Okay, I admit it, I’ve often wondered how my life would have turned out differently, if I didn’t grow up in an all white suburb on the East Coast of the United States. So when OkCupid, an online dating site posted an article titled “What If There Weren’t So Many White People,” I was immediately intrigued. Pulling from their database of 82 million messages sent within their members, OkCupid was able to make some quick observations.
First and not surprisingly, their user base is mostly white, like the U.S. where their user base resides. Also, whites received the most messages on a per capita basis (more than Latinos, Asians and Blacks). 89% of the 82 million messages went to whites, who make up 74% of OkCupid’s users. OkCupid then turned and asked some interesting questions:
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?
Co-founder and editorial director Christian Rudder tackled the numbers. To keep things simple, he normalized the data by only including those who self-identified as a single race. Then he looked at each race to see how much someone from each race group messaged someone else of another race group or within their own race group. Instead of using the ratio of say 19 whites to 1 Asian, they asked, what if there were 10 whites for every 10 Asians? Uing the same rate each group messaged each racial group, they determined how many messages would be sent to each group. The result? Asians would get the most messages if there were equal numbers of members of each race group. Their conclusion?
Asians are the most desired racial group in the country
Yes, I’ll repeat that. Asians are the most desired racial group in the country. Now someone just needs to let all the gays that have “No fats, no femmes, no Asians” in their profile know they’re missing the most desired racial group. (Sorry for the digression and thanks to Alec Mapa, who has a show by the same title).
I don’t know if OkCupid’s conclusion surprises you, but it surprised me. I imagine this result will surprise most people. If there truly were equal numbers of each race when I was growing up and Asians were considered the most desired racial group, I could imagine being more self-confident and less introverted. Those were traits that took me over a decade to acquire.
An interesting side note from OkCupid’s study is mentioned at the end of their article. Since they had already broken out the messages into groups based upon each race and further split by the recipient, they fed the messages into a program that analyzed the reading level of each message, and found something interesting. The result was that we are all a little bit racist. All races wrote at a lower reading level when writing to Blacks and Latinos and tended to write at a higher reading level towards Asians and whites, regardless of who was sending the message.
While whites may dominate the U.S. population today, OkCupid points to the U.S. Census numbers that show whites will no longer be the majority by 2050. It may be hard to imagine what life would have been like if there weren’t so many white people when I was growing up, but it’s certainly not hard to see that’s where reality is headed in the near future. With that, maybe Asians will be the most desirable racial group.
