By Matthew White
Grindr promised to dismantle it’s ethnicity filter in response to Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd. While it has yet to do so (some 4 months later), I think it’s important that we discuss why this is an important step. I think that as white people, and especially as white gay people, we need to ask why that filter existed in the first place.
Here’s my answer: it existed because the queer community is a microcosm of the racialized violence that exists outside.
White gay men hold many of the same systemic privileges as white straight men. For example, I benefit by being able to walk past a policeman and not fear being stopped for a search. I benefit because in our justice system, if I committed a crime, I am young enough and white enough that I would likely be given a pass, or a very short sentence. I benefit because when i walk into an interview, it is never assumed that i am lazy - my performance and experience speaks for me, not my race.
An Indigenous or Black person will often not receive this kind of treatment - an individual is often judged based on their cultural or racial ties, rather than their personal achievements.
In the queer community, I benefit because the traits associated with whiteness are deeply ingrained in what our culture already perceives as beautiful - and normal.
We’ve gotten really good at making use of our whiteness for our own benefit, without much thought to the impact of our actions, or lack thereof, on the rest of the queer community.
We celebrate the wealthy looking white gay couple who shows up on our television, and condemn black and brown protesters for violence - we forget that the gay liberation movement was borne of black and brown queer people rioting. We don’t think about the impact that exclusion from mainstream imagery has on black and brown identities - or how exclusion can lead to a lack of support for queer racialized identities.
We make noise at pride to celebrate our own identities, and maybe we’ll add a black and brown stripe to our rainbow flags, but many of us don’t really bother learning about the intersections of identity that exist within the communities we inhabit. It’s easy to add a stripe - it’s harder to change our behaviour.
Many of us exist in a similar form to “white feminists”, who have historically ignored the unique existence of women of color – the ways that being a Black or Asian or Indigenous woman affects how they might experience womanhood. We’ve done this by allowing ourselves to claim space within white power structures – by allowing notions of white supremacy to permeate the queer community.
This is why we had race filters; it made maintaining the racialized caste system that exists within queer communities that much easier. It made ignoring racial minorities whose existences challenged your own experience that much easier. It made fetishizing racial minorities possible with the click of a button.
The race filter was a tool – not necessarily a conscious tool, but a tool nonetheless – that we used to separate ourselves into racial categories. It made it possible for those of us who wanted to maintain these categories to do so.
This is the part of the conversation where people often claim they aren’t racist – that their racialized dating preferences are not a product of racism, but rather that they just aren’t attracted to members of a certain race.
You are in fact racist. These attitudes spring directly from conceptions of race as being inherently *something*. These qualifiers are incredibly objectifying, or othering. Black men are aggressive, violent, dominant. Asian men are desexualized, submissive, feminine.
By making these “I am not attracted to x” statements, you buy into and reinforce these sexual stereotypes. You may not even be conscious of them. But by lumping an entire race into a single group, you remove any sense of individual – you dehumanize racial minorities for the sake of your sexual preferences.
And the fetishization of race is no better. Men who are “into Asians” remove the individual from their own set of experiences and promote the same kind of dehumanizing understanding of race that I mentioned previously.
This kind of division into racial stereotypes is crucial to the ways white supremacy maintains itself in queer communities. Race is essentially made-up – it is a lumping together of individuals based on appearance or region of origin - and it’s reductive.
It was created in its current form to understand the “other” in relation to Whiteness. In its current iteration, it’s been used successfully to disrupt class solidarity - check out chapter 2 of the People’s History of the United States.
Our conceptualization of race is Eurocentric and undeniably a product of a society that ranked groups of people based on how light or dark their skin appeared – sometimes taking into account the shape of an eye or the size of a lip.
So, when people tell you “I’m just not into this race”, what is really being communicated is that a communal understanding of facial features or other traits that incorporate what it means to be x race are unattractive. It’s a generalization that aligns itself with the idea that race equals a specific kind of person.
In reality, race covers such a wide range of experiences, of physiology, of culture, that making statements about a whole racial group is to see the person as only a product of their racial identity. This is why race filters are at their core, racist. They are methods of objectification, that we use to maintain racist ideals of beauty.
I think we need to be aware of the fact that attraction can be taught, to a certain extent, through cultural and political understandings of beauty. Throughout history, the most beautiful people were often those that were associated with the aesthetics of the ruling class – this is why you see incredibly pale, often larger women in renaissance paintings. It’s why beauty is so often associated with leisure, and with the elaborate (or in some time periods, the minimal)
And who exists as the ruling class in Canada and the United States today? White people.
If you want to argue that fact, we can do so at another time. It’s the topic of a whole different conversation. But, if you agree that white people hold the bulk of the political and social power, it makes sense that we would also determine that which is beautiful – and that which exists as “normal”.
This is obviously changing – these perceptions are shifting as our public consciousness expands and as it becomes more and more popular to challenge the corporations and artists who determine these standards of beauty - or to challenge what beauty means in the first place. There are undoubtedly more people of color in the media we consume than there were previously.
But these kinds of changes cannot only happen top down – a large part of changing how we understand race and beauty is challenging our own assumptions about beauty and attraction. We can consume as much diversity as we can handle, but we still have personal work with regards to how our own attractions align themselves with systemic racism, and how we might dismantle these internalized systems.
This is why our race filters are a racist issue. It gives queer white men like myself the opportunity to remain aloof – to interact with people who are only like ourselves; we need to be willing and able to critique our unconscious choices so that our conscious choices reflect our own values, and don’t play into a systemic problem that normalizes white attraction, and fetishizes everybody else.
Filters gave us the option of ignoring color (or fetishizing it). It gave us the option to equate race to kink - as if a black man’s genitals or skin color were somehow similar to a desire to be tied up. We should not have these options because these options are unethical. Our experiences must exist uncomfortably if our community is to make progress - I need to be able to hold my queer identity in conjunction with my race and understand that I still benefit culturally and politically from my whiteness, even while homophobia exists.
I need to understand that often homophobia is more pervasive when race is involved, because it is more palatable for many communities to see cis white men in love, rather than a genderqueer black people, or a two spirit indigenous person.
We need to learn to critique the structures from which we benefit at the expense of the individuals who lose, and we need to allow ourselves to lean into the discomfort of realizing that our actions can be overtly racist, or that they can be unconsciously racist, or that something that feels as natural as our attraction has been co-opted by how beauty has been racialized.
So start reflecting on your attractions! This is not going to be something that changes in a day. But you can still take steps to become more aware of your internal biases. You can work on more consciously understanding how race plays into your attraction to someone. You can remove racism from your dating profiles, and challenge your communities to do the same.
And importantly, right now you can stand with Black, brown and Indigenous people as they continue to fight to receive the same rights and privileges as many of us already receive.