"What Dating Abroad Taught Me About Stateside Racism"

"What took me longer was to understand how often the answer to that question includes racial preferences and biases.

I was reluctant to fully accept what I subconsciously knew was a huge problem, but this willful ignorance couldn’t stand for long. I read the OKCupidstudy How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get, which plainly stated that “men don’t write black women back” regardless of much they responded to others. One of my best friends, who is also black, called me when she read the study, nearly giddy. “Finally! This is what I’ve been saying, but nobody believes me,” she said. “Now there’s proof! If anyone asks me why I haven’t met anybody yet, I’m sending them this study.” She closed her OKCupid account. Her glee at finding evidence was understandable; it’s incredible, though, what counts as good news when you’re dealing with something painful. Soon, I closed my account, too."
http://jezebel.com/what-dating-abroad-taught-me-about-stateside-racism-1745559824

Sometimes it kind of feels like there is this game going on and everyone was handed jerseys so that they could be identified as players, and some of us just never got one.

The really interesting thing about being a brown person in America (and by interesting I mean confounding and exhausting) is how I can switch from being keenly observed to being close to invisible, according to rules that I have to spend a lot of energy parsing.