Almost as soon as OKC announced the change in search options, people on the interwebz began to consider what the change meant in relation to questions on OKC that address racial preferences in dating. Rehashing older discussions about online dating and race, Slate.com’s Reihan Salam penned a piece titled “Is it Racist to Date Only people of Your Own Race? Yes.” He concludes the piece,

To be sure, dating is about more than the sharing of bread, and OkCupid users who express strong racial preferences may well be doing the world a favor by being open and honest about their wants. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask those who do express such preferences, and those who live them in practice, to reflect on them, and on how there might be more to fighting racism than voting ‘the right way.’

I agree with Salam’s assessment that fighting racism, and other forms of oppression and discrimination, isn’t just about formal manifestations of equality like voting, but is also about our hearts, minds, and even what we do with our genitals. Far from being innocuous and purely personal “preferences,” who we date, love, live with, befriend, and fuck is extremely meaningful for how we organize social power, hierarchy, and affiliation. (This isn’t Rocket Science, folks.)

And that is part of why discussions about dating are so convoluted; desire and attraction cut to the heart of deeper, subterranean social meanings, ones we’re not fully aware of or able to negotiate freely and rationally. Who we desire to be, and to love, isn’t just a matter of individualist private choice in the way that the ideology of American free-market political liberalism leads us to believe. As much as online dating can feel like online shopping, neither activity is devoid of political meaning. Both activities are about creating human relationships situated within larger sociopolitical and economic systems that are beyond our control as mere individuals.

The links between a conservative political agenda and a notion of apolitical personal blame and responsibility is particularly salient when it comes to body size. As the report “Weighty Concerns” by Samantha Kwan and Mary Nell Trautner notes,

In Western cultures with an ideology of individualism, this belief that we can control our destiny, including our bodies, is deeply ingrained. Sizeist attitudes are particularly embedded in individualistic cultures such as the U.S. Work by social psychologist Bernard Weiner and his colleagues shows that fat stigmatization is more likely when individuals assign individual responsibility and blame to fat people, and Christian Crandall and his colleagues’ research further shows that fatism correlates with belief in a just world, the Protestant work ethic, and conservative political ideology (56).

Being fat is, in this frame of thought, an undeniable visible marker of an individual’s failure to live up to the demands of Western political ideologies of personal responsibility and self-empowerment.

While we all have both explicit and hidden (even to ourselves) preferences about who we date, the insistence that those preferences are merely personal, entirely apolitical, or that they are, somehow, our God-given right, belongs to the same genre of ideology as other salient conservative political myths that attempt to decontextualize individuals from their social surroundings; myths like the welfare queen and the pro-choicer who just loves murdering babies. To say that dating “preferences” lack political meaning, that they cannot be harmful because the intent of the individuals expressing the preference is not to cause harm entirely misses the point, which is that systems of oppression are systems and ones that replicate themselves through us. That is, we “inherit” these “preferences” and it is our job, if we are committed to progressive social change, to “work” on those inheritances so that our desires, and consequent “choices” align with the social world we want to pass on to others in the future. (Be the change, y’all. BE the change.)

Still, Salam is right to point out in his article that people who are explicitly and openly discriminatory in their dating preferences may be doing the rest of us a favor by letting us know. I was really pleased when OKC announced the change in search options, in part, because I do want to check to see if my potential matches have publicly expressed dating preferences such as “I strongly prefer to date only people of my own race.” Overt, public racists like that have, quite simply, #gottogo. People who think that expressing a racial “preference” for their match is just a matter of personal choice are extremely unlikely to be a good match for me.