What Tinder is like for Black Girls

Four carefree black girls are all sharing their two cents over Skype… now of course, nothing good could come out of this. The topic of conversation leads to the wonderful popular dating app known as Tinder. ​

“Men on there are so bold,” says Jamanchi Orgi, a pre-med major at UNC Chapel Hill, as she discusses her latest unpleasant encounter with Tinder’s finest.

Soon we begin to exchange the ill-conceived pick up lines that men have used on Tinder. “I’ve once had a white boy ask me if I ‘want a taste of this white chocolate’,” says Mariah Boone, a bio major at North Carolina State University, “that’s when I knew it was time to go.”

After a few more laughs and joking around the conversation takes a steep turn. It becomes clear to me that their experience on tinder is something unique to black women.

“Tinder is tough for the sisters!” says Fumi Agboola, an education policy student at North Carolina State University. “Boys on there always say stuff like ‘oh I’ve never been with a black girl’, or ‘once you go white you never go back!’”

“One time a brown guy from tinder said that he’s never been with a black girl before,” said Boone, “and I was like ooooh papi and ya won’t!”

“If it’s tough for black girls in real life, then what’s supposed to make it different on the internet?” said Agboola. “[This] used to really upset me, but now I’ve just kind of given up, which isn’t right but what else can I do?”

“Boys probably look at us like exotic conquests,” said Orgi, “not all of them, but some.”

As we delve deeper into the conversation we come to the conclusion that there’s definitely a black experience to Tinder.

“People [mostly] use Tinder for a quick bang, or meeting someone with the possibility of having sex,” says Boone, “but black girls get fetishized.”

Boone breaks it down further, “So instead of ‘can we bang’ it’s more like ‘I’ve never done a gal like you before and I want to try it out’. Even if they would never date a black girl or if they publicly don’t ‘like’ black girls.”

That last part brought back memories of the same foolishness we had to deal with in high school. All of us attended the same predominately white high school and during our time there were constantly baffled by the fact that none of the guys there would go for black girls.

“You remember all the black guys that were always like #whitegirlsonly?, and we could never understand it because your mother is black, your aunties are black, your grandmother is black…” says Boone, “Well, I matched with some of them and I’m like ‘wow, so all of that was a lie?’”

Apparently we all matched with a lot of the preppy white boys and black guys who wouldn’t go for black girls from our high school. We continued to laugh at the irony of it all; these were the same people that convinced us that we weren’t on par with their eurocentric standards of beauty, yet here they are begging us for nudes with their corny pickup lines.

Photo Courtesy of CreaterHerStock 

I come to realize that maybe since they can hide behind a screen, they may think that it’s okay to pursue black girls.

“I definitely think [anonymity] plays a role in all of this,” says Orgi, “Like we’ve said before, boys on Tinder are very very bold, and there’s no way they would be talking to us if it weren’t for the fact that this is all happening online.”

We soon ended sharing our two cents about Tinder, but the conversation stuck with me enough to get me writing. The more and more I think about it the more I question Tinder’s popularity, and what’s it’s really doing to black girls. Is it uplifting black women or putting them down?

Tinder has gotten much more publicity recently, and I think that this could be dangerous since it seems to be perpetuating the fetishizing of black women and maintaining this idea that black women are undesirable.

Then again maybe the anonymity that Tinder provides serves as a platform for men to view black girls romantically, and this could help lead us one step closer to popularizing interracial dating.

Honestly it all looks a little hazy to me, but hopefully my two cents will make sense to somebody reading this.

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Written By: Lidia Abraha