Last night, SBS aired their much-anticipated documentary Date My Race hosted by journalist Santilla Chingaipe. It was a fascinating watch – but will leave you unsure if you’re inspired, or completely mortified by the results.
As part of their Face Up to Racism Week, the concept from the show was conceived by the Zambian-Australian Chingaipe as she wondered whether her ethnicity was influencing her success on dating apps.
So she decided to set up a social experiment: four volunteers would trial run her ‘colour blind’ dating app, to see who they would match with when skin colour was taken out of the equation.
Top Comments
I think it's a bit offensive to insinuate people who prefer to date with their own race are racist, there are many reasons people may choose to do so.
I personally have almost exclusively dated outside of my own race, and it has caused a lot of issues. I'm white and have dated quite a few Asians and one Muslim Arab. The latter was charming at first but turned out to be a real mysognist, telling me I needed to submit to him (exact quote), now this is not to say all other Muslim Arabs will be this way (and indeed I know a lovely Muslim guy who isn't like that), but the point is if you are brought up in a highly patriarchal culture then there is a high possibility you may adopt a chauvinistic attitude. Of course plenty of white chauvinists too but the more patriarchal the culture the more likelihood the guy may be chauvinist.
Moving along, I have dated a lot of Indian guys and guys from neighbouring regions, surprisingly considering that their societies are quite patriarchal I have actually found the majority to be lovely guys who will help clean, very supportive of education etc, but a few of them turned out to be married but were in miserable arranged marriages, or were single but couldn't have a white girlfriend because they would be disowned if they didn't go back home and have an arranged marriage. There was also in some instances the problem of different cultural attitudes towards showering etc and some of the foods they ate would leave them with smelly breath. I'm not suggesting they were unclean but they have grown up in a different culture and eat different foods and this affects the way a person smells. Perhaps I smelled to them too.
Some of these guys were really lovely guys but honestly with all this cultural clash I really would prefer to date my own race now, but it is hard to do as I live in a very multicultural area. By the way there were also a number of things I preferred about these guys to my own race, for instance I am not attracted to "blokey" guys. The Asian guys I went out with were intelligent, educated, kind and with a great sense of humour, but I couldn't get past some of the other issues.