes at a level almost one full grade-level higher when writing to a white person than when writing to another black person.

337 Responses to “What If There Weren’t So Many White People?”

  1. T.J.M. says:

    I think all this race stuff is sooo stupid….If youre attracted to someone your attracted thats it. I think even the most horrible self proclaimed racists can be broken down to date outside of thier race if they come across that one person who just “does it” for them…I dont thinkin terms of I only date this or that… I think in terms of I only date who I’m attracted to.

  2. Guillermo says:

    Living in SF, it is not surprising to see your finding about Asians being the most desirable race. But you need to look further than that. I think that if you divide it by race you will see that Asian women are the most desired, but not Asian men. Asian men seem to be desired mostly by Asian women.

    Also, you should note that the least likely interracial couple is Asian with Black.

  3. Joe says:

    Considering race is an artificial social construct how is any of this article valid? What is the scientific methodology okcupid uses to categorize humans? You mean it’s the users’ own subjective view of what artificial social construct they belong to that is the basis for theses stats? How is Christian Rudder not perpetuating racism here? What is your scientific methodology for categorizing humans into “Race”?

  4. D-Mac says:

    You guys got it all wrong. Caucasians make up 70%+ of the US population. There are just more white folks on here period!!! So of course they are gonna get the majority of the emails! As far as Asians being more popular thats because Asian cultures mannerisms are similar to Caucasians. I mean look at the word Cauc-Asian! Is a light bulb going off? So of course a white person is gonna feel more comfortable messaging an Asian person when it comes to dating outside of their ethnicity… The two though different are similar in some aspects. But this is not all Caucasians. Those brave enough or informed enough do venture over to the Latin or African side… Some never go back! lol… As far as Caucasoids being far more popular than Negroids… I don’t know if I buy that. If that is true then why do Caucasians humiliate others in their ethnic group for being fare skinned? And all the white I see killing themselves to be tan… lol… Why do you wanna be tan like me? lol…;) Oh and bye the way, most of the emails I receive on here are from white women… There are just not that many black folks on here…

  5. Can't be? says:

    The Avg black person has 6-9 messages per month?? As a black member of Cupid.. maybe it’s my area, but I’d be lucky to get 1 message a month.

    It’s not just Cupid.. it’s all sites. Not really minority friendly.

  6. cj says:

    and I thought white people were biggots!! check you out!

  7. DFRESH says:

    I don’t have no problem with white people at all, only with the wannabe ghetto white boys!

    I’m Latino myself, I have always dated Latina women myself. But like one of my buddies says, it’s 2011…White girls are in boy! ha ha

    And to say Latino’s get messages? well I haven’t gotten one at all so far….

  8. asianwomanohhlala says:

    thank you for this article – it’s incredibly illuminating!

    why aren’t there more people of color on this and other dating sites? my brown sisterfriend and i had asked ourselves recently and we think it’s because by the time our men of color are in their late 20s or early 30s, they’ve either died, gotten theyselves incarcerated, are already married, or not-married but with children and no money (meaning they can’t take on more). in all of these scenarios, they are not really healthy dating choices for women of color. i am sorry to say. i really am.

    i had been avoiding white men successfully for the past 10 years. then i joined this site recently and find myself talking to a white guy. now i know this was statistically unavoidable.

    keep up the good data analysis, okcupid! (the deficient mathematician in me applauds you.)

  9. LandFlower says:

    This world would be a much better place if Christian Rudder stopped thinking with his skin color and started thinking with his brain (the one above his neck).
    LF

  10. dp says:

    Wrt your “just google ‘why black men like…” example, remember that Google gives you the pre-fills and responses that it thinks YOU want based on YOUR history of queries and clicks.

  11. Tim says:

    So Asians are the most racist and whites the least when it comes to dating…Black people being the next least racist.

    Interesting. Why not just say it that way?

  12. The_Round_Peg says:

    So this study combines Asian men and women together as one group? That would seriously skew the results.

    Everyone knows Asian women are desirable. Everyone (men and lesbians and bi-sexuals) love Asian women. However, I seriously doubt Asian men are the “most desirable” male demographic group.

  13. CO2 says:

    Incredible waste of your time to put that data together. I did like the term “chumpriding” though.

  14. Rc says:

    Wow, I have to agree with @Can’t be-

    As a black male yeah you’re very lucky to get even one message a month.

    As a black gay male- well like me, you’re shit out of luck.

    And @Joe, race is real. The dividing and categorizing of them is real. It’s bull the way we humans do it, but trust that it’s not made up. You can’t really attack the author for presenting data on race and online dating.

  15. Ray says:

    I wonder what cities are those with the least white-loving white people …

  16. nnakbar says:

    At the end of the day people need to remember it’s how you connect to that person….not the color. Many times we may be attracted to someone and we let society dictate how we should feel about this person…and dare God what will people think? What will my family think? A even bigger one. Many times family will dictate you people choose to be with. I find that this is a Valid concern. One must ask themselves will this person feel comfortable with my family? Will my family accept them include them as part of the family? I think it’s important to think about that before you even think of dating anyone of another race.

    I’m a Black women some may consider me mixed. My family is from the Caribbean , you can be any color, race or combination of races I happen to be a combination of most.lol. As for me I have dated about every race. It has allot to do with chemistry and common interest. As a woman of color I must say that it can be difficult. I’ve many times had to really figure out is this person hanging out with me because, I’m a cool person and they my be attracted to me….or They think I’m attractive and I’ve just became their interracial experiment, where they are trying to satisfy some fantasy they’ve had. That is a challenge but i sniff out the truth pretty quickly.

    I know allot of women have been saying that Black and Hispanic men have been to crude in their approach. Well ladies I’ve been getting the same kind of forward advances from White and Asian men as well…. All I have to say to all you men who are doing this. All races who are doing this, clean up your act. None of us is finding this attractive. Take time to read the profiles…You’ll find out just by reading that maybe we don’t appreciate such advances. hmmm food for thought? Maybe then soo many of you won’t get your feelings hurt. There’s a thought.

    At the and of the day people you like who you like for the many different reasons that you do…life is short, these are uncertain times that we live in. We live and if we’re lucky we get to share it with someone. Whether you met a great new friend or something more…We need to forget about what people think and think for ourselves it’s your life.

  17. EyeBlong2U says:

    Uhhhhhhh #1 More White Folks on this dating site, #2 can we help it if you can’t understand the way we communicate to other races.. (Why is it that so many races are trying to sound and look like us?!?! WZF! )But had to learn to conform to your needs, Yet again.. in order to exist side by side and every where else . # Don’t get me Started… #4 The fact that people of colour are viewed more as a fantasy partner with sexual abilites that exceed the White Races ( hows that for being racists for ya?) we are not viewed as potential mates .. more like Dream lover or at least a fantasy… It’s really hard to be just a human being with another human being before race , gender or creed. Can we not post these kind of articles any more. They confuse the sheep which most call the masses I say Bahhhhhhh
    BEfore Race, before Gender, before religion, we are beings, all of us… IF you don’t understand this simplicity.. then all I can say to you is Bahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

  18. JayMarie says:

    For some odd reason, this makes me very sad.

  19. BKK says:

    I am a white woman that prefers to date black men. I wish that OKCupid would have a way that you could specify a preferred ethnicity in the matches they send to you (along with other preferences….like faith). They keep sending me white males!

  20. gs1303 says:

    What good is a 95% match if they only want to date a certain group exclusively?

    I find it interesting that in the previous article on race trends that such a high degree over – 80-90% – of all groups found it unimportant to date exclusively within their race but yet here we are with all of these trends that are to the contrary. Statistics can be bent to form opinions on whatever the researcher is trying to make a point about. I really do think that if OKCupid just expanded their “looking for” feature to include peoples preferences based upon race, similar to sexuality, it would make it easier for non-whites to find a bigger pool of prospective matches-thus get better responses.

    You’re not throwing gay/bisexual people in the mix and making them click on every profile to find out if someone is gay/bisexual. Its the same with someone who wants to date inter-racially. If you don’t think its cool to make gay people “convince” a high match that it could work if the other person is exclusively straight, then don’t do it for people who want to date outside their race, only to be encountered by the “closet racist.” Clearly there are more than a few on this site.

  21. gs1303 says:

    What good is a 95% match if they only want to date a certain group exclusively?

    I find it interesting that in the previous article on race trends that such a high degree over – 80-90% – of all groups found it unimportant to date exclusively within their race but yet here we are with all of these trends that are to the contrary. Statistics can be bent to form opinions on whatever the researcher is trying to make a point about. I really do think that if OKCupid just expanded their “looking for” feature to include peoples preferences based upon race, similar to sexuality, it would make it easier for non-whites to find a bigger pool of prospective matches-thus get better responses.

    You’re not throwing gay/bisexual people in the mix and making them click on every profile to find out if someone is gay/bisexual. Its the same with someone who wants to date inter-racially. If you don’t think its cool to make gay people “convince” a high percentage match that it could work – if the other person is exclusively straight – then don’t do it for people who want to date outside their race, only to be encountered by the “closet racist” at every turn. Clearly, by these comments there are more than a few on this site.

  22. diamond says:

    its a shame how many racist ppl there are still on this earth. i think ppl are going 2 have 2 let there guard dwn an put away any grudge they ahe against blacks away and lock it up in a basement or sumthing..BREACKING NEWS PPL WE’RE BLACK AND WE’RE NOT GOING ANY DAMN WHERE!! I LOVE ALL PPL..BUT I MOST DEFLY LOVE MY RACE…….WOOOOP #I<3BALCKPEOPLE

  23. daBruceJuice says:

    Anything goes with me. From coal black, to milky white, and everything in between… s’all good if it’s good y’all.

    Of course, it all depends whether I find the particular lady to be attractive, in terms of my personal preferences. But race/ethnicity has nothing to do with why I might – or might not – be attracted to someone.

    I find it rather stupid and myopic, that anyone would discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. I mean, would you only ever eat one kind of food? Always apples, and never a mango, etc.? You get the idea.

    End of story.

    daBruceJuice

  24. Samantha Justine says:

    Asians are the new trend!!! Go get yourself an asian through a dating website near you… :P (I’m one XD…. *scoffs at herself for being a web-whore*… not THAT kind of web whore.. -___- I should probably stop writing… O_O

  25. Beautiful Analsyses - But Standard English Does Not Equal Message "Quality" says:

    OK Trends Folks – You guys are a shining example of data analysis made compelling. Keep up the inspiring work of turning data into knowledge- pretty, pretty knowledge.

    OK, props aside – I want to take issue with the “grade-level” of writing analysis, i.e. folks “talk up” to asians and whites and folks “talk down” to blacks and hispanics.

    The grade-level analysis (esp. automated grade-level analysis) is going to see how well a post matches grammatically “correct”, standard academic english, and is not likely capture the quality of the content of a message. My point here is that dialect matters – most clearly with latinos, as they’re more likely to intersperse spanish or spanglish into a message, but also with african americans. I’d be interested to see if you applied a “dialect” analysis, I bet you’d see folks messaging with less standard english forms with blacks and latinos and more standard with whites and asians.

    If that’s true, it’s not as bleak a scenario that “folks talk down” to blacks and latinos or that those posts are “lower quality”, just that when talking to and within those communities people use slang and other non-standard english forms. So a non-standard response would be scored as a grade lower… That’s especially humorous when you look at the white–> black “talk down” score (-0.2) being “higher” than among other group –> black (-0.5…-0.6) – I read that as saying that white folks are bad at dialect, not that white folks don’t talk down to black folks.

    Anyway, Love the site, love the work, keep it coming…

  26. me says:

    I have a question- who gives a fuck and what’s your point? I could have told you all that data without doing one single study but I know one other thing too- you have too much time on your hands and you need a real hobby. And WTF is that “reply” above mine from daBruce? Any black guy that uses “its all good” and “ya’ll” certainly doesn’t correctly punctuate it so who the hell are you trying to bullshit? LOL Why’s this country fucked up racially? Cuz of fucking idiots like the one that posted this garbage all the way to the fake replies following it- GET A LIFE!!

  27. Alec Z says:

    The nonlinear self-selection result is really interesting. Do those cities that exhibit the self-selecting races tend to be self-selecting across the board? Or is it only a certain race that tends to be self-selecting?

    It would also be interesting to see the geographical distribution of those cities. For Chicago, where I live, races are highly segregated. New York is the same, Baltimore too. Perhaps the racial self-selection is due to a universal human attribute: laziness. Why would I want to drive / ride all the way across the city for a match when I could just as easily date my neighbor?

    A last thought: the data to examine geographical racial distribution is there. You could even estimate a radial preference function (from OKC data?), then evaluate it for each race across the geography of a city to see what the theoretical message distribution _should_ look like. Then, if the actual distribution differs, you would have a more accurate estimate of “racism” or self-selection.

    And… a neat infovis! http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer?ref=censusbureau

  28. who says:

    who said you fucks could run analyzers on my messages?

  29. fireblix says:

    Yeah, I can see that. I’m black, and I usually try to send most of my messages to black people, but given the population of the site, and thus the population of my recommended contacts, most of my messages go off to white users, followed by asians.

    I don’t think I have a particular preference for one race or another, I’d be fine being in a relationship and in the future settling down with a girl of any race really, but I do think that I tend to gravitate more towards black women.

  30. Eve says:

    The interesting part is that even black people who message black people and latino people who message latino people lower their reading level. So I don’t think users are talking down to black and latino people, I think they’re probably just using ebonics. The users aren’t racist; your reading-level test is!

  31. Stacey says:

    Wow, a lot of these comments are obnoxious. To the people who thought this article failed to make clarify that the majority of people on the site are white…it totally didn’t. You were just too lazy to read the whole article, or did not read it carefully enough. As for the point of this article, I have a black male friend who has a profile on this site, and I’m sure all of these statistics would be interesting to him(if not already common sense), because when people are not happy with something, they like to know -why-. It may be enlightening to some people to know that race has a bit to do with how many messages they are getting. Also…nobody cares if the statistics in this article don’t tell YOUR story. The point of statistics is to use a sample to make generalizations about a broad population, -not- predict the future/provide an explanation for -every- individual. If these graphs totally don’t make sense to you, then you’re probably an exception to all of these statements, and if so…congrats. But your biases don’t change the validity of any of these findings.

  32. marie says:

    @joe- you’re obviously a white middle class man. the social impact of race is real, without scientific proof of race as a category. also… gravity is still only a theory. so aren’t you so smart.

  33. H2O says:

    I am glad to see OkCupid put out this data and their analysis of it. It is refreshing to see race discussed so openly. I tend to agree with some of their general themes, always noticing that many asians tend to hang out with other asians. But it is not a hard and fast rule, as I know from experience (being non-asian). To the people who get uptight about this article, take a chill pill and realize others (like me) have been dealing with the downside of this shit since we were born. Dating is one place where we just have to face it. FYI, I ain’t hatin’ nobody, everyone gets a chance to prove the stereotypes wrong with me.

    Thank you OkCupid. It would be interesting to see more of this type of analysis in the future.

  34. Alex says:

    Man that’s sobering news. I feel like a freak now because I’ve dated or been attracted too women of all kinda of ethnic backgrounds. Apparently it’s not as common or normal as I thought. How depressing.

  35. smiley face:) says:

    i write messages to people based on what i read in their profile, not what race they are. for instance someone may write in their profile “i love to read and discuss scientific topics”. so that sends a signal to me to write a well written proper message (vice versa). so i do in fact judge people as an individual and i feel like that is what everyone else does too.

    why is OKC making everyone guilty by association?

    let us not be afraid to stand up to OKC and ask questions about their articles claiming guilt by association.

  36. your boy joejoe says:

    to the white liberals: for a group that claims they don’t care about people’s skin color, sure seems to care about people’s skin color. i.e. “why are there so many white people on OKC” or “i date outside my own race”.

    don’t get me wrong, white conservatives annoy me but white liberals annoy me even more..

  37. Adam's Myth says:

    This is meaningless if you don’t control for educational choices (level, school location etc), which could explain your results at least as well as does racial preference.

    But this was funny, especially the photos. And the graphs are awesome.