Study says cyberspace is segregated

With a plethora of interracial dating sites on the Web and a black president in office, one would think that we’re living in America’s post-racial era.

But apparently, that’s not the case. According to a new University of California-Berkeley study of 1 million online daters, cyberspace is just as segregated as the real world.

More than 80 percent of whites – even the 48 percent of males and 28 percent of females who said they were indifferent to race – sent messages to whites, while just 3 percent contacted blacks, the study showed.

Young black men are the most likely to cross the race barrier when looking for love online. And blacks, including women, were 10 times as likely to contact a white person than whites were to contact blacks.

Some people don’t date outside of their race simply because they don’t come into contact with people of other races in their communities, where churches, grocery stores and housing developments are still quite segregated.

“There’s no segregation online, which makes this data so interesting,” says Gerald Mendelsohn, a UC Berkeley psychologist and lead author of the study, which analyzed online subscribers between 2009 and 2010.

“Online dating is about courtship and attraction. Segregation is a physical matter but it’s also a state of mind.”

Mendelsohn says there are three possible reasons for the discrepancy between online daters’ reported attitudes about interracial coupling and their actual behaviors.

“It might be appearance management,” he says. “They think it makes them look better to say that they’re open to another race.

“Also, saying you’re open to another race is only stage one of the dating process. Stage two is actually taking the step.

“Another possibility that can’t be discounted is that people are just hypocritical.”

Lynne Herendeen, an operations manager living in Pleasanton, Calif., says she has a thing for black guys.

“I love the darker skin tone,” says Herendeen, 31. “I feel like it makes their features pop, their eyes sparkle and their smiles more beautiful.”

When searching for matches on OKCupid.com, Herendeen specified tall, nonsmoking, African-American men.

That’s how she met her boyfriend, Rick Kamfolt, a Santa Clara, Calif., lab analyst who is black. The two have been dating for four months.

Kamfolt, 29, has dated women of all races, including his own, and says that intelligence and communication are more important to him than race.

That said, he admits there is an added layer of intrigue when he dates outside of his race.

“It adds a certain spice to the relationship,” Kamfolt says. “It’s something different, so you’re always learning and growing.”

Rob Thompson hears those stories every day as the co-founder of two Nevada-based interracial dating websites, Afroromance.com and Interracialdatingcentral.com.

Thompson, who is white and Australian, met his wife, who is black and Kenyan, online in 2006.

“I think people are becoming aware of more dating opportunities outside of their race,” says Thompson, whose sites have 1.1 million users combined.

“The president has certainly done a lot to raise awareness that it doesn’t matter what your race is. What does matter is your substance. And it’s probably influenced people when they go online looking for love.”

But Thompson’s websites cater to a niche audience. In Mendelsohn’s study, which was based on data from one of the major dating websites (he won’t disclose which one), the young, black men who searched outside of their race were most likely to contact white women.

“The theorizing is that it’s upward mobility,” Mendelsohn says. “Like any other minority, they want to move into the dominant power structure, which is white.”

Also, Mendelsohn adds that white women are the idealized image of beauty in the United States, and that all men receive that message from a young age.

A major objective of the study was to gauge how changing attitudes about interracial marriage and an increase in dating opportunities have played out in relationships between blacks and whites.

In the past 40 years, the approval rating of black-white intermarriage has gone from three to one opposed to three to one in favor, Mendelsohn says. But the study found that our attitudes do not match our behaviors.

“One hypothesis is that while people might feel like it’s acceptable for themselves to date outside of their race, they might feel that it’s not as accepted by their families, friends, and society at large,” says Lindsay Shaw Taylor, a research associate in UC Berkeley’s psychology department and co-author of the study.

Herendeen’s family has never had a problem with her preference for black men. Still, she says she gave them a heads-up before introducing Rick.

“Not like I had to warn them, but I was like, ‘By the way …’ ” she says. “It’s not like I care at all what they think.”