The Daily Show correspondents Jessica Williams and Ronny Chieng take a comedic investigatory dive into the world of online dating and uncover what a lot of us might have already suspected: it’s racist.
“Racism affects nearly every aspect of life, even — and it truly pains me to say this — f**king,” says Trevor Noah introducing the segment. Williams and Chieng confirm the race bias that exists specifically with Black women and Asian men on online dating apps.
“There is kind of a systemic racial bias pretty much in every dating site I’ve ever looked at,” notes Christian Rudder, co-founder of OKCupid and author of the dating statistics book Dataclysm. “We found that 82 percent of non-black men have some bias against black women… And Asian men get the fewest messages and the worst ratings of any group of guys.”
The bias doesn’t necessarily come from “preferences” but from deep-rooted stereotypes about race and features, which in the online dating scene, affect whether people swipe left or right.