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
|

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:
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.
#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.
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.
Good article. Race relations to me is a problem. There are so many people that say they don’t date outside their race like they will get an award for it. Things would be different if that mentality changed. One day there wont be a need for this article.
INCOME AND EDUCATION
You’re missing something obvious: Asians are correlated with high income and education, so of course people prefer Asians since they prefer people with higher income and higher education. This would likely explain the writing sophistication as well.
I bet the preferences within race are not as strong as within education or within income status. Highly educated people look for other educated people.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/assortative_mar.html
I would love to see this broken down by gender. I think the differences between Asian women and Asian men would be especially illuminating, particularly in interracial communication.
Very interesting..hmm
It is interesting that this data shows Asians have a strong preference for other Asians when previous OKTrends suggested the opposite:
In “How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get” it was shown that Asian Females reply 28% to White Males, and and only 22% to Asian Males. Asian Males reply equally (48%) to both. Asians were the least bias group in how they answered questions about interracial dating and marriage.
I guess the take away is that Asians mostly message other Asians, but are perfectly happy to respond and date other races?
PS – I’d love to see this controlled for education (stated and grade level of writing) of the profile too! How about one big regression equation with race, income, has children, age, eduction, etc, all tossed in?
I second Christopher’s request. A gender breakdown of this would be very interesting. This is a great post even without the additional analysis, though it does sadden me a bit.
It would be interesting to see what it would be like to break down the group of so-called “white people” by ethnicity, for example if I may pitch up a couple of stereotypical labels (which for some) do/have represented “race” to the extent that they prefer people with similar physical traits as well as mannerisms. I.E. Guidos and WASPs. I think most people who fit these cultural and ethnically rooted stereo types will be diametrically different in there selection, even in the case were opposites attract which is more than likely due to areas where there is close association allowing for cultural inter mixing.
Even though many of us “whites” often have a multi ethnic background these days I think for the most part we choose to identify with one or two primary groups that may influence our out look towards the rest of the world for better or for worse.
«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»
It would be fun to see a simulation over time which assumes a mixed-racial reproduction rate mirroring the “racial bias” seen on OKC messages.
My god! What happened to all the Indians?? Did they fall off the internet?
Hip Hip Horeay for the race that can’t be classified so easy. Caucasian in racial class, Black in color, Asian in continental origin.
Truly we are super human!
For that last graph, I’d be careful of interpretation. The assertion is made that, for example, black people “write up” when writing to Asian people relative to when they write to other black people, but the data as presented doesn’t only shows such a trend for the population at large, not for individuals in the population. An equally valid interpretation is that black people who write at a higher level – to everyone, regardless of race – are more likely to write to other Asians. I would be actually very interested in seeing that analysis, taking individuals who have sent several messages to people of more than one other race, and looking at the mean per-individual differences between the writing level they use for people of each race. Difference in education and income demographics, as Joe pointed out, could easily explain such a bias.
I completely understand where these number are coming from. I am black myself and don’t message anyone inside my own race because I am not attracted to them plain and simple. I do think it is messed up that no one messages black guys but there is nothing anyone can say about it besides it not practical for it to happen. Know I know I judge my skin color myself so I cant really say to much to this.
Beyond breaking this down by gender, it would be fascinating to see this broken down by sexual orientation. While this was a good start, it feels very incomplete… waving a ‘hey, there is something cool here!’ tease and then only giving the reader a taste of the topic….
Surely there will be one (or more) racial composition where there is apparently no racial bias.
I’ve personally seen people writing down to me as a black male. White & Asian people seem to think I speak with a ‘yo yo yo son’ every 5 seconds. Its rather insulting. I tend to talk to every person the same, regardless of race. I don’t see why it should change with people based on race. Especially if you as a person are trying to speak what you think is ‘that persons lingo’. Its ridiculous.
It should also be noted that just because people may prefer to message people who look like they do, they may have that preferences for reasons that are cultural, not racial. People like to contact other people with similar backgrounds, and there can be a strong correlation between background and race. Maybe somebody doesn’t care what race the person they are contacting is, but they definitely don’t like country music fans. Or rap fans. Or classic rock fans.
OkCupid has a pretty high sci-fi/fantasy nerd contingent; imagine how the messaging rates might change if more black people liked Battlestar Galactica.
I suspect that these numbers are heavily biased towards mens’ preferences for women, because they’re analyzing messages sent/received, and men do most of the sending while women do most of the receiving. A gender breakdown would really help clarify that distinction.
I’m sure this interacts with genders! Pleassseee add gender breakdowns!
I love these articles, I really do. I just wish that at some point, you guys would address Native People as a separate group. And include something for those of us that are multiracial. I’m mixed. I’ve never dated someone that looks like me, because frankly, that would be my brother and that would be super gross.
What a depressing article to read. As a black man I hate to see what I feel printed into statistical analysis and charts because I am always hoping my gut feeling is wrong. But apparently it is spot on. I also disagree about the education and similar background reason as to who messages who. I prominently display my education level on my profile and that does not seem to help at all.
I would love to see an article dedicated to black people on OKtrends. Reading stuff like this makes me wonder if I am waisting my time with online dating.
This is a very racist article.
White people do not cross date out of their race as often as AAs do.
That sums up the messaging issue you discuss. Just a statistical fact,
So the summation that race relations suck is way out of line,
It saddens me to see so many different ethnic groups are STILL considering their minor biological differences as a reason to be a completely different “race” other than what species they truly are, Homo sapien sapien. Being “white” is a cultural thing…not biological. Do some healthy research for your brain before you do pointless praxis on the ancient theory of racism.
For starters, maybe you should replace the word “race” with “culture”. It might give you a better idea of what the fuck you’re talking about. Then you can just say that “I’m prejudice about what I perceive to be white culture”.
As others have said, I’d love to see this controlled for income and education level. I think there’s also enough to conclude that we’re comfortable with what we’re familiar with (shock). Populations that intermix are more likely to intermix online. New York, while it boasts a wide variety of races, also has a lot of neighborhoods/areas within the city dominated by one race or another.
I’m seeing that whites are the least racist group there is.
Wow, why don’t you change the name of this article to “What if there weren’t so many black people?”
Oh wait, THAT would be racist….
LOL… If there were no white folks around then the other races would’nt have anybody to blame their plight in life on…..and Vise Versa !!
SES is the biggest factor you should be considering. However, the likelihood that those persons too poor to be online won’t be in your data set sets up a rather insurmountable bias in your data. Too bad, as that would be the most interesting, and influential factor.
Age old pointless argument. While there are outliers, most people belonging to minorities either try to stay within their group for the sake of identity, or attempt to join the majority in order to make useful connections with a higher number of people. Segregation is a starting point set by culture, and integration always moves towards the majority. If this was set in the ghetto, you’d see people preferring blacks. Instead, it’s on a website where most users are white, so whites are favored.
Two words: President Obama
You can’t conclude that people are “writing up” or “writing down” to specific races based on that data unless you control for the writing level of the individual on each specific message. You could, instead, draw the conclusion that asians with a preference for blacks or latinos are just dumber than those that like white people. Statistical analysis in this post doesn’t seem up to your usual standard.
I thought the exact same thing when they were showing the bi charts.
How bi women talk to mostly guys.
Well duh, there ARE mostly guys here, so technically everyone would talk to mostly guys.
Doesn’t mean you want to date everyone you talk to.
Oh parallels!
As a black male, this is no shock to me whatsoever. I’ve been saying this for years. But it’s interesting to see all the data as such. However, I don’t feel written “down” to by any race.
However, I do feel I have to write an amazing first e-mail to get a response to a non-black girl to get a response due to my (now verified) paranoia of that said race may think about black men. But I write the same type of e-mail to black women too.
All in all, this is sort of depressing. Makes me wonder if I should even stay on this site.
Yeah as other users have commented, this would benefit from basic controls for income and education, nevermind interests. Income and education are hugely correlated in successful matches (I’m sure you have the data to look at that with your people who sign off the site). In an equal word, it would be interesting to see independent of income and education, what effect race has. Secondly, I’m sure there is a way to measure the propensity that interests belong to the same general group by seeing what words are more likely to show up together (if someone writes that they like biking, they’re more likely to like Vampire Weekend and Thai food). It’s interesting that you didn’t even try to control for your own match percentage here, as you have other times.
Is there a sense of how well people of different races are a better “match”, “friend”, or “enemy” and how this compares to people’s race preferences?
people on okc are not unaware of the demographics. i suspect that a person who is into dating non whites is not likely to stick around as long. im sure you have the data on that, you should post it.
What a waist of time people!! We have more important issues in life to worry about and address then what color some one skin is. Racism only continues to exist because certian individuals keep it alive. Are we not better then this as a society? I would like to think so. I believe only a select few in our society, “THE “IGNORENT” keep this riddiculus subject alive and some of us tend to follow their lead. What a shame!! If a person is tall or short, fat or skinny, does this make them any less or better then the next person? Absolutely not!! It’s the same for a person skin color or race. “Everyone” has value in this world, otherwise we would not be here. In fact anything living with a soul such as our pets, dogs cats etc. has value. In the end we are all human beings and we are all created equal, so we can either as a “human race” keep racism alive or let it die. We do have a choice people. What’s it going to be???
Sometimes you think you have come so far, then you realize your still quite foolish.
Humanity as a whole has embraced race which is merely a socially constructed idea: http://www.understandingrace.org/ This is the point that Andrew was nailing at a bit.
Until we reprogram ourselves, Blacks will dominate sports teams, Asians will be the smartest, and whitie will be perfect to blame for any problem. What binds us to these standards is not some physical reality that we are different, but the self-fulfilling prophecy that we are different.
Likewise, I keep hearing all these people call for gender break downs. This once again returns to Andrew’s point. This is completely cultural. In our culture you have only two genders, masculine and feminine with a rising population stating that they are mixed-gendered or inter-sexed which often leads to mixed gender. Now if we look at some place like India, we have three genders: masculine, non-masculine and hijra. You might say this is the same or even easy to deal with, but a butch lesbian is seen in our culture as masculine but in Indian culture as a non-male.
It’s all rather complex. We do little justice by grouping people in these manners and I would assume that people who live by such rigid distinctions between people, will not be able to adjust to a committed relationship with a single individual. That is, their opinion of what is the ‘right relationship’ is too rigid. Then again, we aren’t all shooting for the same thing here…
I find these statistical looks behind the online dating curtain to be fascinating.
I do, however, wonder about the number of people who identify as “undeclared.” I personally identify as such in minor protest to the ability to search based on race. Regardless of reasons, is the number of undeclared persons statistically insignificant?
By the by, I recognize that the plural of anecdotal is not data… even if it is my own anecdotal experience.
All I know is that I’m a white lesbian, and get NO messages on here, ever, and I am pretty.
This isn’t surprising at all. As a Black female who dates mainly inter-racially and as someone with and English degree, I wrote my page to convey my love of literature and grammar. However,when White guys usually message me, I notice the message is very short and for lack of a better term written very childishly.Then I go on their page and see that it’s extremely verbose and written well. What gives? Do they assume someone else filled out the OkCupid page for me? But as others have said, I’d like to see this broken down by gender, because we know men do the majority of the messaging to begin with.
This is some racist shit. “What if there weren’t so many white people?” Come on. Don’t even try and pass this off as something legitimate. White people in America are already becoming a minority because of all the other races. Gtfo.
Chris said: OkCupid has a pretty high sci-fi/fantasy nerd contingent; imagine how the messaging rates might change if more black people liked Battlestar Galactica.
Chris, I wonder, doesn’t that beg the question: Why don’t black people like Battlestar Galactica ?
This is insipid and irrelevant. Had you couched it in any other way it would have been deemed offensive by the majority of the trolls on this sight.
I think two perspectives that are missing are the influences media and society have on our preference. Regardless of how we face it, we live in an ethnocentric society. Although it’s becoming slightly more common to see an interracial couple, it’s still viewed upon as different, or a violation in a societal norm. In a society that’s predominantly white, the preferences will more-than likely lean towards their favor, because they make up the majority, regardless of what race you are. Even when we break it down into terminology, we see differences. The term, ‘American’ alone, is often viewed as the general White/Caucasian. Why else did we develop/do we use the terms African-American, Asian-American and Latin-American?
Even when we take a glimpse at pop culture, something that influences just about everyone’s lives (who watches tvs and/or movies), we rarely see interracial couples. Often-times it’s because it’s looked down-upon. Review the entire series of “Friends”, or even the popularly watched soap opera “Days of our Lives.” Although these shows had a wide fan-base, it showed the dominance Caucasians have on society, and it’s preference on ethnocentric relationships.
We can argue that racism doesn’t exist, but it’s only masked by our society.
This was a very interesting post and one I believe is quite true. The truth isn’t always what people want to hear but speaking from experience, I as a white woman am not typically interested in dating anyone of a different race. It has nothing to do with their color, education level, racism or any of that, I just find white guys to be the most attractive to me. It’s just a personal opinion. Are there nice black guys (or other race) out there, of course! I just haven’t found one I’m attracted to.
I’ve always dated interracially. I mean, REALLY interracially, in addition to obviously dating black men (since I AM black. mostly).
I have a huge list of people I’ve blocked or hidden. I won’t even acknowledge correspondence from people who answered “yes” for interracial marriage being a bad idea, yes for strongly preferring to date within their race or yes for onlywanting children of their on race.
It hurts a little to know that so many people are so… Narrow minded and hateful.
But I’m not looking ti change anyone’s mind. Or be anybody’s last resort. That is precisely why it’s come to pass that I’ve been single for nearly three years now.
Hmph. New journal, coming right up.
As a Hispanic Male who “looks” white I get approached by anglo women very often, I love that moment when they ask me my background and I say “mexican”, about a third of the time I see an obvious look of horror and suprise on their face. Funny enough it’s always from the women who claim to not be prejudiced and or racist, and incidentally those who claim to care very much about social justice and volunteering….it’s what I refer to as a “closet racist”. Love it.
In addition to this, with less white people we might have more diversity in movies…..I’m personally sick of seeing either Anthony Hopkins, Cate Blanchett and Shia LaBeouf in every single movie.
You’re missing something fundamental: you’re only analyzing OKCupid subscribers and their behavior on OKCupid. People use OKCupid to reach outside their existing informal networks.
Because the contours of those networks are partially determined by race, people are more likely to casually meet people of their own through their informal networks. They need and use OKCupid in particular to reach outside to find people of different races. Also, sending a message or a wink is a low-investment way of contacting someone.
Please take a look at other Census and Vital Statistics data. Inter-racial marriage is increasing rapidly, and the number of people who identify themselves as biracial or multi-racial is also increasing.
Ditto. Please break this out by gender.
the premise is fucked up