Via Cosma, this “Ta-Nehisi Coates post”:http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/03/the-black-damsel-in-dating-distress/37085/?rss=37085 gives a nice critique of selection bias in action.
Ayres finds this depressing, and laments that black women have “an uphill battle.” TIME uses the study, and others of online dating sites, and concludes that black women “will be disproportionately snubbed by men of all races.”
Look, I deeply suspect that, on a national level, there are an unfortunate number of people who think black women are less attractive then women of other races. The remnants of white supremacy are not just economic, they are cultural. I also think that’s less true today then it was twenty years ago.
But that said, I think that people passing this data around need to be really careful about using this study to draw inferences about the dating world of black women. One significant problem is that, as any black person will tell you, when black folks date online they don’t go to OKcupid. They go to blacksingles. They go to soulsingles. Or if they’re truly high post, they go to EliteNoire. (Dig the sensuous piano riffs and candelabra.)
Black people who are going to a site like OKcupid are generally black people who, with some exceptions, are open to interracial dating. But the same isn’t true of white people on OKcupid.
So the game is rigged–on OKcupid you have many white men who have no interest in dating black women, but very few black men with no interest in dating white women.That’s because all the black men who don’t want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection.
Also via Cosma, “Power law mugs”:http://masonporter.blogspot.com/2010/09/introducing-power-law-shop.html surely outgeek “APSA beer steins”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/08/political_science_merchandise_1.html by a pretty substantial margin.