Anonymous, free, racy... and a bit racist as well. Blossoming behind the silkscreen of anonymity, Craigslist personals reveal deep-seated racism, discovers Wendi Muse, writing at Racialicious. Muse trained her gaze on America's most cosmopolitan city, New York, monitoring and analyzing a full week of the Craigslist Personals section.
The posts offer an array of stereotypes---the Asian, the Black, the Latino and the White---including the expected fetishism and outright racism, but also more subtle clues of association. The things people will admit to when they think no one knows who they are.
Why so much racial discrimination when seeking a mate on the urbanite's favorite site for free furniture and new apartments? Posters seem to use the ethnic and racial sterotypes as prepackaged descriptions of what they seek, instead of answering the probing questions a personals ad requires: Who am I?, What am I looking for in a date?. It's far easier to default to tag-lines and pre-packaged images of 'the kind of person' one wants, riddled with racist cues though they may be: a traditional Asian girl, a spicy Latino man, a bossy Black woman, just a normal white guy.
Read Muse's post for a thorough, hand-picked run of the grittiest dregs of the dating scene, where the meat market sells by the color of the skin.:
While some ads include the user’s thoughts on race in more subtle ways, for example, simply stating a racial “preference” (still, arguably, a sign of prejudice), others are more obvious in their descriptions—ranging from the utilization of explicitly racist phrases or terms to describe his/her own background and/or the background of the person being sought to downright exclusion a la Jim Crow style (“No -insert race here- need apply”).
Posted by melanie at May 25, 2007 12:05 AM
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