OKCupid.com releases stats on race and dating. Probably an incredibly corrupted sample, but still fascinating.

The post, on their blog OKTrends (great idea to actually dedicate a blog to examining the sociological implications of your data, guys—not a lot of other places you can see trends in racial interaction emerge before your eyes than an online dating site), is titled rather obviously "Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back." Fortunately, the post is saved by the blog's consistently snarky, self-and-other deprecating tone, which is awesome:

Welcome back, dorks. We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if the other major online dating players would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can’t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people paying them those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there.

I, too, feel the freedom to alienate both of you who are reading this. So there.

The sum-up of the data:

• Nobody loves an Asian guy—angry or otherwise. Or at least, 78% of people don't. (That total doesn't include Indian males, who are broken out separately and get it in the nads even harder—80% of their outreach goes ignored.) But Asian guys are still marginally better off than black men, who get no responses to their messages 83% of the time. Sucks to be us.

• Everyone loves an Asian girl. Essentially, every group of males responded to Asian females at a rate equal to or higher than women of their own race. Except Pacific Islanders, who are likely a very small percentage of this pool, making the data therein even more squirrelly than the rest of this stuff.

• White people have it made, but especially white men. Every group of females responded to messages from white guys at a rate equal to or higher than men of their own race. Oh, but whites are also far more likely, by a huge sum, to prefer to date people of their own race to people of other races. (Here, white women are the most strongly preferential—in fact, they're the only group out of all race/gender combinations to actually have a majority, 54%, say they strongly prefer to date within their own race, something echoed by 40% of white men. Every other group was willing to date outside of their race by a huge percentage; black men were the most likely to reject the notion that same-race dating was preferable, with only 11% saying they strongly preferred to date black women.
  

• Black women are pretty much screwed. I'll let the blogger say it in his own words:

Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.

Man, that sucks. I've suggested before (and in company which includes the awesome Twanna Hines of Funky Black Chick), that black women and Asian men should take a good long look at one another. Go forth. Let love reign. It's better than dealing with the crap this world slings us alone.

Oh, and some additional good commentary's over at Racialicious. Go check it out.

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Posted via email from OriginalSpin